Book Excerpt: Movies With Balls: The Greatest Sports Movies Of All-Time Analyzed And Illustrated

The following is an excerpt from Kyle Bandujo’s (host of Baseball America’s “From Phenom To The Farm” Podcast) upcoming book, “Movies With Balls: The Greatest Sports Movies of All Time Analyzed and Illustrated,” from Quirk Books and Penguin Random House, publishing on September 24, 2024. The book offers breakdowns, MVPs and deep dives into 26 of the best sports movies of all time, highlighted by visuals including tickets and play maps. We lead off with a classic in Ron Shelton’s “Bull Durham.”

Bull Durham

The Movie

You don’t have to be a former minor league baseball player to make a great baseball movie, but it sure as hell doesn’t hurt. In the 1988 classic baseball film Bull Durham, writer, director, and former Orioles farmhand Ron Shelton brought the bus leagues to the big screen. A season with the then-Class A Durham Bulls of the Carolina League served as the backdrop for the tale of an aging minor league catcher mentoring a naive young pitcher–and the woman between them.

There’s little doubt that Shelton’s baseball career breathed authenticity into the movie. The actors, led by Kevin Costner (who played the affable veteran backstop Crash Davis), spoke and carried themselves like real ballplayers. Watching decades later, you still feel like you’re inside a minor league dugout, actually witnessing a manager call his cowering team a bunch of lollygaggers while standing in the shower.

The Game

There’s an old baseball adage: you can’t score every inning if you don’t score in the first one, and Bull Durham puts up a crooked number with Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh’s (Tim Robbins) professional debut game to open the film. Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon) opens the film delivering a monologue about the Church of Baseball, then strolls into Durham Athletic Park to watch the professional debut of Durham’s $100,000 bonus baby and right-hand pitcher.

Bull Durham relies more on moments than full games, but its Nuke’s debut game which sets up our premise: Million-dollar arm, ten-cent head.

The Breakdown

At this early point in the film, Costner’s Davis hasn’t shown up yet—this game is the LaLoosh show. Fresh off inking a six-figure signing bonus (presumably with Atlanta, as Durham was a Braves farm club at the time), Nuke didn’t take his first start seriously. Robbins plays him perfectly–as a cheerful man-child walking through life without a care in the world because things always work out for him–and he doesn’t often think deeply enough to care anyways.

After eschewing his pre-game bullpen warm-up in favor of pre-game locker room coitus, he assures his less-than-amused manager that he’s good to go. It’s a mark of perfection from Shelton–one of the small aspects of authenticity peppered throughout the film highlighting its grasp of baseball. Of course Nuke thinks he’s good to go–he’s just spent the last four years of high school watching future accountants and salespeople cower when facing his heat.

To Nuke’s credit, folks still cower at his heat, even in pro ball. The problem is it’s not just the hitters. Fans, the broadcast team, and even mascots can become collateral damage with LaLoosh on the mound. It’s a wild pitch mashup, made even funnier by how Robbins throws a baseball. Costner looks like a seasoned pro, while Robbins throws as if someone asked a baby deer to paint the corners. In a movie littered with perfection, even the not-so-perfect Robbins seemed to work, well, perfectly. Of course, the young, eccentric guy who boinked a fan in the locker room pre-game would throw like a bit of a weirdo.

Nuke manages not to leave his fastball in a “piece of ass,” but he does leave it everywhere else in Durham Athletic Park. Eighteen walks and eighteen strikeouts later, Durham manager Joe Riggins (Trey Wilson) sits in his office, looking as if he’d just seen God. Although Nuke’s performance would’ve likely made real-life Durham management double their protective netting budget, LaLoosh was also mowing down hitters. Sitting down opposing batters with such force is essential–we know right away if Nuke can harness his stuff, he’s going to have the world on a string, but if he can’t, he’s going to break more ribs than a pork butcher.

The game itself isn’t crucial in the grand scheme of baseball—early-season A-ball games rarely are—but it’s a flawless jumping-off point for the movie. With little more than a handful of wild pitches, some apologetic cringing, and his manager’s post-game evaluation, we learn some essential details about Nuke:

His right arm is exceptional, potentially one of a kind. That his last five pitches were faster than the first five (especially considering the number of pitches thrown) is Herculean.

Any pitch delivered by that right arm could damage either property or person.

In generous terms, Nuke was kinda dumb–but just young guy dumb–not hopeless dumb. Annie later says he’s “not dim, just inexperienced.” Yep, young guy dumb.

It’s going to be a ton of fun watching this idiot try to bottle electricity.

Game MVP

It’s LaLoosh, and no other player even comes close. Robbins puts on a masterclass–from the get-go, Nuke is a man on an island, just a kid scared to death, hanging on only by the howitzer attached to his torso. His apologetic grimace after sailing another heater towards unsuspecting victims says far more about Nuke’s readiness for pro ball than any dialogue in the scene.

Honorable Mentions: Skip Riggins, Teddy the Radio Announcer, pre-game locker room coitus

Was He Good at His Job?: Joe “Skip” Riggins

Trey Wilson’s Joe “Skip” Riggins was an onscreen treasure. His classic exasperated rant on lollygagging lives on to this day and he was one of the great cigarette smokers in sports movie history. Just watch that guy drag a Marlboro, it’s flawless form.

However, when it came to managing the workload of the best arm he’d seen in thirty years, Riggins made some questionable choices. The 1980s were admittedly a different time when it came to pitch counts, and “innings limit” might as well have been considered a swear word. But even taking this into account, the workload endured by LaLoosh and his million-dollar arm during his debut would’ve had old-timers like Cy Young shaking their heads in disbelief.

His league records of 18 walks and strikeouts place LaLoosh at a minimum of 126 pitches per game (no MLB pitcher averaged more than 100.8 during the 2022 season). Conservatively estimating that even half of those at bats resulted in two additional pitches over the minimum bumps the total up to 162. It’s unlikely that LaLoosh only threw the six innings required to net the eighteen punchouts, so assuming that Skip generously motioned to the bullpen for the 9th and the additional two innings’ worth of outs averaged out at two pitches per plate appearance, LaLoosh sits at a tidy 174, at least. In a 2022 podcast appearance, Shelton estimated the total at over 175.

Why Riggins sent his organization’s prized investment out to throw his arm out is tough to square. Perhaps the excitement and awe from the zip of LaLoosh’s fastball had him in a daze. His voice describing Nuke’s arm to Crash post-game is filled with awe–maybe it was just tough to pull a man throwing lightning bolts off the mound.

At the end of the day, it’s a minor league manager’s job to help get a ballplayer ready for the big leagues. Which Riggins did. I guess you can’t argue with results.