For KSDS’s Matt Silver, Ron Shelton’s “Bull Durham” is a perfect game.
“Relax, all right? Don’t try to strike everybody out. Strikeouts are boring! Besides that, they’re fascist. Throw some ground balls — it’s more democratic.”
That’s the gospel as served from Kevin Costner’s Crash Davis to Tim Robbins’s Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh in Ron Shelton’s Bull Durham (1988). If you’re going to present such well-worn archetypes, you better do it to perfection, which Bull Durham does. Costner’s Davis plays the sage journeyman catcher, a career minor leaguer except for “the 21 greatest days” of his life in the “show,” where “you hit white balls for batting practice, the ballparks are like cathedrals, the hotels all have room service, and the women all have long legs and brains.”
After decades on the fringes of becoming a legit big leaguer, Davis is back in Single-A, with the lowly Durham Bulls of the Carolina League, as far from “the show” as professional baseball gets. Physically and spiritually washed up, skills diminished, Davis is in an abusive relationship with the game that’s been his life’s only north star. He’s within shouting distance of the minor league career home run record, a hollow consolation prize he knows won’t assuage his personal and professional disappointments yet wants anyway. Because he’s a ballplayer, and every win counts the same in the standings, even the pyrrhic ones.
Meanwhile, “the big club” (the unnamed Major League Baseball franchise for which Davis’s Bulls serve as the Single-A affiliate) has invested big money in LaLoosh (Tim Robbins) a young but unpolished fireballer, whom the Bulls bench coach, played with dead-pan comedic brilliance by Robert Wuhl, describes as having “a million dollar arm but a five-cent head.” The organization wants Davis to mentor LaLoosh, take him under his wing, room with him on the road, show him how to be a professional.
With Davis’s help, the Bulls’ manager suggests at their first meeting, “[LaLoosh] can go all the way.”
“Yeah, and where can I go?” Davis shoots back.
“You can keep going to the ballpark and keep gettin’ paid to do it. Beats the hell outta workin’ at Sears.”
“Sears sucks, Crash,” interjects Wuhl’s character earnestly, shuddering as he takes a pull from his bottle of Miller High Life. “I once worked there. Sold Lady Kenmores. Nasty…. Nasty work.”
Like a jazz standard, the structure of Bull Durham is formulaic: the wise but curmudgeonly old catcher begrudgingly accepts his assignment, clashes initially with the the young upstart fireballer until he’s been humbled in all the ways the grizzled vet told him he would be. And an aging Crash Davis, in the twilight of a career that never became what he’d hoped, inevitably makes a kind of peace with his frustrations by teaching a young, brash, scared kid “with a thunderbolt for an arm” how to be a professional baseball player and, ultimately, something approaching a grown-up. When LaLoosh gets called up to the majors at movie’s end and we see him, in the midst of one of his first television interviews, rattle off the list of clichés Davis memorably tells him he’d better master to survive the media in the show, he does so with the sangfroid of a ten-year vet.
The boy has become a man. And, somehow, seasoned moviegoers as we are…we know without it ever being explicitly shown or stated that the process of shepherding LaLoosh to the majors has unburdened the old catcher of whatever ambivalence he’d harbored toward the game. He’d not only made peace with baseball and his place in it; he’d found contentment because of the game, even if it wasn’t in the manner he’d always expected.
And, of course, he gets the girl.
To love baseball is to love not just the game but its culture, its uniquely high-brow/low-brow sensibility, its cherished customs and mystifying idiosyncrasies, and the prolific vernacular language borne of it. It’s to love everything that happens in between pitches. To like the action but LOVE the anticipation of action.
It’s to be a romantic about a hyper-pragmatic game, a game that makes an art form of anality, where every conceivable action taking place between the lines is recorded and tabulated and quantified and obsessed over with the ferocity of exactitude devoted to following the digits of pi to whatever place exists beyond infinity.
Said differently, to truly love baseball in all its complexity and elegant simplicity is to love the space between the notes.
Bull Durham is the funniest, warmest, most perceptive love letter ever written to baseball’s version of that sacred, magical space.
So here’s to high fiber, good scotch, the hanging curve ball, and maybe one day, a constitutional amendment outlawing astroturf and the designated hitter.
