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In a sentence: An aging pitcher starts a game in Yankee Stadium while struggling with the end of a relationship.
A few years ago I was playing in a softball game, and we were getting killed. I don't even know the score, but it was bad. We might've given up 30 runs by the time it was over. But that's not what I remember most about it.
Right there in that blowout, in the middle of one of the worst drubbings I've ever been a part of...we turned a triple play. Not one of those stupid triple plays where all the runners get really confused or give up, either. I think about that play all the time. I use it to stay motivated. I tell the story to teammates when we're down. Because I know at any moment, without warning, no matter the score or the stakes or the circumstances...you might make the greatest play of your life.
I played softball recently with someone very new to the game. I'm not sure if she ever even played in Little League, but she had a lot of enthusiasm. I showed up early before games to play catch with her, throw her batting practice, try to help her get more comfortable with the game. And we started to see little improvements. Instead of a strikeout, a foul ball. Instead of a foul ball, a ground ball. And then a ground ball that led to an error, so she actually reached base.
And then, the final accomplishment: a clean base hit. Hard, well struck, right up the middle. Nobody bobbled it, nobody was out of position, nobody overthrew anyone else. It was a real hit. And she was hooked. Even vicariously, it was intoxicating. And she chased that high for another year.
This speaks to something about baseball that keeps people coming back to it: imprecision. The difference between a popup and a homerun is sometimes a matter of mere inches, hitting the ball with the exact same force at a slightly different launch angle. This brings to mind golf, another sport people become weirdly obsessed with, and I think for the same reason: because every now and then you strike the ball perfectly, just often enough to keep you coming back, trying to recreate the magic feeling you get when your kinetic mechanism whirs exactly the way it should. When you somehow do everything right all at once.
For Love of the Game is not a particularly good movie, nor a particularly good baseball movie. It has a terrible title that's connected to the story in a throwaway moment, and its Obligatory Romantic Subplot devours so much of its runtime that it's almost a Supplot, as we watch Costner and Preston go through all their Meet Cute motions. But it does capture a feeling that most other baseball movies don't: the idea that anything can happen.
Billy Chapel (Kevin Costner) is a pitcher past his prime, on a team that isn't winning anymore. The owner's about to sell. It's the end of several different eras.
Pitchers go through a particularly humbling degradation of skills. There's an adage that you should learn to "pitch, and not just throw." Meaning you should think about location and timing and not just try to use pure stuff (as baseball folk call it) to blow the ball by someone. Because you won't have that forever; Father Time is undefeated. Your arm will slow just as sure as the sun sets, just as sure as beauty fades. Someday your fastball's going to start showing wrinkles, so make sure your curveball has a good personality.
The pitchers who stick around are the ones that can reinvent themselves, and that's the stage Chapel is at. They're out of the race but they're facing a team that isn't, and there's pride at stake in denying them their celebration, even if only for a day. Playing well must be its own reward. Plus it's the Yankees, everyone's favorite team to root against. And as the game goes on, something funny starts to happen: he keeps getting people out. One after another.
All of this is set against the backdrop of an out-of-sequence relationship. We're coming in at the end of his career, and seemingly the end of their relationship, and we flash back over and over to other points in both. This is probably the only really good thing in the movie, because it does a good job of filling in the blanks, of showing how they got to this point. By the end, you feel the accumulated weight of all their misunderstandings. You feel tired on their behalf. But it just goes on too long, takes up too much of the film. The relationship is the point of the film, and the baseball is a sideshow to it. The premise is good, the pieces are all there, but the balance is off.
Quite good. Costner famously has always wanted to play baseball, and he goes the extra mile, mechanically. He can really throw, looks good fielding off the mound, and really does carry himself like a ballplayer.
The psychology is particularly well-depicted. Most sports are about making dramatic moments feel just like all the others, particularly in baseball, the most steeped in repetition and routine. Chapel has a mantra: "clear the mechanism." And we get to see what this looks like from his perspective: the audio fades out, and everything other than the batter's box goes fuzzy. It's a cool effect, and a great depiction of athletic focus at the highest level.
The movie is also serious enough about baseball that it bows to the inevitable role luck plays; many times Chapel "deserves" to lose his perfect game, but is bailed out by a great play, or a ball slicing foul.
There's a little something special here that deserves it's own section: the in-movie broadcast booth is manned by the legendary Vin Scully, voice of the Dodgers for 66 years. He passed away just two years and six days ago.
Scully gets to employ all his usual florid wordplay, and he was good enough at it that I genuinely have no idea whether his words came from a professional screenwriter or the man himself.
Scully is part of the inspiration for this series of reviews. Lots of little kids want to be baseball players, but I wanted to be a baseball announcer. In some ways this is a larger flight of fancy; there's way more ballplayers than professional baseball broadcasters. Making that your dream is kind of like saying you want to be an astronaut: it ain't happenin'. But I did stumble backwards into a version of it, doing professional esports casting. I'll never forget the day someone offered to fly me out to San Diego to broadcast live at TwitchCon in 2022. A dream come true, or as close as can reasonably be expected.
