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In a sentence: A career minor-league catcher and a hot shot young pitcher vie for the affections of a baseball groupie.
One difficulty in critiquing older films is that you have absorbed tropes through cultural osmosis that were, at the time, novel. Trailblazing films get short shrift because we often see them after having internalized all their copycats. Some films are classics because they're great, and others because they're influential.
Bull Durham is both, but its status as a classic baseball film is down mostly to its influence. Because before, most films about baseball were romantic. They were about the magic of the game, about boys and men daydreaming about the Majors. They were sanitized fairy tales about the game, the way old war films were about handsome men running up hillsides rather than people dying miserably in trenches.
This baseball movie is about those trenches. It's about all the young ballplayers who die having never crested the hill. It's about grime and grit and drinking and sex and sweat and struggle, sometimes all at once. It hardly depicts the Major Leagues at all. It's about the minors. It's about the guys who haven't made it yet, and about the guys who never will. It's about the way our pit stops become our final destinations.
Right off the bat, the film tells you it's going to be different: it opens with narration from someone who isn't a baseball player. Or a manager. Or a scout. It doesn't have a single primary character, but our entrance point into its world is Annie Savoy. "Savoy," incidentally, is the name emblazoned on the replacement the bat boy selects for Roy Hobbs at the end of The Natural.
Everyone remembers Crash's "I believe in..." speech to Annie, but for my money the best lines are all from her narration:
Baseball is undoubtedly the sport most like a religion. It's tied up in tradition and routine. It's a sport with a borderline cathecismic rulebook, and just as many unwritten rules. And it's the only major sport that tracks a statistic called "Sacrifices."
Baseball games turn on fickle things like random gusts of wind and bad bounces that bring to mind an angry Pagan deity, the kind of pre-Christian god whose gaze you mostly tried to avoid. And in Bull Durham we have not one primary character, as I said before, but a veritable trinity of them: Crash, Nuke, and Annie. The father, son, and Holy Ghost of the game. And of course they mirror the three transcendetals: Heart (Annie), Head (Crash), and Hands (Nuke). You find the same structure across so many famous stories: Frodo, Gandalf, and Aragorn. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy.
Annie follows the team religiously, and knows the game inside and out. Each year she gives players advice and each year she picks one in particular for some hands-on coaching, which she claims always leads to the best year of their career. She scouts the local talent, as it were. And Nuke is that talent. He's got a "million dollar arm and a five-cent head," to quote one of the film's best lines. She gives him herself, her sage wisdom, and his nickname. What, you didn't think Nuke was his Christian name, did you?
Kevin Costner plays Crash Davis, a veteran catcher who has the dubious honor of approaching the all-time minor league home run record. His career is winding down, which makes him as poor a prospect for catching as he he is for copulating. Annie won't waste her magic touch on a player on the downslope, about to be excommunicated from the Church of Baseball.
Of course, he's more age appropriate, and wiser, and we know right away they're a better match than her and her latest prospect project. Is this the obligatory romantic subplot again? Refreshingly, no. The relationships here are weird, atypical, and come adorned with little comedic baubles to keep them fresh and interesting even as most of us will be pretty sure where the whole thing'll end up. A dumber film would expect us to be in genuine suspense (and genuinely care) about the romantic intrique, but Bull Durham recognizes that it needs these stories to be interesting in their own right, even if you know where it's going, and even if you don't much care.
Really good. The action itself is real and accurate and clearly orchestrated by people who know how the game actually works. But what sets this film apart are all the subtle things outside of the games themselves.
Specifically, it captures the dinginess of the minor leagues at the time. The way so many are in smaller towns, the way the local community can center around them like a job-giving factory or industrial hub. The announcers have weird lisps and accents, the fans are many of the same people each night, and the presence of goofy stage acts and gimmicks ("Hit this sign, win a steak!") betrays a lack of confidence in the quality of play itself. These teams often were, and are, kept alive by a small group of local diehards, like Annie.
And it captures the psychology of baseball. The issues of pride and cosmic inequity that arise when a smart, hard-working player is utterly dwarfed by someone stupid and lazy, but insanely talented.
The story is almost entirely about Nuke's inability to simply pitch the way everyone knows he can, and the many things he tries to achieve some measure of consistency. And it does the same thing with Crash, albeit on a more granular level: it shows him reacting to each pitch, talking to himself, stepping out of the box, and muttering little mantras about where to put his hands. Baseball is about repeating a tiny thousand things as often and as accurately as possible, about replicating an insane kinetic chain that can break if even a single link is corroded.
Crash is a classic "quadruple-A" player, someone who's a bit too good for the minors but never quite good enough to stick in the majors. They are players without a team, men without countries, doomed to struggle, to learn from that struggle, and then cursed with the resulting wisdom to forever teach the more talented. The head must direct the hands, and is left to despair and despise when they don't do what they're told.
Not really. There is no Big Game, no cheap athletic stakes to slot in as a third act, another thing which sets this film apart. It's all about Annie's choice, Nuke's development, and Crash's reckoning with the end of his career. And on that front, yes, everybody "wins." Annie grows out of her groupie status and realizes she loves Crash, Crash accepts that his playing days are over, and Nuke makes it to the majors, still dumb but having absorbed enough wisdom from Crash that he'll clearly be okay. The head gets the heart, and the hands wave goodbye.
It's often said that baseball is about failure. The greatest teams in history lose a third of the time, and the best hitters fail seven out of every 10 at bats. Crash's triumph is in accepting that he won't. That he's not the savior, that his role in the history of the game is to teach, to pave the way for players like Nuke. To be John the Baptist in the Church of Baseball.
Bull Durham (1988)
In a sentence: A career minor-league catcher and a hot shot young pitcher vie for the affections of a baseball groupie.
