Crank up the Metallica theme, boys! Here comes our closer!
As a kid, I found visual images all over the place in everyday life that I plugged into my sometimes silent, but always present fascination with the game of baseball. I once enjoyed the company of the same young Dominican nun teacher for 6th through 8th grade at St. Christopher’s in Park Place. Sister Reginald wasn’t a professed athlete, or particularly a baseball fan, but she showed an athletic ability in some of her teaching gesticulations that made me conclude that she could have been an effective sidewinder pitcher, had she so chosen to be. Sometimes in class she could bring that right arm around with all the sweeping motion of a vintage Ewell Blackwell in pointing to one of us “boys” as indicted, convicted, and sentenced for disturbing the peaceful goals of parochial school education.
I loved it, even I happened to be the one that day that was drawing the chin whiskers pitch from our hardworking taskmaster teacher. It gave me the opportunity to imagine hitting Sister Reginald’s pitch out of the park.
Yeah, that’s right. They say there’s a thin line between the presence of creative imagination and the mental residence of abject insanity in the minds, hearts, and souls of us too. I tried to keep that in mind from an early age, but I couldn’t help myself. I kept seeing the imagery of human motion as it applied to baseball in just about everything I saw. And nowhere was that more true than at the movies.
Long before the concept of “closer” became an everyday concept in baseball, I loved the climactic scene from the movie “The Things From Another World” in which “the thing” (James Arness), a vegetative man from another planet, comes through the military outpost door near the North Pole and halts in the doorway. I thought, “Wow! What if he was really an ace relief pitcher for the Buffs coming into put out a Dallas rally in the ninth inning at Buff Stadium? The visitors would be beaten as soon as they saw him standing there!”
As soon as he picked up the lumber, The Thing morphed from Closer to Slugger.
Of course, as the Thing plodded “closer” to the humans in the movie, they threw a big stick of wood at him to force him onto that wooden walking path, a route that was wired for electrification of the mad invader as he drew nearer. The visual effect on my baseball fantasy of him was that the Freudian presence of the big stick immediately transformed The Thing into a potential slugger with all the pop of a steroids stallion – and all these imagery synapses were firing in my young brain some forty years prior to our common knowledge of HGH and what it could do. I just loved the vision of the Houston Buffs acquiring a real “Superman,” an unretirable, unbeatable slugger that even the parent Cardinals could not take from us.
Yep, that’s right. I was a rank dreamer – and a Freudian one at that.
"Why is that every time I throw a ball, I throw it like a girl?" - Anthony Perkins (R) in the movie about Jimmy Piersall, "Fear Strikes Out" (1957).
The imagery issue had another backfiring effect upon me. I had little patience with Hollywood for bad casting of non-athletes as baseball players. They did it a lot – and maybe that speaks more for the fact that actors generally are not athletes – and vice versa. Although, we seem to have a greater supply of athletic actors today than we did back in the 1940s and 1950s.
Anthony Perkins has to be my all time favorite worst athlete/actor for his 1957 portrayal of Jimmy Piersall in “Fear Strikes Out.” Just for the heck of it, here’s my top ten list of worst athletic portrayals by an actor in a baseball movie. To me, these are the instances of visual failure that are inexcusable to the tastes of any real baseball fans. That being said, I’ve been able to rise above my unhappiness with the playing abilities of all these actors to have enjoyed all the movies on this list. They were about baseball, weren’t they?
Worst Athletic Actors in a Favorite Baseball Movie:
1. Anthony Perkins in “Fear Strikes Out” (1957).
2. Ray Milland in “It Happens Every Spring” (1949).
3. Jimmy Stewart in “The Stratton Story” (1949).
4. Gary Cooper in “Pride of the Yankees” (1942).
5. Dan Dailey in “Pride of St. Louis” (1952).
6. William Bendix in “The Babe Ruth Story” (1948).
7. Ray Liotta in “Field of Dreams (1989).
8. Ronald Reagan in “The Winning Team” (1952).
9. Bruce Bennett in “Angels in the Outfield” (1951).
10. Michael Moriarty in “Bang the Drum Slowly” (1973).
Have a nice Memorial Day weekend, everybody, and watch where you are looking. You never know when something is going to pop into view that reminds you of baseball – even if you happen to be watching an Astros game.
The Pecan Park Eagle 
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