Copyright 1999 The American Reporter. All Rights Reserved

FOR LOVE OF THE WHOLE GAME
by Allan R. Andrews

It's always dangerous to write critically about a movie one hasn't seen, but I'm going to risk it here because I've read the book upon which Costner's film is based. I take heart from the one-sentence review printed last week in The Toronto Star"For the love of the game, read the book."

Of course, reading the book is no guarantee that one is even in the same ballpark, if you'll pardon my metaphor; Hollywood's adaptations of books are notorious for missing the strike zone.

For those with a more literary than cinematic bent, "For Love of the Game" was written by the late Michael Shaara, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Killer Angels," a Civil War novel that was the basis of the movie, "Gettysburg."

Shaara died in 1988 before his baseball novel was published, but his son, Jeff Shaara, a historical researcher who has devoted himself to being executor of his father's estate, had "For Love of the Game" published posthumously after finding the manuscript among his father's papers.

Shaara's novel is relatively short -- 152 pages in the paperback edition I have. Ostensibly, it is a baseball novel with a struggling romance woven between the innings of a perfectly pitched game. In truth, it's a book about a fading veteran pitcher's foibles and faith.

I'll be interested, in fact, to see how the film handles the two short but important prayers to God uttered by protagonist Billy Chapel before he pitches the ninth inning and when he wins the real battle at the end of the book.

Reviews of the film I've read have tended toward the negative. Costner gets generally good grades for baseball, less than good grades for romance, and an average grade for the overall product.

One reviewer called it a "dazzling disappointing film," saying it is "awash in cliches and pretension." Even baseball announcers Vince Scully and Steve Lyons, who play themselves in the film, are accused of mouthing unrealistic lines in reviews I've read. (Incidentally, as I recall there are no announcers in Shaara's book.)

Costner himself hasn't helped the impression of the film, claiming that Universal Pictures, in an effort to lift the rating from R to PG-13, cut scenes that were crucial. If they canned the R-rated stuff, they probably meddled with the mile-high romance, not with Costner's slider or fast ball. I mentioned earlier that I probably will have trouble with the baseball depicted in the film.

If the movie is true to Shaara's novel, almost all the baseball action takes place on the pitcher's mound, and most of the verbal exchanges are part of an interior monologue. The field of dreams in Shaara's book is located in Billy Chapel's head.

Here's my gripe: A baseball game is more than pitching. Besides, most of what Shaara wrote about can't be captured on film.

To be sure, pitching is important, perhaps the most important ingredient. There's an old baseball adage that good pitching will beat good hitting over the long haul.

The emphasis on pitching -- and perhaps even Shaara is an unwitting victim of this bias -- can be laid at the feet of television. With its limited field of vision, the tv camera largely reduces the game of baseball to a game of catch between pitcher and catcher.

I cannot watch a televised baseball game without thinking that my appreciation has been reduced and the importance of two players on the field has been overemphasized by the camera at the cost of the other fielders.

Costner's "Field of Dreams" demonstrated a comprehensive understanding of the game. That movie emphasized without trying that the game is played on a large field and that seven other players stand in various positions on that field throughout the game.

Shaara can get away with a short novel about a pitcher's struggle because the pitcher holds the ball more than any other player on the field; because the action of the game begins when the pitcher releases the ball. But a pitcher is dead without his fielders behind him.

Can anyone imagine a novel written about a centerfielder playing through nine innings of a game, perfect or not? Believe it or not, I can, though I won't speak with confidence about the sustained action line of such a novel.

With every pitch that centerfielder readies himself for action with his weight forward on the balls of his feet, his eyes focused sharply on where the pitch is delivered, and his ears listening for the report of the bat hitting the ball.

In all the televised analysis of baseball I've heard and seen, I am aware of detailed explanations of how a pitcher grips and hides the ball and pushes off the rubber and follows through, ready to field his position, but I have never heard a single commentator detail for listeners just what is involved in a centerfielder "getting a jump" on a hit ball, or how a second baseman "plays a hitter to go up the middle."

Shaara has given us a small but significant psychological study of the player on the mound, but he hasn't captured the grandeur and panoramic action of a baseball game.

Costner, I'm afraid, is using a medium suited to panoramic grandeur and filling it with grunts and struts that will make us sympathetic to a player who works typically only once every five games, doesn't hit, rarely has to run the bases and is more often than not removed from the game when his turn to bat comes at a crucial point of play.

Many years ago, Edward R. Murrow said of news and television: "News is what goes on in people's heads and there's no way to take pictures of that."

Similarly, Shaara's novel is wonderful because of its depiction of what is going on in Billy Chapel's head. No movie can capture that or translate it with sweaty uniforms and authentic grunts.

At some time, no doubt, I will see "For Love of the Game," but the reviews I've read have had the effect of sending me back to Shaara's novel.

I repeat the advice from Toronto: "For the love of the game, read the book."

Allan R. Andrews can be contacted at allan.andrews@reporters.net