Baseball in Durham is No Bull

Last Wednesday, while my L.A. Dodgers were thrashing the San Diego Padres, trying to inch toward a major league title (fingers crossed!),  I decided to rewatch my all-time favorite baseball movie, 1988’s Bull Durham. To my surprise, it was released the year before Kevin Costner starred as a dreamy Iowa farmer who wills a vintage baseball team into being as a way of reconciling with his dead father in Field of Dreams. The Costner of Field of Dreams was young, fresh-faced, idealistic, and basically innocent. In Bull Durham, though, he seems perhaps a decade older, much smarter and more cynical, someone who has tried and failed to fulfill his early promise.

 Part of Bull Durham’s success comes from the fact that it was written and directed by someone who really knows the sport, knows what happens on the field—and off. Ron Shelton, a former minor league infielder, brings to the film a gritty understanding of how baseball is played, and what games are played in the shadow of America’s National Pastime. This was his first film as a director, and it has led him to score with other sports-related projects, like White Men Can’t Jump (1992, about the world of playground basketball hustlers), and Tin Cup (1996, about professional golf,  once again starring Costner). Wikipedia notes that “in 2022, Shelton's book The Church of Baseball: The Making of Bull Durham: Home Runs, Bad Calls, Crazy Fights, Big Swings, and a Hit was published by Vintage Books. It sounds worth reading.

 Although Bull Durham deals with the exploits of a minor-league baseball club, the Durham (North Carolina) Bulls, it is less about a team and more about three individuals who are very much in the team’s orbit. The film’s opening line belongs to Susan Sarandon, who as Annie Savoy starts us out, in voiceover, with her philosophy of life. It begins with “I believe in the church of baseball,” then goes on to philosophize about the game as a sort of earthy substitute for formal religion. The provocative Annie, who during the year teaches literature, dedicates her summers to education of a different sort. Settling on a young, attractive player, she enjoys hot sex while also building his confidence and throwing in some lessons in basic baseball skills. For this particular summer, she chooses the naïve but mega-talented Ebby Calvin Latoosh (Tim Robbins), a pitcher who is as of yet too erratic and too cocky for stardom.

 The third member of this very dynamic triangle is “Crash” Davis (Costner), a worldly-wise catcher who once spent 21 days in the major leagues, doing nothing very spectacular before being sent back down to the minors. With his playing days numbered, he’s been added to the Durham roster to keep Latoosh under control and try to clue him in to the secrets of big league success. Smart but prickly (even though he’s a romantic at heart), Crash captures Annie’s interest when he strongly rejects the idea of auditioning for a role in her menage. Naturally, the sense that he’s his own man, and not one of the adoring “boys” who surround her, piques her curiosity.

 In a sense this is a film about the clash of innocence and experience, as well as about the push-and-pull between talent and wisdom. At the film’s end, Latoosh is headed for the majors (having learned a few life lessons along the way) but who’s to say that Crash won’t be happier in the long run? The irony is that in real life Sarandon and the much younger Robbins ended up together for more than two decades.