The Crosspatch Times 4 - On Movies and Baseball (Part 2)

In baseball, there’s a clear platonic ideal you can strive for but never reach. The possibility theoretically exists that someone could hit 1.000 or that a team might never lose a game. Those things won’t ever happen, though, because the game is so damn hard. As players, we settle for the best we can do, and we have to accept that most of the time, things won’t pan out. It’s as Richard Linklater put it: Sisyphean. And that, friends, creates a glorious kind of irony. It’s why baseball is so dramatic, and it will break your heart like nothing else. 

The Heartbreak (Baseball)

Think about it: it shouldn’t be a surprise when someone doesn’t come through with the big hit in the bottom of the 9th. In today’s MLB, many players get a hit under 25% of the time in the best of circumstances—you want them to come through in the most difficult? No way. There’s no chance. It’ll never happen in a million years. 

But…what if it did?

Wouldn’t that be so much cooler? So much more incredible than if they were supposed to do the job? Wouldn’t it be amazing if a little hobbit with no experience and no skills got the One Ring all the way to Mordor? 

The success of the little guy who shouldn’t be able to get the job done is central to many, if not all, of our greatest stories. We’re conditioned to believe that, despite it all, the underdog will pull through, because that’s the dramatic choice. It’s not just the audience that feels the drama either: the players do too. One of the hardest things to do as a player is to take the context of an at-bat out of the equation when you go up to hit. There’s more riding on you when you’re down 1 run in the bottom of the 8th and you’re hitting with runners on the corners than there is when you’re leading off the game. When you’re up at bat, however, you have to be able to understand the importance of a situation and strategize accordingly without allowing the stakes to overwhelm you.

Chances are you’ve heard of Shohei Ohtani, even if you’re not a huge baseball fan. The Japanese phenom had a historically great season at the plate, becoming the first player ever to hit 50+ home runs and steal 50+ bases in the same season, finishing the season with a stellar .310 batting average. And yet, through 125 games this season, he had hit only .219 with runners in scoring position.

Was he pressing? Feeling the drama of the moment? Maybe. It’s hard to believe a hitter that talented was simply having bad luck for so much of the season. Whatever it was, it changed on August 23rd. Ohtani hit a walk-off grand slam that day, and went on to hit .516 with runners in scoring position for the remainder of the season, including going 16 for 19 to close out the season. That’s ridiculous. 

Baseball is a mental game, and Shohei was able to reconfigure his brain in those moments. He went from understanding that he shouldn’t succeed, to knowing in his bones that he would succeed. The dude turned off his targeting system and used the force to guide him to destroy the Death Star.

There’s a saying in sports, when crazy things happen, that “you can’t write that ending” and it’s true, because if it did happen in a movie, no one would believe it. Live sports are the only arena where you can actually get those stories and they don’t feel treacly and fake. And in no sport is the drama more inherent than baseball, because the chances of success are so small, relative to other sports. 

Baseball knows you want to believe, which makes it so heartbreaking when the storybook ending doesn’t work out. The flip side of against-all-odds success instantly becomes an epic, inevitable tragedy. Your hero gets all the way to the end of their journey, is so close to achieving their goal and…they fail. 

Of course they did. It was foreshadowed the whole time! For humanity’s sake, that man is hitting .190! How could we ever have believed he would get the job done? 

Life is now empty and meaningless…

Until tomorrow.

The Heartbreak (Movies)

By now, the corollary I’m drawing between baseball and storytelling should be clear. What’s not clear is what it has to do with boots-on-the-ground production, which was more the focus of my first two segments. 

After all, I’ve already said that you’re supposed to succeed when you go to work on a production. What’s Sisyphean about that? Nothing.

What is Sisyphean, is the mentality of the person who thinks they should get into film & video production in the first place. The success of an individual shoot doesn’t equate to success in the industry any more than a single win in 162 games means you’re going to win the World Series. The chances of “making it” in the film industry in any role are so infinitesimally small, even if you’re good at what you do. Just like there are thousands of minor league baseball players who never get to hit a Major League field, there are tons of incredible pros in the film & video industry who won’t ever work on a blockbuster. So why do it?

I believe there’s a link in the mentality of people who choose baseball and people who choose the movies. Just like in baseball, there’s a platonic ideal of a movie that no one will ever reach. Universal acclaim and commercial success are my metrics there and while many films come close, you can’t say that universal acclaim is ever going to happen. 

Case in point: many popular films of Christopher Nolan don’t really resonate with me. I recognize the proficiency and I’m usually engaged, but I feel nothing afterwards. Or, you could argue The VVitch (2015) is a masterpiece, but you know who doesn’t think so? The guy who directed it, Robert Eggers.

And yet, the urge to keep going is still there. You can always do a little better; work a little harder, prepare a little more. What are we striving for, if not the incredible drama of success despite having everything stacked against us?

I suspect it says something about my own psychology that I wanted to play for the Yankees when I was a kid and I want to make movies as an adult. I’m all about those Sisyphean tasks, baby! Put in a negative light, I’m a crazy person–an idealist and a fool. But I like to think about one of my favorite scenes in one of my favorite movies when thoughts like that cross my mind. A movie that just so happens to be about baseball.

In A League of Their Own, Dottie (Geena Davis) is about to leave the Rockford Peaches behind and trek back to Oregon with her surprisingly not-dead husband, Bill Pullman. Her coach, Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks), gets angry at her for quitting. Her response? “It just got too hard.”

Dugan answers with a quote that lives rent-free in my head at all times: “It's supposed to be hard. If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. The hard... is what makes it great.”