The World Series opens Friday with an updated version of The Natural in play, the role of Roy Hobbs, the mysterious slugger-pitcher from somewhere in Middle America, being reprised by a muscular manchild from Japan. The mythic contours of the game—baseball as our spiritual sports obsession—have rarely been more in evidence than in the chimerical (one could almost say comical) versatility of the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani, who is scheduled to get at least one pitching start against the Toronto Blue Jays and expected to blast at least one seamed orb out of the confines of either Dodger Stadium or the Rogers Centre.
The Natural, from 1984, was just one of five baseball films—all successful and well-executed in their own ways—that emerged from the diamond-deep decade of the 1980s. Its mythic cousin is Field of Dreams (1989), whose rewatches still have grown men weeping at the sight of long-dead ballplayers emerging from cornfields looking for a game of catch. Eight Men Out (1988) and Major League (1989) were somewhat polar opposites, the former a John Sayles-directed account (fairly accurate) of the World Series scandal of 1919, the latter a raucous comedy with a cover of the Troggs’ “Wild Thing” as its musical heartbeat and the voice of the immortal Bob Uecker intoning “Just a bit outside” after a pitch from Charlie Sheen’s character threatened to leave the zip code.
