The Natural

Baseball baseball baseball.  God, I love baseball.  One day, I'll probably coherently put together my thoughts enough to share exactly the pleasure that I derive from baseball, but in my mind, baseball is the perfect game.  A true game of inches.  A true game of strategy. 

The season is nothing more than a giant game of Risk between general managers.  Games are chess matches between manager and manager.  The situations of the match are iron-willed face-offs between pitcher and catcher.  The pitches are cinematic frames where the bat misses the bll or hits the ball by a matter of millimeters.

I found a quote attributed only to Greg, age 8: "Love is the most important thing in the world, but baseball is pretty good too. "

Anyway, if you've never seen The Natural, or if it's been a while, give it a watch -- if, for nothing else, to see the little fat kid that plays the bat boy.  The flick is not the best movie about baseball (61*, Major League, or Bad News Bears hold that distinction, take your pick), but it is classic enough to inspire excitement in any upcoming baseball season.

Movies that feature Robert Redford tend to be a bit on the sappy side.  Awfully adult -- not in the jiggle jiggle boom boom way but in the Glenn Close kind of way.

But baseball movies, even those that feature Robert Redford, are different.  More charming.  Most have that real thick melodrama, but there is always a scene that features all of the players giggling together while some ragtime music plays.  Dirt, grass, catcher's masks and bubble gum.

Baseball, the game and the playhousian genre, is about failure.  It sets up failure after failure after failure, so that when the big moment comes (and it will come), it is all the more sweet.  Roy Hobbs' homerun into the lights, Rick Vaughn's strikeout of the big ugly Yankee, playing catch with your dead father: all moments that indelibly stick into your mind because they are preceded by tragedy or long-odds or all together despair.

From Bart Giamatti, the modern saint of the Game (and parenthetically, father of Paul Giamatti):

It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.