As I did more casting and got more attention for it, I started to think about its nature. I started mentoring people new to it and wrote guidelines to help all of us along, the verbal version of showing up early to play catch and take batting practice. And I became romantic about casting (esports or otherwise) the same way I was about baseball. I thought about some of my favorite moments and how the announcer's words or enthusiasm were an inextricable part of them. The film Miracle is called that specifically because of Al Michaels' call.
It's not just an honor, but a responsibility, to occupy that space in people's memories when you have the good fortune to call an amazing moment. It's your job to speak for all the people watching, to express the thing they wish they could express when they're yelling and cheering and jumping up and down in front of their screens. To do justice to the moment. A stenographer to the immortal.
I could go on about this forever, but instead I'll end with my favorite Vin Scully quote (though picking just one feels like a crime). Scully was chosen for this role not just because he's the greatest there ever was, but presumably because he had the privilege of calling three perfect games. One of them was Sandy Koufax's perfect game in 1965. And as he so often did, he found a way to encapsulate the moment, the collective anxiety of the fans for whom he speaks, with poetry:
I still get those butterflies every time I get ready to broadcast, or play the game. The physical manifestation of pure possibility. It's awful, and I hope it never goes away.
They do. Chapel finishes the perfect game. As a player he won awards, won the World Series, became a living legend. This perfect game is not the foundation of his legacy, it's the capstone. But it's also the one thing that finally frees him. He chases perfection for decades, and finally achieves it. Then, and only then, can he leave the game content and start the next phase of his life.
This is the magic of all competition: shrinking the world down just enough that we might be faultless within its boundaries. Stepping outside of our messy reality, full of mistakes and painful lessons, full of imperfections and evils. Full of what-ifs and could-have-beens, of second and third guesses. Heartbreakingly full of things we could have done better. But in this place, at this time, in this game built on failure, we can leave all that behind. For one glorious night we can forget our brokenness and experience something otherwise unavailable to us in this world:
We get to be perfect.
For Love of the Game (1999)
In a sentence: An aging pitcher starts a game in Yankee Stadium while struggling with the end of a relationship.
A few years ago I was playing in a softball game, and we were getting killed. I don't even know the score, but it was bad. We might've given up 30 runs by the time it was over. But that's not what I remember most about it.
Right there in that blowout, in the middle of one of the worst drubbings I've ever been a part of...we turned a triple play. Not one of those stupid triple plays where all the runners get really confused or give up, either. I think about that play all the time. I use it to stay motivated. I tell the story to teammates when we're down. Because I know at any moment, without warning, no matter the score or the stakes or the circumstances...you might make the greatest play of your life.
I played softball recently with someone very new to the game. I'm not sure if she ever even played in Little League, but she had a lot of enthusiasm. I showed up early before games to play catch with her, throw her batting practice, try to help her get more comfortable with the game. And we started to see little improvements. Instead of a strikeout, a foul ball. Instead of a foul ball, a ground ball. And then a ground ball that led to an error, so she actually reached base.
And then, the final accomplishment: a clean base hit. Hard, well struck, right up the middle. Nobody bobbled it, nobody was out of position, nobody overthrew anyone else. It was a real hit. And she was hooked. Even vicariously, it was intoxicating. And she chased that high for another year.
This speaks to something about baseball that keeps people coming back to it: imprecision. The difference between a popup and a homerun is sometimes a matter of mere inches, hitting the ball with the exact same force at a slightly different launch angle. This brings to mind golf, another sport people become weirdly obsessed with, and I think for the same reason: because every now and then you strike the ball perfectly, just often enough to keep you coming back, trying to recreate the magic feeling you get when your kinetic mechanism whirs exactly the way it should. When you somehow do everything right all at once.
For Love of the Game is not a particularly good movie, nor a particularly good baseball movie. It has a terrible title that's connected to the story in a throwaway moment, and its Obligatory Romantic Subplot devours so much of its runtime that it's almost a Supplot, as we watch Costner and Preston go through all their Meet Cute motions. But it does capture a feeling that most other baseball movies don't: the idea that anything can happen.
Billy Chapel (Kevin Costner) is a pitcher past his prime, on a team that isn't winning anymore. The owner's about to sell. It's the end of several different eras.
Pitchers go through a particularly humbling degradation of skills. There's an adage that you should learn to "pitch, and not just throw." Meaning you should think about location and timing and not just try to use pure stuff (as baseball folk call it) to blow the ball by someone. Because you won't have that forever; Father Time is undefeated. Your arm will slow just as sure as the sun sets, just as sure as beauty fades. Someday your fastball's going to start showing wrinkles, so make sure your curveball has a good personality.
