MINNEAPOLIS, MN- APRIL 18: The Cleveland Indians logo on a sleeve patch of the uniform against the Minnesota Twins on April 18, 2015 at Target Field in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Indians defeated the Twins 4-2. (Photo by Brace Hemmelgarn/Minnesota Twins/Getty Images)
Who are the top five MLB film characters in movie history, or better yet, if that term is narrowly defined, could you name the best?
Here are the rules: Within the story of the film, all your MLB film characters need to have been in The Show. No film can be named twice, and that should make things at least challenging. For example, no matter how much you admire Eight Men Out, you can’t name three of the Black Sox in that film.
Properly judged, here are undisputed selections for at least the top seven:
Eddie Harris (Chelcie Ross), Major League (1989): In a film featuring probably five of the best MLB film characters in the top twenty, Eddie Harris, the aging right-hander of the inspiring Cleveland Indians, stands out.
As played by Ross, Eddie is a comic mixture of incredulity and frustration as he surveys his teammates, a squad purposely selected by their owner to lose so she can move the team to Miami.
Ross was actually past his mid-forties when he played Harris, and he looks every bit the aging veteran – a pretty creaky guy, honestly – although he actually played varsity baseball in high school in the late ’50s. His pitching motion is fairly convincing, just really old-looking.
Eddie is also a nice combination of piety and dishonesty. Early in the film, his attempt to organize a team prayer is interrupted by a teammate’s voodoo ritual involving a small explosion and a lot of smoke. See, Pedro Cerano practices voodoo, sets off sprinklers, and a good deal of comedy is built on an antipathy that builds between the two characters.
But as devout as Eddie is, his belief in Jesus doesn’t prevent him from cheating to extend his career, leading to one of the genius bits of dialogue in a baseball movie between him and the young fireballer Rick Vaughn.
In the locker room, Vaughn sees a glob of white goo smeared on Harris’ chest and asks what “that shit” is. Harris answers matter-of-factly, “Crisco.”
And he then goes on to point out Bardol on his head, and Vagisil at his waistline: “Anyone of them will give you two to three-inches drop on your curveball.”
He adds to that, “Of course, if the umps are watching me real close, I’ll rub a little jalapeno up my nose, get it runnin’, and if I have to load the ball up….”
He then wipes his nose.
A popeyed Vaughn asks, “You put snot on the ball?”
Harris replies, “I haven’t got an arm like you, kid. I have to put anything on it I can find. Someday you will too.”
In the end, naturally, Harris does yeoman’s work in the last big game of the film, contributing to the Indians’ victory.
Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) in Bull Durham (1988): As slapstick and silly as Major League is, Bull Durham is serious. Yes, it’s still a comedy, skillfully written and acted, and it has given us perhaps the most widely loved MLB film character ever. He is the aging minor-league veteran Crash Davis, who scrapes into the running here because, as he says, he “was in The Show for 21 days once – the 21 greatest days of my life.”
Thirty-two years after it came out, Bull Durham still gets a 97% rating from Rotten Tomatoes, and this is in large part because of Kevin Costner as Davis.
He is the veteran, savvy catcher sent down in the minors, despite his skill, to tutor a fairly dim, but talented, young pitcher named Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh, played by Tim Robbins.
Along the way, Davis demonstrates quite dramatically that LaLoosh has little control over his pitches, especially when angry, that the youngster needs advice about the fungus on his shower shoes, and that he can figure out how to make LaLoosh into an asset for his organization.
And he wins the heart, eventually, of the quite politically incorrect Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon). Savoy is, with apologies here for shocking language, a “loose woman,” an adjunct college instructor at a community college, and one who has an interesting hobby.
She gives a fabulous, if slightly sentimental, voice-over speech at the beginning of the film about “the church of baseball.” She is such a dedicated worshipper, in fact, that she takes as a lover each season a talented player on the local team, the Bulls.
(Would this plotting even survive a story pitch to a producer today?)
Anyway, Savoy’s interaction with Crash is maybe even better than Nuke’s. In the end, after Davis is bouncing from team-to-team in pursuit of the all-time minor league home run record (which is ignored when he sets it), she gives her heart to the truly committed older player with aspirations of managing.
