Wait, is "Night Swim" a baseball movie?

No, but hear me out

Even in my forthcoming book on the subject, Baseball: The Movie, I can’t shy away from the hard truth that baseball movies are basically dead. At least on life support. They’ve got two strikes, and they keep fouling pitches off. Whatever metaphor you want. The last hit baseball movie was 42 (2013), and the last to get anything resembling a wide release was Everybody Wants Some!! (2016), a movie that contains exactly one baseball scene (but still qualifies as a baseball movie because it’s about a college baseball team). The reasons for the genre’s descent into obscurity are numerous, but chief among them is the fact that Hollywood got risk-averse during this era and basically stopped making any movies that weren’t franchiseable or potential Oscar bait during this era. Several baseball movies have inspired sequels (Major League, The Bad News Bears, The Sandlot), but none were very good, and the number that have achieved any Oscars attention can be counted on one hand. 

There have, however, been a few signs that the baseball movie is due for a comeback. For starters, the streamable baseball documentary has been a reliable genre over the last couple of years, with docs on Yogi Berra, Reggie Jackson, Nolan Ryan, and minor-league club owner Mike Veeck getting noteworthy releases. Movies about other sports, like basketball (Air), wrestling (The Iron Claw), and racing (Ferrari) are getting big budgets and love from both audiences and critics. Can a proper baseball film be far behind?

We’re not there yet, but we’re getting close. The most promising evidence arrived recently in the most unlikely of places: a haunted swimming pool. Night Swim might seem like just another low-rent, PG-13 horror movie. Last year at this time, we got M3gan, about a murderous doll. This year, we’ve got one about a murderous pool. The thing that none of the marketing about Night Swim will tell you, however, is that it’s very, very close to being a baseball movie.

The film stars Wyatt Russell as Ray Waller, married father of two and former major league third baseman whose recent diagnosis of multiple sclerosis has left his career in limbo. Ray and his wife (Kerry Condon) remain hopeful he can get his symptoms under control and return to the diamond, but his doctors are more skeptical. No one seems to want to tell Ray that his playing career is over. The good news is that the pool seems to have healing powers. After a few dips, his symptoms disappear and he is crushing balls into the lights like Roy Hobbs in The Natural. The bad news is that the pool “requires a sacrifice” and that his son might have to die.

Identifying a baseball movie is pretty difficult (I usually default to Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of pornography: “I know it when I see it), but I feel confident that Night Swim doesn’t qualify. Yes, there is a lot of baseball talk, and we spend a little time at the son’s Little League practice, where Ray is assistant coaching. Technically, the film has as much baseball as Everybody Wants Some!! (which also starred Wyatt Russell), but Night Swim isn’t fundamentally about baseball in the same way. It’s about a haunted pool, and you could substitute any other sport for baseball in it, and not much would need to be changed. 

The emotional challenge Ray faces, however, is a very real one for ballplayers. Letting go of baseball at the end of your career is one of the hardest things a pro athlete ever has to do. One ex-MLBer I spoke with for the book explained it to me thusly: During your pro career, every decision you make in your life is about optimizing your performance: where you live, what you eat, what you do during your time off. You have a brief window to play and get paid, so everything else falls by the wayside. These players fear the end of their career because they have to learn how to live without that structure. They have to learn what kind of food they like, where they want to make their home, etc. They have to learn who they are. Although Ray never specifically voices this perspective in the film, the story effectively portrays his reluctance to let go of the game as a product of that fear. Is he ready to just be a husband, father, and Little League coach, and not a professional athlete? All signs point to no.

So Night Swim is not a baseball movie, but here’s one way it could have been: They could have afflicted Ray not with MS but instead with a body ravaged by injury. We’ve all seen some of our favorite players have their careers derailed due to injuries that were rare just a few decades ago. So what if Ray was a pitcher who just tore his UCL for the third time? Or if he was dealing with thoracic outlet syndrome, which very few pitchers ever come back from successfully? If that were his issue, Night Swim would be more fundamentally about baseball and the issues it faces today, instead of having it simply color the motivations of its characters.

Either way, it’s a good sign that the filmmakers chose baseball as their sport, rather than football, basketball, or hockey (which Russell played in college), and it’s an even better sign that the studio supported that creative decision. It means that baseball, which was considered box-office poison until the 1980s, is once again seen as a relatable and reliable subplot for a major motion picture. Perhaps another baseball movie boom isn’t too far off.