The pitchers who stick around are the ones that can reinvent themselves, and that's the stage Chapel is at. They're out of the race but they're facing a team that isn't, and there's pride at stake in denying them their celebration, even if only for a day. Playing well must be its own reward. Plus it's the Yankees, everyone's favorite team to root against. And as the game goes on, something funny starts to happen: he keeps getting people out. One after another.
All of this is set against the backdrop of an out-of-sequence relationship. We're coming in at the end of his career, and seemingly the end of their relationship, and we flash back over and over to other points in both. This is probably the only really good thing in the movie, because it does a good job of filling in the blanks, of showing how they got to this point. By the end, you feel the accumulated weight of all their misunderstandings. You feel tired on their behalf. But it just goes on too long, takes up too much of the film. The relationship is the point of the film, and the baseball is a sideshow to it. The premise is good, the pieces are all there, but the balance is off.
How's the Baseball?
Quite good. Costner famously has always wanted to play baseball, and he goes the extra mile, mechanically. He can really throw, looks good fielding off the mound, and really does carry himself like a ballplayer.
The psychology is particularly well-depicted. Most sports are about making dramatic moments feel just like all the others, particularly in baseball, the most steeped in repetition and routine. Chapel has a mantra: "clear the mechanism." And we get to see what this looks like from his perspective: the audio fades out, and everything other than the batter's box goes fuzzy. It's a cool effect, and a great depiction of athletic focus at the highest level.
The movie is also serious enough about baseball that it bows to the inevitable role luck plays; many times Chapel "deserves" to lose his perfect game, but is bailed out by a great play, or a ball slicing foul.
There's a little something special here that deserves it's own section: the in-movie broadcast booth is manned by the legendary Vin Scully, voice of the Dodgers for 66 years. He passed away just two years and six days ago.
Scully gets to employ all his usual florid wordplay, and he was good enough at it that I genuinely have no idea whether his words came from a professional screenwriter or the man himself.
Scully is part of the inspiration for this series of reviews. Lots of little kids want to be baseball players, but I wanted to be a baseball announcer. In some ways this is a larger flight of fancy; there's way more ballplayers than professional baseball broadcasters. Making that your dream is kind of like saying you want to be an astronaut: it ain't happenin'. But I did stumble backwards into a version of it, doing professional esports casting. I'll never forget the day someone offered to fly me out to San Diego to broadcast live at TwitchCon in 2022. A dream come true, or as close as can reasonably be expected.
As I did more casting and got more attention for it, I started to think about its nature. I started mentoring people new to it and wrote guidelines to help all of us along, the verbal version of showing up early to play catch and take batting practice. And I became romantic about casting (esports or otherwise) the same way I was about baseball. I thought about some of my favorite moments and how the announcer's words or enthusiasm were an inextricable part of them. The film Miracle is called that specifically because of Al Michaels' call.
It's not just an honor, but a responsibility, to occupy that space in people's memories when you have the good fortune to call an amazing moment. It's your job to speak for all the people watching, to express the thing they wish they could express when they're yelling and cheering and jumping up and down in front of their screens. To do justice to the moment. A stenographer to the immortal.
I could go on about this forever, but instead I'll end with my favorite Vin Scully quote (though picking just one feels like a crime). Scully was chosen for this role not just because he's the greatest there ever was, but presumably because he had the privilege of calling three perfect games. One of them was Sandy Koufax's perfect game in 1965. And as he so often did, he found a way to encapsulate the moment, the collective anxiety of the fans for whom he speaks, with poetry:
"The Dodgers defensively in this spine-tingling moment: Sandy Koufax and Jeff Torborg. The boys who will try and stop anything hit their way: Wes Parker, Dick Tracewski, Maury Wills and John Kennedy; the outfield of Lou Johnson, Willie Davis and Ron Fairly. And there's 29,000 people in the ballpark and a million butterflies."Could there be a better symbol for baseball than the butterfly? Beautiful, short-lived, thriving in the warmth and the sun. Impossible to predict. And setting up camp in our guts at all the best and the worst times.
I still get those butterflies every time I get ready to broadcast, or play the game. The physical manifestation of pure possibility. It's awful, and I hope it never goes away.
Do They Win?
They do. Chapel finishes the perfect game. As a player he won awards, won the World Series, became a living legend. This perfect game is not the foundation of his legacy, it's the capstone. But it's also the one thing that finally frees him. He chases perfection for decades, and finally achieves it. Then, and only then, can he leave the game content and start the next phase of his life.
This is the magic of all competition: shrinking the world down just enough that we might be faultless within its boundaries. Stepping outside of our messy reality, full of mistakes and painful lessons, full of imperfections and evils. Full of what-ifs and could-have-beens, of second and third guesses. Heartbreakingly full of things we could have done better. But in this place, at this time, in this game built on failure, we can leave all that behind. For one glorious night we can forget our brokenness and experience something otherwise unavailable to us in this world:
We get to be perfect.