Throughout, Costner as Davis is written as whip-smart, and at the end, convincingly sentimental. Some people talk about the tear-jerk scene involving Costner and his father having a catch near the end of Field of Dreams.
That scene, for that purpose, pales in comparison to Costner and Sarandon sitting and quietly talking about baseball and more on Annie Savoy’s porch at the end of Bull Durham. This scene alone puts them among the best ever MLB film characters.
Moonlight Graham (Burt Lancaster) in Field of Dreams (1989): It’s only fair to pick a minor character among the top five, and particularly if one can pick a role handled by the great Burt Lancaster. The exceedingly sentimental Field of Dreams was Lancaster’s fifth to last film, and he may be the only actor in it who handled sentiment reasonably well.
He’s essentially the same character in W.P. Kinsella’s novel, Shoeless Joe, on which the film is based, and which is superior to the screen treatment in considerable part because the part in the film played by James Earl Jones is taken by the writer J.D. Salinger in the original story.
It would have been interesting to see Salinger join these MLB film characters as Kinsella wrote him.
In any event, Graham turns out to not be greatly disappointed by his unsatisfying brush with athletic fame, telling Kevin Costner’s Ray Kinsella that he would have been more disappointed if he hadn’t been able to become a physician and hadn’t met his wonderful wife, who has passed away.
Still, Ray Kinsella insists Graham must feel he missed out on something by his tantalizingly short career. Lancaster-Graham’s reply is an old pro’s reading of a long-forgotten dream:
“Well, you know I…I never got to bat in the major leagues. I would have liked to have had that chance. Just once. To stare down a big-league pitcher. To stare him down, and just as he goes into his windup, wink. Make him think you know something he doesn’t. That’s what I wish for. Chance to squint at a sky so blue that it hurts your eyes just to look at it. To feel the tingling in your arm as you connect with the ball.”
Buck Weaver (John Cusack) in Eight Men Out (1988): Cusack plays the most unjustly damned of the Black Sox Eight as an idealist who loves the game.
At one point in the film, he sits with neighborhood kids talking baseball in the midst of the scandal, talking about feeling a ball “give” when a good swing is put on it. “Damn,” he says, “if you don’t feel like you’ll live forever.”
It is impossible to know whether or not “Buckie” Weaver was the same sort of idealist Cusack plays in this film, perhaps the most serious baseball film ever made.
We know, however, that Cusack does a good job portraying a player who really wasn’t “in the loop” of the planned scandal, and is outraged he’s lumped in with the Sox who threw the Series. One of his other memorable scenes is in the trial at which he and the others accused are acquitted.
He angrily demands a separate trial, and begins citing his statistics from the Series. One of his teammates shouts out the early 20th century equivalent of “Sit down, Buckie – nobody cares about your WAR.”
Buck Weaver is the central character in this film involving several MLB film characters as defined here. The actual player he’s portraying was, like Shoeless Joe Jackson, a player who may very well have ended up in the Hall of Fame. (Jackson would have been, of course, a consensus lock until the scandal if the notion of a Hall had existed.)
It’s interesting that the ordinarily tough-minded director John Sayles saw Weaver as idealistic as he is portrayed. On the other hand, Sayles has always portrayed the unjustly treated as just that, not just his MLB film characters.
It was a season that changed baseball, portraying the coming explosion in analytics as desperate measures used to do great things. At least early on in their implementation.
Pitt plays a guy so stressed out by watching his team that he doesn’t. He works out instead, his character’s way of handling the intensity that had doomed him as a player.
Among all MLB film characters, he is maybe an even more fully developed character than Costner’s Crash Davis, who’s quite fully sketched in.
Pitt’s Billy Beane is a guy who’s also willing to think outside the box in order to win despite his stress, and a man unafraid to wield the power he actually has to fire backward-thinking scouts and hire an important nerd to help him make the A’s winners.
His portrayal of the GM’s relationship with his young daughter also adds just the right touch of sentiment to a story of a man determined to make his mark in baseball one way or another. The film definitely captures the spirit of Michael Lewis’ excellent book about that person at that time.
Next. Rockies: Hawpe played his role in WS year of '07. dark
You can’t go wrong in attending to any of these MLB film characters. They’re all parts of films many consider quite good. Just add some salty snacks for Field of Dreams, which is a bit too sweet. You’ll eventually get to Moonlight Graham.
