Roy Hobbs homers into the lights, 1939
And there was also a statement by the baseball commissioner. “If this alleged report is true, that is the last of Roy Hobbs in organized baseball. He will be excluded from the game and all his records forever destroyed.”
Roy handed the paper back to the kid.
“Say it ain’t true, Roy.”
When Roy looked into the boy’s eyes he wanted to say it wasn’t but couldn’t, and he lifted his hands to his face and wept many bitter tears.
That Bernard Malamud — what a card! A few years ago, I read a series of notes he wrote about “The Natural,” his first novel. Malamud went on to become one of the most admired and respected writers in the world. He twice won the National Book Award for Fiction. He was called America’s greatest short story writer by Flannery O’Connor herself.
There’s a strange irony about Malamud though: In the literary community, for the most part, “The Natural,” is written off. None of the hardcore critics seemed to love it. They saw it as an earnest but flawed beginning to a brilliant career.
And yet, “The Natural,” is by far the most famous of Malamud’s work because of the movie it inspired. And the movie, as you might know, is very different from the book.
In any case, in these notes, Malamud forcefully made the point that “The Natural” isn’t about baseball at all. He bit back at the critics he believed missed the point. He wrote on and on about the symbolism of the book*, about the larger significance of the story and its relationship to morality, and about Sigmund Freud, who apparently plays an important part. Play ball!
*The bat was apparently a phallic symbol — I didn’t need to know that. Malamud might have been a fun date at a literary soirée, but you probably wouldn’t have wanted him sitting next to you in the Wrigley bleachers.
There are many people who prefer Malamud’s haunting and depressing ending — no spoilers, but as you can see from the top, the book ending isn’t exactly happy — to the corny and joyous ending of the movie “The Natural.”
I mean no offense to these people as they undoubtedly contain depths that I lack but … are you kidding me?
The thing that I find so wonderful about “The Natural” — the 1984 movie, directed by Barry Levinson and starring Robert Redford — is that it gets baseball. I mean, yes, it’s true, it has a million baseball flaws in it. I’ll go through a few of them; this assuming that you’ve seen “The Natural.” If you have not, please, take a couple of hours to watch it now. I’ll wait.
OK, a few of those flaws:
- In Hobbs’ final at-bat, it’s not entirely clear that the umpire called the first pitch a ball. The pitch clearly is a ball, but the umpire sounds like he’s saying “strike.” In fact, on the original subtitles, it has the umpire saying “Strike.” (The current subtitles, I just checked, don’t have the umpire saying anything at all.) If he really had called it a strike, the whole scene would have been ruined because Hobbs would have struck out.*
*OK, I’ll spoil it for you: Hobbs does strike out in the book version. So maybe having the umpire say “strike” on that first pitch was Levinson’s homage to the book. I should ask him about that.
- In the scene in Chicago where Hobbs’ homer hits the clock and destroys it, the movie makes it look like everybody started leaving — like that was a walk-off home run. But because Hobbs was on the visiting team, it could not have been a walk-off, they still had to play the bottom of the ninth.*
*There are those who point out that before 1950, the home team had the option to bat first. This happened now and again in the very early 1900s (the first Yankees game, when they were still the Highlanders, they batted last on the road) but by 1939, it was unheard of for a home team to purposely bat first.
- The reliever who came in to face Hobbs in the crucial at-bat did not take any warm-up pitches.
- When Pop Fisher, the manager, thinks that Hobbs won’t play, he simply crosses Hobbs’ name out of the lineup and puts a scrub into the No. 3 spot in the lineup. You would hope no big-league manager would do it that way.
- When the Knights and Pirates tie for the pennant at the end of the season, a one-game playoff is set up. But that’s not how it worked in 1939 — it would have been a three-game playoff, like the one the Giants and Dodgers had in 1951.
- For the last at-bat, the pitcher goes into a full windup with the tying run on first base. You don’t do that. And yet the runner does not steal second to move into scoring position.
