The Scout
I’d read a number of reviews prior to seeing this movie which suggested that it suffers from a split personality — the first half is a genial, Albert-Brooks-flavored baseball movie, while the second half is a trite object lesson on Learning What’s Really Important. This isn’t an inaccurate assessment, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg. The two types of plot can co-exist, and have, many times. That isn’t the problem here. The problem here is that the movie fails at both.
The general critical concensus seemed to be that the serious bits didn’t belong in a baseball movie, but my problem with them is that we didn’t see the serious bits, really; Dr. Aaron tells us the serious bits, most of which we gleaned from Steve Nebraska’s first session with her, but the audience is expecting something more serious, and is also expecting the revelation to come in some form other than exposition that isn’t dressed up in the slightest and doesn’t actually tell us anything. If we don’t know exactly what happened, why he’s so dissociative about certain subjects, why bother? Why not just make him a weirdo, and make Al Percolo afraid that he’s another Lacy who’s going to flake and re-ruin Percolo’s career? And Albert Brooks is one of my favorites, but he really isn’t set up for that sort of acting; he plays the more emotional scenes in his customary style, which undercuts any intended tear-jerking.
But more irritating than that, to me, is the outright up-fucking of baseball basics in the last ten minutes. The Scout is a movie that knows its baseball; it features Keith Hernandez and Bret Saberhagen, among others, playing themselves. Steve Nebraska’s circumstances and his meteoric rise are not what I would call plausible, but the movie seems to know enough about the way baseball is played, and run, that I suspended my disbelief.
The final sequence, however, in addition to overselling the happy ending it purports to contain, is riddled with errors — the kind a baseball fan isn’t going to be able to ignore, and the problem with that is that I don’t think I know who else would want to see this movie. Again, I like Brooks a lot, so I’d have seen it anyway regardless of the sport, but it’s a baseball movie. It needs to get certain things right, especially if it wants us to believe that a guy who has never pitched in the majors before can retire 27 straight batters on 81 consecutive strikes. This is what I meant by overselling the happy ending, but at the same time, it doesn’t sell it at all, because:
1. Steve Nebraska comes to bat. Yes, I know, he’s a great pitcher AND a great hitter. Yes, I know, they want to show him pitching in Yankee Stadium, in Yankee home pinstripes. But if you do that, you can’t show him batting, because it’s the AL park and the pitcher won’t come to the plate. If he IS going to bat, you need to mention this as an unusual circumstance.
2. The 27th and last player to face Nebraska in his uber-perfect game? Ozzie Smith. Um, no. This implies that he’s batting ninth. If pitchers do bat in this game, we can assume that the Cardinal pitcher is not a Nebraskan wunderkind, so he’s batting ninth, not Ozzie, who…wouldn’t bat ninth anyway. He was a top-of-the-order guy; you don’t bury that kind of speed at the bottom of the line-up. I mean…this is not arcane shit here. That entire last sequence should have been cut, because it served no plot purpose, served no character purpose, furnished an ending a third-grader would dismiss as too unsophisticatedly unrealistic, and willfully ignored baseball fundamentals.
I don’t ask for stark realism in baseball movies — if it’s realism I want, I’ll just watch a real game — but my issue here isn’t just with the baseball aspect. If you expect your audience to take a leap of faith with you on certain unrealistic/implausible aspects of your story, you have to reward that faith by getting everything else correct that you can. I know they had certain things they wanted to do with that last scene, but those things didn’t need doing in the first place, much less in a way that’s going to yank every viewer with even a passing knowledge of baseball out of the scene.
In short: bah.
Tags: movies
Oh good-I thought i was the only one bothered by this stuff. Stabitty stab stab-I mean-when he was batting that was all I could think about. Bah.
That sounds like a movie aimed at someone who doesn’t know anything about sports. Before I finally figured out, at the age of twenty, that baseball was not boring and stupid, I totally would have bought that sequence of events.
On the other hand, I wouldn’t have been watching it in the first place, because I hated Inspirational Sports Movies with a passion. So either way, the movie fails with me.
Hee – “Inspirational Sports Movies”. I must admit that in my tween/early-teen years, I was quite taken by the Ducks trilogy (and had a major crush on Josh Jackson pre-DC), “Cool Runnings” (your standard Disney fare, really), and in terms of baseball flicks, I remember getting “Rookie of the Year” from the videostore, as well as “Little Big League” (with Scott “Luke” Patterson).
I was a huge sports fan, and we played softball in primary school and highschool (as part of interschool comps), but I had bigger plans for myself: to play ice-hockey. Yeees…I think I was just a little TOO fascinated by The Mighty Ducks.
I’m as bothered by this stuff in sports movies as anyone, but the two things you mention here are actually ok with me. Late in his career, Ozzie Smith batted 8th or 9th quite a few times, and as you mentioned, it’s an American League park so there’s no pitcher/pinch-hitter to hit last.
Also, since Steve Nebraska is such a great hitter, it makes sense that the Yankees manager would let him hit and use the DH to hit for some other weak hitter (’94? Pat Kelly maybe?). It’s something that probably should have been mentioned but is completely realistic (relatively speaking).
I certainly agree with your overall opinion of the movie, however. The only reason I’ve seen it more than once is that the opening scene of Brooks pulling up to Ralph’s King Size Motel was filmed 5 minutes from my house.
All I really remember about this movie is Brendan Fraser singing “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” on the plane. My brothers were 8 and 10 when we rented this, and they cracked each other up with that for months afterwards.
I do remember one of my brothers pointing out during the movie that if Nebraska was both a great pitcher and hitter it seemed dumb that he’d sign with an AL team. But the end obviously didn’t make much of an impression since Ozzie was our favorite player growing up and I completely forgot he was in the movie until you mentioned it.
Hmm I’m pretty sure a DH can only hit for the pitcher.
Don’t get me started on how offensive this movie is to Tony Bennett fans.
As much as I like to look at Brendan Fraser in his prime, I jettisoned this one from my collection, as just too irritating.
I’m writing something in which I mention “The Scout,” which I haven’t seen, and I needed confirmation independent of Wikipedia that Ozzie Smith was the final out of the perfect game; thanks for providing that. As for the commenter who mentioned that Ozzie Smith hit 8th and/or 9th late in his career, a quick look at the box scores from the 1996 NLCS pretty much just shows him batting leadoff. Not that that proves he didn’t occasionally hit 8th or 9th, but, still.