Baseball movies, damn it, BASEBALL MOVIES!

A critic wants to destroy his play
his marriage is ending
and tonight...
His Team is One Game Away.

-> GAME 6

Starring Michael Keaton, Griffin Dunne, Ari Graynor,
Shalom Harlow, Bebe Neuwirth, Catherine O'Hara,
and Robert Downey, Jr.

Directed by Michael Hoffman

Written by Don DeLillo

Produced by Amy Robinson, Griffin Dunne,
Leslie Urdang, Christina Weiss Lurie.
Executive Producers: Michael Nozik,
David Skinner, Bryn Iler

http://moma.org/exhibitions/film_media/2006/Baseball.html

I HAVE seen Headin' Home with Ruth, albeit a crappy print.

http://www.thebasesareloaded.com

Oliver Platt as Steinbrenner
John Turturro (in latex ears) as Billy Martin
Daniel Sunjata (from Broadway's Take Me Out, and way too gorgeous for this role) as Reggie.

I won't paste the whole Times story, but Graig Nettles says Turturro as Martin is "scary."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/26/sports/baseball/26bronx.html

HARRISON FORD AS THURMAN MUNSON, I DEMAND IT

oh hell no -- Liz Smith via CSTB:

The life story of Dodgers’ manager Tommy Lasorda is reported on the “fast track for development” at Miramax. Al Pacino has “expressed interest” in playing the famously irascible Lasorda with Michelle Pfeiffer a “possibility” as his wife. Translation–don’t dress for the premiere. There’s many a slip twixt the “fast track” and the first day of shooting. Still and all, for the life of me I can’t imagine Al Pacino on a baseball field. But, that’s why they call it acting!

A Ballplayer Seeks a Hit, a Hit Film

By JOHN ANDERSON

WHEN Anna Boden stepped up to introduce her new movie, “Sugar,” to the opening-night crowd of the Dominican Republic Global Film Festival in November, she felt like a rookie reliever staring down at an All-Star lineup. “It was totally nerve racking,” she said. “I was introducing the film and looking out at these huge stars. Sammy Sosa. Pedro Martinez. Big Papi.”

“And the president of the country,” added Ryan Fleck, her co-writer and director.

But even the country’s president, Leonel Fernández, would defer to the star power of his island nation’s leading export: big-time baseball players. Since Ozzie Virgil joined the New York Giants in 1956, the Dominican Republic has provided the American major leagues with talent like the Hall of Famer Juan Marichal, the Alou brothers, Rico Carty, Manny Mota and present-day stars like the aforementioned David Ortiz (Big Papi) of the Boston Red Sox, Manny Ramirez of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Robinson Canó of the New York Yankees and José Reyes of the New York Mets. Like the N.B.A. in urban centers across America, beisbol for Dominicans is seen as the quickest, most glamorous route out of poverty, which in the Dominican Republic is as hard to ignore as the Caribbean Sea.

A talented player, a genuine prospect, is burdened not just with his own future but also that of his entire family. That desperate desire to escape, against almost impossible odds, exposes him to cultural discombobulation and the seamier aspects of the business of baseball. The psychic dislocation that results for the vast majority of those strivers, those that don’t make it, is the focus of “Sugar.”

The choice of “Sugar,” which opens April 3, seems an odd one for Mr. Fleck and Ms. Boden. Their previous film together, “Half Nelson,” which earned an Academy Award nomination for its star, Ryan Gosling, was about a drug-addicted New York City teacher. And Ms. Boden was only vaguely interested in baseball. (“My parents were basketball people,” she said.)

Though Mr. Fleck, who grew up in Oakland, Calif., remains an Athletics fan (and still watch games online), it wasn’t the sport that hooked them. It was discovering, after reading an article that referenced the Mets’ Dominican camp, that every major league team save the Milwaukee Brewers runs an academy in the country.

“We thought: ‘There are so many guys who go through this process every year. What happens to the guys who go through the process, and don’t make it?’ ” he said.

The stories informing “Sugar” initially came from places like Roberto Clemente Park in the Bronx, where players who have fallen short of the Dream still play a high level of amateur ball. Many of them, according to Mr. Fleck and Ms. Boden, were very open about their “failures.” Others were not.