Beyond that, generally speaking, only a handful of the players look like they belong on a baseball team — a panning of the Knights’ dugout looks like an orthodontist’s convention.*
*Though, if you look very carefully you might see former rookie sensation Super Joe Charboneau in the movie. He was supposed to have a bigger part but apparently because of his size (6-foot-2), he dwarfed Redford, which obviously didn’t work.
But even with all the slightly off-key baseball things, I think “The Natural” captures the romantic spirit of baseball — what it feels like to lose, what it feels like to win, the possibility of the impossible, the sudden burst of magic that just suddenly happens in a game — as well as a movie possibly can.
And though the plot, in general, is silly, it’s silly in recognizable
baseball ways. Guys like Hobbs do show up out of nowhere and become a
sensation — think Kevin Maas or Mark Fidrych. Dave Parker once did knock
the cover off a ball. Shoeless Joe Jackson did have a special bat with a
special name; he called it Black Betsy. More than one big-league star
did learn how to pitch by throwing fastballs against the barn. The most
famous was Bob Feller.
And the final home run, the crescendo of all crescendos in baseball movies, well, sure, it seems a bit ludicrous if you think too much about it. I mean, you get a pitching phenom who gets shot by a woman who wants to kill the greatest sports stars in the country, he disappears for more than a decade, shows up as a hitter to play for a last-place team with all sorts of chemistry issues, he goes on a tear like the game has never seen, goes into a horrendous slump by dating the manager’s niece, he comes out of the slump when his childhood sweetheart stands up in the crowd, he goes on an even greater tear than the first one, he leads the team to the brink of the pennant, he gets poisoned (?) and has to go the hospital where he has the bullet he was shot with taken out (looking shiny as ever), he shows up for the final game against the advice of doctors and after turning down a gambler’s money, he has two strikes against him against a left-handed fireballer* and then this stirring music starts playing and he hits a home run into the lights to win the pennant.
Yeah, OK, it seems a bit unlikely.
But honestly, is it any more unlikely than Kirk Gibson’s home run in ’88?
*To me the least likely part of the whole scenario was that left-hitting Redford could have pulled the ball against a lefty who threw that hard, especially with two strikes on him.
Anyway, the final home run gets me every time. Sure, it’s syrupy nonsense but every now and again, when we get lucky, so is baseball. That’s the whole point. We sit through all the 4-3 groundouts and pointless throws to first base and 3-0 fastballs that are taken for a strike because sometimes the stars align and then Hobbs hits one into the lights and they explode into fireworks. Because baseball can make us believe that’s a real thing that can happen.
One final point about “The Natural”: Do you remember when Hobbs shows up for the final game? Fisher was shaving and muttering about how he should have bought a farm, which is true: He was a decent fellow but a lousy manager. In any case, he was muttering about farming and Roy showed up and talked about how great life is on a farm.
“You know, my mother told me I ought to be a farmer,” Pop said.
“My dad wanted me to be a baseball player,” Roy said.
“Well, you’re better than anyone I ever had,” Pop said. “And you’re the best-goddamned hitter I ever saw.”
So, that sentence has always vexed me. What did he mean? Why was Hobbs the best player he ever coached but the best hitter he ever saw? Was he saying that Hobbs wasn’t the best player he ever saw? Was that because he thought Hobbs was a lousy outfielder?
But more to the point: If not Hobbs, who did Fisher think was better? This was 1939, remember, so this was before Willie Mays before Henry Aaron, before Mike Trout. Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams were only just beginning. Was Fisher saying that Babe Ruth was better because he also pitched? Maybe, but you know, Hobbs was a pitcher, too.
Was he saying Ty Cobb was better? Nah. If Hobbs was a better hitter than Cobb he had to be a better player than Cobb, no? Cobb was a great baserunner and an OK outfielder, but his game was hitting.
So who? Tris Speaker? Honus Wagner?
Tell you what I’d like to believe — I’d like to believe that Fisher was thinking Oscar Charelston was better. That would give me a whole new level of respect for Pop.
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