Baseball movies always work on some level. The stuff of drama is built into the very nature of the game: baseball is about failure. Think about it for a bit and you'll know I'm right. The best team in the majors this year will lose a third of its games. The best hitter in baseball will sit down two thirds of the time. Some baseball teams wear failure as a badge, whether it's the Chicago Cubs or the pre-2004 Boston Red Sox. To be a baseball fan is to be a masochist. If, as in football, winning is the only thing, then the most hated team in baseball would not be the New York Yankees, who are a symbol of outsized success (the Yankees, it should be noted, have won a quarter of all of the World Series ever played). It's even in the literature of the game. Mighty Casey strikes out. So does Roy Hobbs at the end of Bernard Malamud's The Natural (and nevermind the bullshit uplift of the movie version--it rings totally false). The best baseball movie ever made is Bull Durham, where Crash Davis ends his career with meaningless home runs in the minor leagues while dreaming of making into the bigs as a manager. I mention all of this, because it informs my reaction to Moneyball (2011, directed by Bennett Miller), a film about an outrageous success that ultimately ends in failure. That's baseball for you.
Posts
