TCM is running a night of Susan Sarandon movies tonight. The night kicks off with another showing of Atlantic City at 8:00 PM, a film I'm always looking forward to, although as it turns out I've already done a post on it back in 2020. It aired on TCM in the very early days of this blog, when TCM got the rights to some Paramount films from after the batch that were sold off to Universal, and then didn't air for ages. In any case, the second film tonight is Bull Durham at 10:00 PM, and since that one's been on my DVR since this year's 31 Days of Oscar, I watched it specifically to put up this post.
The movie takes its name from the baseball team in Durham, NC, a minor-league team at what was at the time the lowest level of the minors affiliated with Major League teams, known as Single A. (Thanks to a reorganization and reaffiliation in the late 1990s, the team is now in Triple-A, the level just below Major League.) Generally, this is the sort of place that would get high turnover as most of the players are young one who are either going to be moving up or who don't realize they're never going to make it to the majors and finally going to give up the dream after a couple of seasons bouncing around. One of the up-and-comers is pitcher Ebby LaLoosh (Tim Robbins). He's got a really fast pitch, but no control over location and no sense of how to deal strategically with hitters.
That strategy is something that catchers normally deal with in conjunction with pitchers, which is you see catchers signalling pitches with pitchers sometimes calling them up. The organization realizes it needs a catcher who can show LaLoosh, given the nickname "Nuke" by his manager Skip (Trey Wilson), and in that regard it's demoted journeyman catcher Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) to Durham. Crash made it to the majors once, and had a three-week stint there, but he's really never going to make it again and ought to know better. In fact, he's close to setting the record for most home runs by a player in the minor leagues, which is something one probably ought not want since it means you're spending a lot of time in the minors.
Meanwhile, there's Annie (Susan Sarandon), who has a connection with the team in part because of her family's having funded the stadium in part decades earlier. Annie also has a thing where she's going to take a player under her wing each year, although in her parlance that means sexually. We get the impresion that Crash would be right for her, but Nuke is just so much more exciting because he's young and studly and exciting with his craziness. Crash also doesn't really want to put up with this nonsense, which is why Annie eventually picks Nuke.
Thrown into all of this is the usual motley crew of off-beat tropes that populate baseball films: the Jesus freak, the Latin player with a crazy girlfriend, and so on. They all try to come together as a team, but the start of the season isn't very successful until Nuke's pitching picks up, at which point the team goes on a long winning streak. However, there's always the looming likelihood that Nuke is going to get good enough that the organization is going to move him up to a higher level, something that naturally does happen toward the end of the movie.
Bull Durham is generally considered a sports movie for obvious reasons, although it's just as much about the interpersonal relationships, with the team's on-field performance really being in the background compared to other sports movies. As such, the actors playing the three main characters do a good job with the love triangle material that just happens to be set against a baseball backdrop. The stock baseball player character part is something I found myself caring rather less about, to be honest.
