June 15, 1988—Make up any list of the greatest baseball films and the greatest romantic comedies, and one movie will likely appear on both: Bull Durham, which premiered on this date 20 years ago and promptly became a popular and critical hit.
The movie marked the passage of several talents coming into their own: stars Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon, and Tim Robbins—and, most significant for its eventual success, I would argue, writer-director Ron Shelton, who captured the anxieties and idiosyncrasies of minor-league players so well because it reflected his own experience in the game he had quit 15 years before.
Bull Durham strikes me now like one of those “Folly Floaters” that Yankee reliever Steve Hamilton used on nonplussed hitters in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s: A lazy pitch that sneaked up on you and was a hilarious wonder to behold (so long, of course, as you weren’t at the receiving end of it).
To their immense credit, critics got it about Shelton’s offbeat take on love and the Great American Pastime, as his screenplay netted both the New York Film Critics Circle and L.A. Film Critics Association Awards.
To its shame, Hollywood didn’t, giving the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay instead to Rain Man—hardly a bad film, by any means, but one that, when you get right down to it, never deviated far from its road-film and buddy-film genres.
(Even odder, Sarandon was never nominated for her career-defining role as Annie Savoy, the community college English instructor who makes it a point to take a new player under her wing, so to speak, each year.)
In contrast, I think it’s safe to say there was no baseball film quite like Bull Durham beforehand, and there’s been none since then.
(In fact, the odds are high against it: no less an authority than Shelton himself believes that nowadays his seminal work would only see the light of day as an indie, and even in that instance getting it launched would be dicey, because of that market’s heavy reliance on foreign sales.)
Consider the other major baseball films that appeared in a five-year span from 1984 to 1989:
The picture whose success probably helped get Shelton’s project greenlighted was the Robert Redford film The Natural in 1984. Like Kevin Costner’s other significant baseball film made only year later after Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, the Redford movie appeals heavily not only to the mythic and nostalgic elements of the game, but also to the longed-for connection between fathers and sons.
John Sayles’ Eight Men Out, based on the Eliot Asinof account of the “Black Sox” betting scandal in the 1919 World Series, for all its finely wrought and historically accurate detail, follows a straight-through narrative—owner Charles Comiskey’s greed, the players’ fateful decision to bet (or, in the case of third baseman Buck Weaver, not to bet but not to inform), and the legal fallout.
David Ward’s Major League had the dubious distinction of following the far superior Bull Durham. Its fine cast could not surmount a painfully pedestrian plot whose twists could be guessed at within 10 minutes of the opening credits.
Shelton’s script, in contrast, threw out the conventions of the baseball film. There’s no real-life hero, such as in Pride of the Yankees; no American Pastoral (the Durham Bulls’ home games are in a small city ballpark that everyone walks to); and, most of all, no Opening Day and World Series. Quick – summarize the plot in a sentence. (Didn’t think you could!)
Instead, it’s built on a series of terrific scenes that highlight the players’ flakiness: the wild fastball of Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh; the pitcher’s mound conference involving Nuke’s jammed eyelids, a live rooster to take a curse off a glove, and “what to get Millie or Jimmy for their wedding present”; and Nuke’s misinterpreted lyrics of “Try a Little Tenderness.” And there are also some of the most famous monologues in film history, notably Annie’s opening “Church of Baseball” speech and Crash’s summary of his 21 magical days in the major leagues, or “The Show” (“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”).
Pitchers as a class are so flaky that Nuke is hardly an exaggeration. Any list of baseball characters is bound to include ball-addressing, mound-landscaping Mark “The Bird” Fidrych; reliever Al “The Mad Hungarian” Hrabosky; and perhaps the wildest eccentric of them all, Rube Waddell, who, when he wasn’t delayed for games because of drunkenness or playing marbles with street urchins, would run out of the stadium, mid-windup, the second he heard a fire engine.
In his madcap reverence for the strikeout (pronounced “fascist” by Crash), Nuke most resembles Roger Clemens, who has named all of his children with the letter “k”; in his taste in exotic underwear fashions (“The rose goes in front, big guy,” deadpans Crash), he appears to have inspired Jason Giambi.
I don’t believe the three principals have ever been better, despite Oscars they earned in other films.
Costner is best at his loosest, as Shelton sensed not only in casting him for this but also in his fine golf film, Tin Cup.
Sarandon’s role as Annie may have been the most significant sexy older woman role since Mrs. Robinson, and it was criminal that she was not even nominated for a role that called on her to be by turns funny, alluring, rueful, maternal and smart.
Robbins’ dim bulb of a rookie was so convincing that I had trouble for a long time imagining him as anything else.
There is an undercurrent of sadness in the film, typified by the sequence when Annie bids goodbye to Nuke and Crash is released. The two realize the full truth now of Annie’s remark that “The world is not made for people cursed with self-awareness,” and the kindred spirits’ recognition of this draws them close together at last—and brings this classic to its inevitable conclusion.
(As luckless as Crash and Annie are, it’s nothing compared with the real-life manager of the Durham Bulls at the time of the film’s release, Grady Little – yes, the same poor guy who, as manager of the Boston Red Sox, lost to Joe Torre’s Yankees in 2003, then lost his job with the Los Angeles Dodgers to the same Torre this past off-season. “There’s no crying in baseball,” Tom Hanks famously proclaimed in A League of Their Own. Also, I might add, no fairness or justice.)