“A lot of young guys we talked to hadn’t really come to terms with it at all,” Mr. Fleck said. “They tell us, ‘I’m going to go for a tryout with the Yankees,’ you know, some kind of open tryout in Staten Island. They were still optimistic they were going to make it.”

All signs in “Sugar” say the hero is going to make it too. Played by the newcomer (and nonactor) Algenis Perez Soto, the talented Miguel Santos, nicknamed Sugar, survives the player mill of a Dominican baseball academy and is drafted by a professional team. As a result he’s sent to a minor-league team in Iowa, where the non-English-speaking Sugar is given a crash course in Middle American: the members of his host family are older, conservative baseball nuts; the granddaughter is born-again and tries to orchestrate Sugar’s religious conversion. The combination of a new world and a new level of competition disorients the once-grounded player.

Casting an unknown as Sugar “was pretty much a requirement of the role,” Mr. Fleck said. “How many 20-year-old Dominican baseball player-actors could we find?”

But they were out there, on the field.

“My brother told me about some auditions,” Mr. Perez Soto said during a visit to New York from Boston, where he now lives. “But I didn’t go to the casting, because there was a baseball game at the same time.” It was only after the casting call was over, and Mr. Fleck and Ms. Boden came to the nearby field where Mr. Perez Soto was playing, that the young man was invited to audition.

“They asked me if I wanted to be an actor,” he said, “and I said yes, but only because I thought that’s what they wanted to hear. ‘Yeah, I want to be an actor.’ But no, not really.”

He has since changed his mind.

“Of course everyone in the Dominican Republic has a plan to come here, even if it’s just to see New York,” Mr. Perez Soto said. “I had a plan to come here, but it was supposed to be because of the baseball, you know? I thought I’d be signed by a team and come here to play, and become a star like the others, but it didn’t happen to me.”

By making the movie he did get to meet some of his idols, as well as the former pitcher José Rijo, who was a consultant on the film. And that connection brought the filmmakers a little closer to the problems bedeviling Dominican baseball than they would have liked.

Last month Mr. Rijo was fired from his job as a special assistant to Jim Bowden, the general manager of the Washington Nationals, amid a continuing federal investigation into whether scouts and executives took kickbacks from signing bonuses promised to Dominican players. Mr. Bowden resigned soon afterward, denying what he called false allegations by the press.

But the high-profile departures have spotlighted the unsavory practices of local talent brokers known as buscones, who sign players as young as 10. (Dominican players are not subject to the major league draft and can be signed by any team when they turn 16.) The brokers have been accused of feeding players steroids, altering players’ birth certificates to make them appear younger (and thus more attractive to teams) and grabbing an exorbitant share of signing bonuses.

In an early scene in “Sugar” one of Miguel’s teammates talks about his own deal, and with a sigh says his manager will be taking 40 percent.

“Thirty to 40 percent is pretty standard,” Mr. Fleck said. “Any industry where there’s a lot of money to be made and there are poor people involved, there’s going to be some exploitation on some level. But we really didn’t want to focus on that.”

Nor did they want to focus on drugs, principally steroids, the use of which is commonplace in the Dominican Republic. What the filmmakers were after was a new way of telling an age-old story, of hopes, dreams and what happens when life throws you a change-up. “I’ve been improving my English,” said Mr. Perez Soto. “I’ve been practicing and improving every day, because I want to be ready when this movie comes out. I want to be ready in case something else is coming.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

no one else seen Sugar?

Seeing it tonight.

what'd u think?

It was sold out! I'm seeing it Saturday night now!

Okay I saw it. It was great.

loved his awkward deal w/ the blond Iowa girl

Yeah that was great. Actually the whole family interaction was pretty awesome. Also liked the direction the last 45 minutes goes a lot.

Do you know what minor league ballpark they were playing in (with the bridge in the background)?

Davenport IA, the franchise is Quad Cities (Cardinals affiliate).

http://web.minorleaguebaseball.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20090330&content_id=546891&vkey=news_milb&fext=.jsp

Super pretty.

