Where Have You Gone, ‘Bull Durham’?

THE CominG CollEGE WorlD

SEriES rEminDS US of a BiG aBSEnCE on THE BiG SCrEEn

BY Ryan SyRek

Every June in Omaha, baseball becomes more than just a tool for fathers to avoid real communication with their families. It is also a reason to yell “You can’t turn left on Dodge Street!” at an oblivious TCU Horned Frogs fan in town for the College World Series. As virtually everything else ever has or will, this time of year leaves me thinking about movies. Specifically, why hasn’t there been a good baseball flick in the last decade?

You could argue that “Everybody Wants Some!!” — writer/ director Richard Linklater’s comedy about a college baseball team released in 2016 — should be considered a winner. But I have a strict rule that you get one exclamation point in a film title at most. Even if you ignore grammar and good punctuation, it was a sparingly seen film, even by Linklater standards. Besides, I’m not talking about an indie joint with longhairs. Where hath our Bulls of Durham gone? Wherefore art thou “Moneyball?” Whither “The Natural” and “Major League?”

Sure, you could argue that the lack of motion pictures about “America’s pastime” indicates that baseball is simply past its pastime prime. To “chicken and egg” this thing a bit, what if the opposite were true? In a year when MLB has rolled out a slew of changes designed to make games shorter and more entertaining, what if the sport just needs more Kevin Costner? Or, even better, someone popular who can actually act.

Legitimately, I think it says something about us culturally, societally that we have actively left baseball out of the most dominant modern artform. The sport has long been lauded as physical storytelling, with players given closeups and backstories during their at-bats and action that reads like a definitive narrative, at least after the final out. In an age when studios are willing to exploit any intellectual property, from childhood toys to athletes making shoe deals, where are the remakes of “Rookie of the Year” and “Angels in the Outfield?”

I think the message in the decade-long absence of major-league Major League Baseball movies suggests two things. First, film executives have lost faith in the metaphor without realizing they helped perpetuate it. I legitimately don’t know if I fell in love with baseball before or after falling in love with baseball movies. Football doesn’t need movies. The failure of “80 for Brady” won’t ding the NFL’s bottom line if concussions didn’t. A fresh take on “Field of Dreams,” however, may spike MLB popularity like upturned cleats on a hard slide into second.

Second, the lack of baseball movies tells me that storytelling is evolving. That can be a good thing. Actually, that should be a good thing. Provided we aren’t leaving behind things best kept close to the heart. So many movies these days fail at the barest, most basic aspects of how we should shape stories. Cinema and baseball were a perfect fit for how we once wove narratives, in part because they leaned on core elements such as well-defined characters, patient pacing, solid structure, and faith in audiences/fans.

If modern filmmaking has progressed past adaptations of this sport for good reasons, like inclusivity and innovation, fine. If not, perhaps what anxious theater ticket takers and the baseball commissioner could both use is a brand-new, big-screen “Little Big League.”