Players connect with fans both on screen and in reality
When we think of those “great sports movies,” it’s not really football movies that come to mind. Maybe in the last decade or so, with “Remember the Titans” (2000) or “Friday Night Lights” (2004), you could make a claim to the gridiron’s dominance. More often than not, it’s the diamond that holds the drama.
With South Carolina taking the field for the first time since the dramatic College World Series win, one that certainly felt historical not just for what it means to our university but for the NCAA — it was, after all, the last time the series will grace the legendary Rosenblatt Stadium — we are already tempted to think back with that sense of warm, glowing nostalgia.
And while I could certainly rattle off a list of my “Top Five Baseball Movies,” a column that would almost certainly devolve into a fairly cliché group of “Major League” (1989), “Field of Dreams” (1989), “Pride of the Yankees” (1942) and “The Natural” (1984), that seems just a little reductive and predictable as we throw our anticipation into the coming season.
The drama of baseball is the drama of human accomplishment, one of the chief reasons it has had such resonance on-screen. Where football creates plays out of 11 men working on either side of the ball, baseball reduces itself to man-on-man far more often.
The duel between the pitcher and the batter is made for the cinema — the subtlety of the pitches, the way the plate itself becomes a frame that each player must study and understand, the strategies behind the swing and ultimately the sweet payoff when metal connects.
We see this play out on television when we watch baseball. The cameras cut between close-ups of the pitcher and the batter, the coaches and the base runners, before going back to the over-the-mound shot to get the whole grandeur of the moment.
So to bring up one of those “great baseball movies” briefly, we see this again in “The Natural,” Barry Levinson’s seminal tale of a comeback kid who rallies from a terrible accident to be “the best there ever was.” The climax of the film, as powerful as any sports movie ever, is a series of slow-motion, extended shots that build to the film’s major visual payoff — the ball colliding with the stadium lights on Roy Hobbs’s (Robert Redford) game-winning home run, sending a spectacular show of sparks across the field.
It’s a triumphant, wordless moment entirely built out of the human elements of the sport. And while Hollywood of course focuses more on tales of underdog triumph and amazing finishes, the ability for the sport to reflect the essence of our desire to win and to conquer is always front and center.
When Gamecock Nation crowds to watch our reigning national champions over the coming months, we’ll undoubtedly be replaying that World Series-winning hit over and over. But it wasn’t the play itself that made the moment amazing — it was the joyful, emotional reactions of the whole team.
Our joy derived from their joy. Baseball, in all its glory, is a place where we as spectators can play out life’s emotions in each of the players. We believe in them, hope for them, despair in their loss, cheer in their victory. There’s a reason it is, and always will be, America’s pastime.