One difficulty in critiquing older films is that you have absorbed tropes through cultural osmosis that were, at the time, novel. Trailblazing films get short shrift because we often see them after having internalized all their copycats. Some films are classics because they're great, and others because they're influential.
Bull Durham is both, but its status as a classic baseball film is down mostly to its influence. Because before, most films about baseball were romantic. They were about the magic of the game, about boys and men daydreaming about the Majors. They were sanitized fairy tales about the game, the way old war films were about handsome men running up hillsides rather than people dying miserably in trenches.
This baseball movie is about those trenches. It's about all the young ballplayers who die having never crested the hill. It's about grime and grit and drinking and sex and sweat and struggle, sometimes all at once. It hardly depicts the Major Leagues at all. It's about the minors. It's about the guys who haven't made it yet, and about the guys who never will. It's about the way our pit stops become our final destinations.
Right off the bat, the film tells you it's going to be different: it opens with narration from someone who isn't a baseball player. Or a manager. Or a scout. It doesn't have a single primary character, but our entrance point into its world is Annie Savoy. "Savoy," incidentally, is the name emblazoned on the replacement the bat boy selects for Roy Hobbs at the end of The Natural.
Everyone remembers Crash's "I believe in..." speech to Annie, but for my money the best lines are all from her narration:
- "The world is made for people who aren't cursed with self awareness."
- "Baseball may be a religion full of magic, cosmic truth, and the fundamental ontological riddles of our time, but it's also a job."
Baseball is undoubtedly the sport most like a religion. It's tied up in tradition and routine. It's a sport with a borderline cathecismic rulebook, and just as many unwritten rules. And it's the only major sport that tracks a statistic called "Sacrifices."
Baseball games turn on fickle things like random gusts of wind and bad bounces that bring to mind an angry Pagan deity, the kind of pre-Christian god whose gaze you mostly tried to avoid. And in Bull Durham we have not one primary character, as I said before, but a veritable trinity of them: Crash, Nuke, and Annie. The father, son, and Holy Ghost of the game. And of course they mirror the three transcendetals: Heart (Annie), Head (Crash), and Hands (Nuke). You find the same structure across so many famous stories: Frodo, Gandalf, and Aragorn. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy.
Annie follows the team religiously, and knows the game inside and out. Each year she gives players advice and each year she picks one in particular for some hands-on coaching, which she claims always leads to the best year of their career. She scouts the local talent, as it were. And Nuke is that talent. He's got a "million dollar arm and a five-cent head," to quote one of the film's best lines. She gives him herself, her sage wisdom, and his nickname. What, you didn't think Nuke was his Christian name, did you?
Kevin Costner plays Crash Davis, a veteran catcher who has the dubious honor of approaching the all-time minor league home run record. His career is winding down, which makes him as poor a prospect for catching as he he is for copulating. Annie won't waste her magic touch on a player on the downslope, about to be excommunicated from the Church of Baseball.
Of course, he's more age appropriate, and wiser, and we know right away they're a better match than her and her latest prospect project. Is this the obligatory romantic subplot again? Refreshingly, no. The relationships here are weird, atypical, and come adorned with little comedic baubles to keep them fresh and interesting even as most of us will be pretty sure where the whole thing'll end up. A dumber film would expect us to be in genuine suspense (and genuinely care) about the romantic intrique, but Bull Durham recognizes that it needs these stories to be interesting in their own right, even if you know where it's going, and even if you don't much care.
How's the Baseball?
Really good. The action itself is real and accurate and clearly orchestrated by people who know how the game actually works. But what sets this film apart are all the subtle things outside of the games themselves.
Specifically, it captures the dinginess of the minor leagues at the time. The way so many are in smaller towns, the way the local community can center around them like a job-giving factory or industrial hub. The announcers have weird lisps and accents, the fans are many of the same people each night, and the presence of goofy stage acts and gimmicks ("Hit this sign, win a steak!") betrays a lack of confidence in the quality of play itself. These teams often were, and are, kept alive by a small group of local diehards, like Annie.
And it captures the psychology of baseball. The issues of pride and cosmic inequity that arise when a smart, hard-working player is utterly dwarfed by someone stupid and lazy, but insanely talented.
The story is almost entirely about Nuke's inability to simply pitch the way everyone knows he can, and the many things he tries to achieve some measure of consistency. And it does the same thing with Crash, albeit on a more granular level: it shows him reacting to each pitch, talking to himself, stepping out of the box, and muttering little mantras about where to put his hands. Baseball is about repeating a tiny thousand things as often and as accurately as possible, about replicating an insane kinetic chain that can break if even a single link is corroded.
Crash is a classic "quadruple-A" player, someone who's a bit too good for the minors but never quite good enough to stick in the majors. They are players without a team, men without countries, doomed to struggle, to learn from that struggle, and then cursed with the resulting wisdom to forever teach the more talented. The head must direct the hands, and is left to despair and despise when they don't do what they're told.
Do They Win?
Not really. There is no Big Game, no cheap athletic stakes to slot in as a third act, another thing which sets this film apart. It's all about Annie's choice, Nuke's development, and Crash's reckoning with the end of his career. And on that front, yes, everybody "wins." Annie grows out of her groupie status and realizes she loves Crash, Crash accepts that his playing days are over, and Nuke makes it to the majors, still dumb but having absorbed enough wisdom from Crash that he'll clearly be okay. The head gets the heart, and the hands wave goodbye.
It's often said that baseball is about failure. The greatest teams in history lose a third of the time, and the best hitters fail seven out of every 10 at bats. Crash's triumph is in accepting that he won't. That he's not the savior, that his role in the history of the game is to teach, to pave the way for players like Nuke. To be John the Baptist in the Church of Baseball.