Book Tour Diary #2: Big Screen Baseball

Before I begin this entry of my Book Tour Diary, I’d like to make a small request. If you have read and enjoyed Baseball: The Movie, would you consider writing a review on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Goodreads? If you’re feeling frisky, you could even copy and paste one review into all three sites! These reviews and ratings really make a difference in getting the algorithm to notice my book. Every little bit counts. Thank you!

Since last month’s Texas leg of my book tour, I’ve had the good fortune of doing several events closer to home, and each one has been an absolute blast. For instance: Last week, I hosted two screenings at gorgeous movie theaters with eager audiences. The pleasure of connecting with baseball movie nuts hasn’t waned; after each screening, I signed books and gabbed with these lovely people, co-members of a tribe I didn’t know existed. As a cinephile, however, the real treat has been simply seeing these movies on the big screen. I watched so many baseball movies to write this book, but literally all of them were viewed on either my flatscreen TV or my little laptop. It turns out watching a baseball movie in an actual movie theater is like watching it for the first time. It instantly transports me back to childhood, when I fell in love with this game and this genre in the first place.

First, I drove up to Boston to host a screening of Bull Durham at Somerville Theatre. I have a little history with this theater. When I was 20, I was there with my girlfriend to see Almost Famous on opening night. I didn’t love that movie then, and I’m not nuts about it now, but the theater itself is a work of art. It was built in 1914 as a movie and vaudeville theater. Busby Berkley directed shows there in the 1920s. It still hosts musical acts, and it still has one of those great marquees that I recently posted about as an antidote to the industry’s problems. It makes you excited just to walk through its doors.

The Somerville Theatre was the perfect place to see Bull Durham on 35mm. The movie plays gloriously on film, especially on an old print with visible scratches, cracks and pops during the reel changes, and even a few seconds missing from certain scenes. At one point, the projector broke down for a minute, and we all sat there in silence. As I said, glorious. And the movie itself was a revelation. Bull Durham deserves every bit of its reputation as one of the best baseball movies ever made, but what came through to me on this viewing was just how refreshingly adult it is. I knew it as a child, of course. I remember seeing the trailer on TV and thinking, “This is what an adult movie looks like, and that [Costner] is what a man is supposed to be.” I felt that way in part because I had barely seen any adult films.

Now I’ve seen many of them, but not a lot lately. Unfortunately, they don’t make many movies about grown-ups these days, and none are as crowd-pleasing as Bull Durham. What a joy it was to hear characters talk so frankly about their fears, desires, and perversions. When these characters speak, they speak about sex, and I can’t remember the last time I heard characters use the words they use, which are, of course, the same ones we use in real life. How joyous the final third of Bull Durham is, when Crash (Kevin Costner) and Annie (Susan Sarandon) finally succumb to their desires and spend about a week in her home, screwing, eating, talking, and screwing some more. It’s a neat contrast to a film like this year’s Challengers, which also features a love triangle set in the world of sports and was similarly sold on its horniness. But no one actually screws anyone in Challengers, at least not on screen, and it’s hard to imagine any of those characters saying any dirty words. They never quite seem like adults, which I think is both the point and a problem. Anyway, Bull Durham still rules, either through young eyes or the cynical gaze of a middle-aged man.

Field of Dreams  turns that middle-aged man back into a child. It’s a very different, decidedly less naughty baseball film starring Kevin Costner. I was lucky enough to watch it in a packed house at the wonderful Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, NY. The theater has been renovated fairly recently, so you can’t feel the history in it like I did at the Somerville. What you can feel is a palpable respect for cinema. They take the viewing experience seriously, from the seating to the projection to the programming.

I gave my little intro and then sat down to watch the movie. I don’t know if it was because I was sitting next to my mom, or because my high school friend Matt and seemingly half his very large family were there, including several kids, but the screening was revelatory. I’ve been back and forth on Field of Dreams over the years. Sometimes it doesn’t make any sense to me. Other times, I lock into its dream logic. It’s such a strange film. Screenwriters are taught that a protagonist must have a clear objective, and then you put obstacles in his way, and he overcomes those obstacles and achieves his objective, and then the movie is over. Field of Dreams doesn’t work that way. Ray Kinsella’s objective is unclear. So are his obstacles. It has a lot of scenes where a character says, “We have to go to this place, and I don’t know why, but something will happen there, and we’ll know it when it does.”

How does it pull this off? I’m not entirely sure. It’s a magic trick, and that’s why watching it with an audience is so transcendent. It’s rare that a film asks anything of us these days. They cater to us. Field of Dreams asks us to suspend our notions of character, plot, time, and space. Costner plays Kinsella like an overgrown child—fitting for a film that hinges on his relationship to his deceased father—and his wide-eyed optimism lifts us up to float right alongside him. I have to think the theatrical experience played a role here. Would we give ourselves over to this film so easily if we were at home alone on the couch, phone in hand, scrolling through the day’s news? Certainly not. But when you sit in a dark theater with dozens of strangers, your collective gaze turned upwards…that’s when magic happens.

When the credits rolled, the magic continued. I did a Q&A with a knowledgeable JBFC staffer and somehow ended up talking about playing wiffle ball every summer day of my childhood with my sister and our neighbor Karen. Later, I was signing books, and who appeared at the front of the line? Karen’s parents, Bill and Ethel. I hadn’t seen them in over 30 years, and they happened to be there the night that I publicly reminisced about playing baseball with their daughter. This is the sort of thing that only happens when you get out of the house and see a movie in the theaters. And maybe when you write a book about your childhood obsession.

Is the baseball movie some kind of heaven? I don’t know. Heaven is the place where dreams come true. Maybe this is heaven.