Ease The Pain

There are 96 days now until Opening Day. I am always at a loss this time of year because there's no baseball to watch on TV. As there was no joy in Mudville when Mighty Casey had struck out, there is an equal lack of joy in Bloomfield when the season is over. Unlike many sports fans, I don't get the same enjoyment from football and basketball and it pains me to try to watch an entire game of either.

While I bemoan the emptiness of this seemingly endless gloom period, I continually search the TV channels for baseball movies, ESPN classic games or just watch Ken Burns' classic series, 'Baseball', over and over.

One of my favorite baseball movies is "For Love of the Game" with Kevin Costner. Costner plays an aging pitcher, Billy Chapel, who is pitching the final game of his long career. The entire movie is nothing but flashbacks as Billy pitches a perfect game against a fictional version of my New York Yankees. The movie is anything but perfect, but there is something about the sequencing of events throughout the flashbacks and his struggle with the pending finality of his baseball life that I am fascinated with every time that I watch it. If you have ever really played the game at any level, you can appreciate the pain of those final moments when you accept the fact that you have to quit.

I saw the movie again the other night and after this latest viewing I watched the credits closely and noticed that the "throwing instructor" for Kevin Costner was Frank 'Spec' Shea. Spec was a Yankee pitcher back in the late 40's. In 1947, Spec Shea was the winning pitcher in the All Star Game, even though he gave up a 4th inning home run to the Big Cat, Johnny Mize. Spec also won games 1 and 5 of the 1947 World Series against the National League's perennial World Series loser, the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Costner has made quite a few baseball movies over the years and I enjoy watching 'Field of Dreams' and 'Bull Durham'. In Bull Durham, he plays Crash Davis, a minor league catcher nearing the end of his ball playing days. The character of Crash was based on a real life Bull Durham ball player, Lawrence Columbus "Crash" Davis. The real life Crash was a utility infielder for the Philadelphia Athletics from 1940-42. He got his nickname from crashing into a teammate while trying to catch a fly ball. There is a nice interview with the late Mr. Davis at this page: http://philadelphiaathletics.org/history...

I watched The Natural for about the hundredth time a couple of weeks ago. I get pretty fired up when Roy Hobbs goes on a tear and then knocks the lights out with a powerful shot to right. There's also a great scene where he knocks the cover off the ball. I try to satisfy my competitive cravings nowadays with an occasionally well struck golf shot, but there is nothing truly close to the feel of a well hit baseball. Plus, any movie with Wilford Brimley, Richard Farnsworth and Robert Duvall has just got to be good.

I always get a kick out of the scene where Barbara Hershey shoots Robert Redford in the hotel room. Supposedly her character, Harriet Bird, had a thing about shooting great athletes with a silver bullet. In real life, a similar situation occurred in 1949. A 19 year old typist from Chicago by the name of Ruth Ann Steinhagen, who had been infatuated with former Cubs player, Eddie Waitkus, lured him into a hotel room and shot him. (That's exactly why I refuse to go to hotel rooms with strange women, especially strange women who carry guns.) Waitkus was lucky and the bullet missed his heart. Unlike Roy Hobbs, Waitkus wasn't out of baseball for 16 years. He returned to baseball the following year and played first base for the pennant winning Phillies (by the way, they lost the Series to the Yankees). Ruth Ann was found not guilty by reason of insanity. She was committed to an asylum where she received electroshock treatments and was released in less than three years. I'm not sure what happened to Ruth Ann in her later years, but I'm guessing she didn't follow baseball too much.

There's another great scene in the movie where Iris (Glenn Close) tells Roy, "You know, I believe we have two lives. The life we learn with and the life we live with after that." That's pretty deep for me and it has caused me to think extremely hard from time to time about my own life. Although I think that she has a good point, I have had some difficulty defining that dividing point between my two lives. I'm not really sure if I have stopped learning yet and started living or maybe I'm just doomed to make mistake after mistake throughout an eternity of learning. There are times as I sift through serious evaluations of my two lives when I am almost convinced that I must be a special case because my life has surely consisted of much more than just two lives. I keep seeing 3 or maybe 4 lives at times. Heck, it is probably best that I don't spend too much time evaluating my life; at best it is down right confusing and at worst it is total chaos.

As Roy Hobbs said, "My life didn't turn out the way I expected."