Decades before Ted Lasso hung that iconic sign over his office door, another Hollywood venture into the sporting world taught us the value of belief.
Again and again in Bull Durham, director Ron Shelton’s 1988 ode to minor league baseball, the characters invest themselves fully in the task at hand, believing in themselves, their work, Dame Fortune and whatever else they can find (whether religion, voodoo, the powers inherent in the head of a live rooster, etc.).
This dogged pursuit of an elusive, uncertain end is largely reflected in the efforts of two of the main characters, Crash Davis and Annie Savoy, the grizzled catcher and exotic groupie played by Kevin Costner and Susan Sarandon, respectively. Their mission is to mold Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh (Tim Robbins), the raw pitcher in whom the organization has invested heavily, into a major leaguer. They commit themselves fully to that pursuit, to the point of using unconventional means to get through to Nuke (telling opposing batters what offering they can expect in Crash’s case, urging the young pitcher to wear women’s undergarments for good luck in Annie’s case).
Others in the movie believe just as strongly in what they’re doing. Manager Joe Reardon (played by the late Trey Wilson) believes he can transform his players into something more than lollygaggers. The players themselves are quite certain they can rocket through the bush leagues to the majors, that they are all indeed “one dying quail a week from Yankee Stadium,” as Crash intones in one of the film’s more moving scenes.
This is far from the only movie to explore the power of belief. In Diner (1982), a star-crossed character named Boogie (Mickey Rourke) puts it this way: “If you don’t have good dreams … you got nightmares.” In The Shawshank Redemption (1994), Robbins himself reminds us that hope is the best of things, while memorably playing the wrongfully convicted inmate Andy Dufresne.
And so it is in Bull Durham, which on June 15 marked the 35th anniversary of its release: Everybody is clinging to something, and seeking something more. The characters believe in their quest, believe in their dreams – and we do, too, even if at times the film stretches the bonds of credulity. Are we really to buy that Nuke could throw 95 mph with such a comically awkward pitching motion? That he would be left out there to build such a staggering pitch count that he would strike out 18 and walk 18 in the same game – each “a new league record,” as pitching coach Larry Hockett (Robert Wuhl) informs Reardon? For that matter, are we to believe that a major league club would promote a pitcher from Class A to the bigs (“The Show,” in Bull Durham-speak) while expanding its roster in September?
Of course not. But the film works anyway. Works wonderfully, in fact. It is funny and sexy and gritty. It is poignant and powerful.
Just ask Tom Herr.
Herr, undrafted out of Hempfield High School in 1975, signed with the Cardinals, and after nearly five years in the minors played 13 major league seasons (1979-91), with St. Louis and four other teams. The movie came out late in his career, and when he first saw it, he didn’t care for it.
But after further viewings he said it “kind of grew” on him. He liked the acting and the humor. He liked that the film conjured up memories of the small towns in which he had played, like Pulaski, Va., Bluefield, W.Va. and Kingsport, Tenn.
“Generally speaking,” he said, “I think they did a pretty good job of capturing what minor league life is like.”
Stands to reason, since Shelton was once an Orioles farmhand. His portrayals of Crash, the veteran playing out the string, and Nuke, the pampered prospect, really hit home with Herr.
So too did Shelton’s depiction of the women who hovered about the team.
“There’s a lot of women,” Herr said. “You could call them groupies or whatever. They just hang around, and (among) each year’s crop of players, they find a new one to latch onto.”
I suggested to Herr that few of these women likely have the sophistication of Sarandon’s character, and he did not disagree.
“She was a wily veteran, that’s for sure,” he said.
Herr also vouched for the authenticity of the scene in which Crash tips Nuke’s pitches, in order to make a point with the younger man about trusting his catcher. Herr said such a thing happens not only under those circumstances, but when a catcher might be friends with an opposing hitter, and looking to help him out.
“You have to watch out for that kind of stuff,” he said.
Mitch Johnson, a Donegal graduate who spent 10 years as a minor league pitcher (all but one in the Red Sox chain), recalled a Pirates catcher doing him a solid and telling him a fastball was coming on a two-strike pitch from veteran Rick Reuschel, after Johnson had taken a couple hopeless hacks in a spring-training game.
Didn’t help.
“I still missed,” he said.