I do wonder if it's really true that a Single A team with a strong Dominican pipeline wouldn't have a real translator for the players.

just saw a pretty good doc feature on Luis Tiant that ESPN will air this summer.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51E9KJQSS0L._SS500_.jpg

Liked the Tiant doc on ESPN after the game, as noted above

saw this the other night:

http://jewsandbaseball.com/

Follows the Ken Burns style, and Hank Greenberg has his own doc, but told me some things I didn't know (Rod Carew did NOT convert; Elliott Maddox did), and the coup is that Koufax sat for an interview. Marvin Miller says he looked around at the plaintiff table at the Curt Flood case and realized everybody was black or Jewish.

morbs i bet you love billy crystal joint "61*"

Thomas Jane kills it as Mantle in 61! Ol' tommy jane, yessir~

Sugar is really, really good. Also Mr. Baseball is kinda cool

61 was really corny but i was like "wow how did they get roger maris to come back from dead, become young again and play himself tbh"

at least that cornpone phony-baloney The Pride of the Yankees had the real Ruth, albeit not whoring or winning a trophy in a farting contest.

Hah, I forgot Ruth was in PotY. I loved that movie when I was a kid! The speech at the end ;_;

so Alex Gibney has made a documentary about Steve Bartman and other sports scapegoats:

http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory?id=13428741

Don DeLillo wrote a baseball movie?? The things one learns on ILX.

I'd like to see Rhubarb, with Ray Milland.

http://www.movieposter.com/posters/archive/main/111/MPW-55717

How the heck did he make that movie AFTER The Lost Weekend?

http://www.emovieposter.com/images/books/sports/53.jpg

It is apparent that we need to arrange a Ray Milland baseball movie night.

"Field of Erroneous Scorekeeping, more like."

http://flipflopflyball.tumblr.com/post/8740392528/field-of-dreams-opened-in-cinemas-on-april-21

Cint Eastwood to play a scout SLOWLY GOING BLIND!

http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Matthew-Lillard-Joining-Clint-Eastwood-Trouble-With-Curve-28893.html

the BP staff gives some dubious recognition to baseball films like Bad Lieutenant and The Fan (SPOILER!):

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=15939

next year's Robinson pic 42... look who's playing Branch Rickey

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0453562/combined

I guess that means Spike Lee's long-rumored Jackie film has been abandoned?

afaik it was when Denzel got too old

Doesn't really look like an actual baseball movie:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdJPvXLemVs

Laughed at all the non-joke content.

"We need to appeal to white men over the age of 80 and Justin Timberlake fans."

"You don't know anything about the game--a computer can't tell if a kid's got instincts."

Somebody didn't like Moneyball.

someone actually wrote the line 'it's feng schmay, dont u know anything'

Really liked Knuckleball. (The directors were supposed to be there but cancelled.) Minor quibbles: maybe a little more history on the pitch, Wilhelm especially, and the music's lousy. Larger quibble: I don't think it gets as deep into the psychology of throwing the pitch as Bouton did in Ball Four. Where it's great: "the fraternity." It's another one of those documentaries where I think, "What an obvious film to make--how did it take this long?" There's like seven living knuckleballers of any stature, and they interview them all. And most of them are friends--more than friends. The scene where Wakefield, Dickey, Hough, and Niekro all go golfing is pretty much the best thing I've seen this year. Dickey is such a likeable guy--I feel silly for having ignored his story till the big streak earlier this season, but I'll be rooting for him to win the Cy. Wakefield is much quieter, and it's genuinely moving when he gets his 200th.

Salon review of Knuckleball:

http://www.salon.com/2012/09/14/pick_of_the_week_baseballs_secret_zen_fraternity/

Again: excellent.

The one with all the color footage from the '40s and '50s, right? I watched the first one--I believe there was a second.

Three total, I think the last may have come out way later.

Aside from baseball, I was hooked by the look of that home movie Kodachrome once they got into the color era.

Not a movie, but just watched the MLB Network's George Brett documentary/profile. As I've said before, one of the most memorable players I was able to see for the duration of his career, from his playoff heroics against the Yankees in the '70s to the Pine Tar Game to killing the Jays in the '85 ALCS. (Because I was a little bit off baseball from '79 to '82, I followed his pursuit of .400 through the paper but wasn't as caught up in it as I normally would have been.) Had a toxic relationship with his father, who sounded like a true nightmare.

Turned up in a sidebar, first time I've ever seen this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvaZlsi5rLs