All these years later, this is still the part Ron Shelton appreciates more than anything. All these years later, Shelton will meet a baseball player, and they’ll strike up a conversation, and inevitably the subject will shift to “Bull Durham,” the 1988 movie Shelton wrote and directed, and the message will be simple and satisfying.
“You got it right,” the player always will say.
And that’s all Shelton really wanted when the germ of an idea leaped out of his brain and into his typewriter 35 years ago. Before “Bull Durham” became a platform to solidify Kevin Costner’s stardom, revive Susan Sarandon’s and create Tim Robbins’, it was a vehicle for Shelton to tell all the stories he’d assembled years before he’d become a screenwriter, back when he’d put in five years as a player in the Orioles’ minor league system.
“The players always say it captured something about the essence of the game at that level, when you’re so far away from the big leagues that you can’t even see them,” Shelton says over the telephone from his California home. “The fan sees a different game than the player sees. There’s something happening on the field and in the dugout that a fan can’t be aware of, but wants to be.”
Shelton has just released a book, “The Church of Baseball,” which is an exceedingly enjoyable memoir of the making of “Bull Durham,” and a reminder just how well that film’s baseball scenes have held up through the years. Its broader appeal may have been due to the romantic tangle among Sarandon (as Annie Savoy), Robbins (as Nuke LaLoosh) and Costner (as Crash Davis).
But what makes it a permanent part of the sports-movie pantheon is the fact Shelton held true to the key storyline: life in a bush-league town, on a bus-league team, and all of the details add up to a timeless tapestry that is endlessly rewatchable.
Every baseball fan has their favorite scene, and they can all be reduced to shorthand: The pitching meeting scene (“Candlesticks always make a nice gift”). The batting cage scene (Costner, a natural baseball player, ad-libbed the one-handed swings). The bus scene (“I was in The Show for 21 days once. Twenty-one greatest days of my life. You know you never handle your luggage in the show? Someone else carries your bags …”).
The rainout scene. The scene in which an exasperated Crash tells the hitter what’s coming — “When you speak of me, speak well” — and then tells Nuke: “Anything that travels that far oughta have a damn stewardess on it, don’t you think?” Crash’s list of beliefs (including “I believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone,” which became especially ironic after Costner played Jim Garrison in “JFK.”)
On and on. And on. And on.
So many elements make those scenes crackle. The glue, of course, is Costner, who had yet to become the gold standard for sports-movie centerpieces, but closely followed “Bull Durham” with “Field of Dreams” and later reteamed with Shelton for the golf-movie classic “Tin Cup.”
Shelton’s film came at precisely the right time. Costner was just about to break out with “The Untouchables” and already had “No Way Out” in the can. He had also agreed to star in “Everybody’s All-American” (a role that later went to Dennis Quaid) though once he saw the “Bull Durham” script he knew he wanted in — so badly, in fact, that though Shelton told him he didn’t need to audition Costner insisted on a meeting at a baseball field where he could prove his baseball chops.
And thus was Crash Davis born.
“He has this simmering righteous anger, but he’s also a great guy and a great teacher even though he doesn’t want to be there,” Shelton says. “It’s almost wistful. The other players can’t even imagine the major leagues and he’s been there for 21 days. Once he tells them that they all look at him differently.”
Shelton himself played 479 games in the minors from 1967-71, in places like Stockton, Calif., and Bluefield, W.Va. He played several seasons under Joe Altobelli, who in 1983 guided the parent-club Orioles to their third and most recent World Series title. Altobelli was there in Rochester, N.Y., the night Shelton was inducted into the Red Wings Hall of Fame. That was the closest Shelton ever got to The Show, 216 plate appearances at Triple-A. In all, he hit .251 and had 90 stolen bases as a pro.
Notably, and unusually, when the end came, it was Shelton who walked away from the game. He wasn’t pushed. But he’d kept his eyes and ears wide open the whole time. He may not have been as accomplished a player as Crash, who hit 247 minor league home runs (in the “Bull Durham” fictional universe, the all-time record). But he revered the game — and its nuances — every bit as much.
“I didn’t want to turn into Crash even though I liked Crash,” Shelton says. “I knew guys like Crash, saw what all the bus rides and disappointments did to them. It soured some of them, and these were guys I knew and respected, guys who played for eight, nine years and get to Triple-A and realize: that’s as good as it’s going to be.”
But Shelton also knows some of those very same players are the ones who become terrific managers. Maybe it’s impossible to know whether Crash went on to become a successful manager — or if he even took the job in Visalia he was interested in at the end of the movie — but Shelton sees Tommy Lasorda and Sparky Anderson and Tony La Russa (all with limited or no big-league success, all Hall of Fame skippers) as the embodiment of the Crash ethos.
There is also Buck Showalter. There is no way that in 1986 Shelton had any idea who Showalter was, but in so many ways, Buck seems to have channeled Crash: a good-but-not-good-enough player, a high baseball IQ, the kind of glib humor and inherent wisdom that teammates and players tend to listen to.
“I really like Showalter as a manager, for a lot of reasons,” Shelton says. “And I’m glad he’s managing in New York again, and doing such a great job with the Mets. In so many ways he’s a model for what the ultimate payoff can be for all those bus rides, all those lessons learned. You almost never see great managers who were great players.”
Thirty-four summers after “Bull Durham” first hit theaters, its influence is still apparent. Shelton is saddened by the way MLB has down-sized the minor leagues, because the movie helped spark a genuine revival for minor league baseball, helped pave the way for small towns to eschew big league nicknames and go with their own (and thus were the Lugnuts, Rumble Ponies and Yard Goats born).
It’s funny, too: Before he sat down to write the screenplay, Shelton had been estranged from the game for many years. Now, he is an essential part of its fabric, and the game is once again a part of his life. He follows the Dodgers, though his prime baseball interest is his son, Anton, also a gifted musician, who will be a freshman baseball player at Oberlin College in Ohio this year.
“He’s a catcher,” Shelton says with a laugh that implies: of course he is. “Just like Crash.”