Like Herr, Johnson and another Lancaster County native who played professionally, Mike Sarbaugh, attest to the film’s accuracy.
The superstitions among players? Rampant. The scene where Crash and Co. create a “rainout”? Yep, that happens from time to time (and indeed it is one of the many things Shelton culled from his own experience).
Sarbaugh, another Donegal graduate, also coached and managed in the minor leagues and now serves as the Cleveland Guardians’ third base/infield coach. He said the film definitely “gave some people more ideas” about ways to forge postponements.
“All the ballparks in the minor leagues back then, you could find a hose and then just for some reason the faucet would turn on accidentally, and the hose just happened to be on the infield,” he added, tongue buried in cheek. “I was never a part of that, but I know that did happen.”
Another scene – the one where Reardon upbraids his players for their lackluster play by calling them “lollygaggers” – appears to have resonated with Sarbaugh even more than he might have imagined. As a second-year manager at Class A Lake County in 2005, he too found himself airing out his club. And while doing so he let slip the L-word, much to his surprise and chagrin.
“I probably couldn’t think of a certain word, so ‘lollygaggers’ came out,” he said. “And I didn’t hear the end of it. At the time I was like, ‘I can’t believe I said that.’”
The mound-meeting scene, while hilarious, was described as “over the top” by Sarbaugh and “a little bit hokey” by Johnson, and not without reason. Crash, Nuke and several other players are grappling with a cursed glove, breathing out of one’s eyelids, a fatherly visit and what to get their teammate and his betrothed for a wedding gift.
“Usually,” Herr said, “mound meetings are all business.”
The scene, nearly cut by some deep thinkers at Orion Pictures according to Shelton’s 2022 book The Church of Baseball, ends with a wonderfully ad-libbed line from Wuhl: “Candlesticks always make a nice gift, and maybe we can find out where she’s registered. Maybe a place setting, or a silverware pattern. OK, let’s get two!”
While that might detract ever so slightly from the film’s authenticity, its belief motif remains intact. Crash launches into a soliloquy about the things in which he believes early in the film (including “long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days”), and the players cling to the idea that they are one step away from something better, that their big break is right around the corner.
Such a break, Johnson said, is often a matter of “being lucky – right place at the right time, right people liking you at the right time. All those kinds of things have to come into play.”
He would know, seeing as he rose as high as Triple-A Pawtucket during his decade in the game, but no higher. He would see other Red Sox prospects reach The Show, not the least of which was Ellis Burks, an outfielder who wound up hitting .291 with 352 homers in 18 major league seasons. (An amusing side note: Johnson said Burks borrowed his travel iron the night before he was summoned to Boston in 1987. He has yet to return it.)
Sarbaugh cited the example of an infielder named Jamey Carroll, who was called up to the Montreal Expos in 2002 at least in part for geographic reasons. Carroll had returned to his hometown of Evansville, Ind., after the minor league season ended, and as a result could get to Montreal more quickly than any other prospect. He wound up fashioning a 12-year major league career.
For his part, Herr was a shortstop when he signed with the Cardinals in 1975, and admittedly wondered where he fit into the organizational picture, since they had used a first-round pick on another shortstop, Garry Templeton, the year before. But Herr was moved to second base in the minors and steadily climbed the ladder. He made it to the big club for good in 1980, four years after Templeton and two years before Tempy was traded to San Diego for future Hall of Famer Ozzie Smith.
So while Herr believes that good fortune plays a role in minor leaguers’ development, particularly as it pertains to health, he also believes that the cream ultimately rises to the top.
“I think most guys that deserve to get a shot, get it,” he said.
Especially now, given the increasingly large sums of money clubs invest in high draft picks.
“Organizations are almost forced to try to get a return on their investment, any way they can,” he said. “So those guys really get pampered and every benefit of the doubt they get. I think there’s a lot of players that feel they were good enough. But ultimately my feeling is, if you deserve to be there, you’re going to be there.”
In that way, then, Bull Durham is more romantic than realistic, more a product of its time than a reflection of the present day. Still, it holds up, its credo reflected in something Annie Savoy says in the film’s opening scene: “It’s a long season, and you’ve gotta trust it.”
You’ve gotta believe, in other words.
Because if you don’t have dreams, you’ve got nightmares.