My personal spring training regimen consists of reading a baseball book and watching Bull Durham. After the season is over, I’ll watch the movie again, to help put what’s just ended in perspective.

You can never have too much of a classic.

Bull Durham is not only the best baseball movie ever but also the best sports movie ever. It’s not even close. Alyssa Rosenberg‘s review helpfully summarizes the plot while noting that Bull Durham is well deserving of the moniker of a film classic.

“Bull Durham” takes place over a single summer, or more precisely, over a season for the Durham Bulls minor league baseball team. It concerns a love triangle among the team’s biggest fan and part-time English professor Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon), rookie pitcher Ebby Calvin LaLoosh (Tim Robbins) and aging catcher Crash Davis (Kevin Costner), assigned to prepare LaLoosh for the majors. Annie, who takes a new player as a lover each summer, identifies the two as “the most promising prospects of the season so far.” And though she ends up with LaLoosh, whom she nicknames “Nuke,” when Crash explains that “after 12 years in the minor leagues, I don’t try out,” she can’t get the older man out of her head — not least because he sees baseball the same way she does: as the encapsulation of a certain American idea and a particular approach to life.

When a friend recommended a new book by the writer and director of the movie, I had it in my hands within days.

The Church of Baseball: The Making of Bull Durham (2022) by Ron Shelton is a gem on multiple levels. Shelton, a former minor league baseball player turned writer and director, has a passion for this multi-faceted story that still shines through 35 years after the film was released. And the tale of how Shelton — along with Kevin Costner and Susan Sarandon — pursued every angle to make this film in spite of great odds and with challenges arising around every corner, is worth knowing as well.

Let’s begin with the fact that no one wanted to finance a movie about minor league baseball from a first-time director.

Shelton grew up in an evangelical tradition that frowned on movies since they would probably lead to sex. And like many a young person, the lure of forbidden fruit was too strong to resist. After scratching his itch to play professional baseball, Shelton goes to school and ends up in LA searching for a job making movies. He can’t, however, get this baseball story out of his head.

Shelton notes that it has been said that directing is “fifty percent the cast and fifty percent the script.” The book begins by showing us how each was constructed, sometimes against significant pushback from the studio that eventually agreed to finance the project.

Early on he tells how he found the perfect names for the three main characters. Lawrence “Crash” Davis was a real person who once led the Carolina League in doubles. Shelton assumed he was dead. (He wasn’t.) Annie Savoy is a composite of a number of women from his past. Annie is the name baseball players give to female groupies and Savoy came from a matchbook cover, to provide a balance of “big city sophistication” with the first name’s “girl-next-door” vibe. And a waiter at a hotel dining room in Columbia, South Carolina, introduced himself as “Ebby Calvin LaRoosh, but you can call me ‘Nuke'”. LaRoosh became LaLoosh and the rest is history.

One sees Shelton’s life’s trajectory in Annie’s opening monologue, a script he began while driving in his car in the backroads of North Carolina.

I believe in the Church of Baseball.

I’ve worshipped all the major religions and most of the minor ones. I’ve worshipped Buddha, Allah, Vishnu, Siva, trees, mushrooms, and Isadora Duncan. I know things . . .

A few lines later Annie says,

I prefer metaphysics to theology. You see, there’s no guilt in baseball and it’s never boring, which makes it like sex . . . Making love is like hitting a baseball. You gotta relax and concentrate.

Over the course of the book’s first 100 pages we learn how Shelton conceived and wrote the story. Then he begins sharing the draft script, and Kevin Costner — whose leading-man potential was being questioned by some in the studio — quickly became a fan and wanted to play Crash. The story of how the two of them shopped the project to studio-after-studio shows both Shelton’s and Crash’s perseverance. Susan Sarandon is another early believer, but the studio feels she is already past her prime. She finally pays her own way to Los Angeles from Italy to audition, where she nails the part and makes a stop by the studio to show all the “suits” how fabulous she looks. Tim Robbins is the hardest sell of all, as the studio wanted someone else in the role and kept second-guessing Shelton’s casting decision well into filming.

The chemistry between the three leads takes the film to another level. We see that in the scene where Annie — pissed that Crash has told Nuke he should continue his abstinence from sex while on a winning streak — barges into his boarding house to confront him, still in the skirt and heels she wore to seduce Nuke a few minutes earlier.

Crash challenges her. “Who dresses you? I mean, isn’t this a little excessive for the Carolina League?”

ANNIE:

“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” — William Blake.

CRASH:

William Blake?

ANNIE:

William Blake!

If you like books about making things, then The Church of Baseball is also for you. In development, preproduction, production, and postproduction Shelton takes us through the countless decisions needed to shape this project. For instance, the “suits” wanted to cut the mound visit, which became so iconic — with Larry’s “candlesticks always make a nice gift” line — that it made Joe Posnanski’s Why We Love Baseball.

After finishing The Church of Baseball, I watched the movie once more. Thanks to Shelton’s funny and insightful book with its pitch-perfect tone, I saw it again but with fresh eyes.

Highly recommended.

More to come . . .

DJB

The Weekly Reader links to the works of other writers I’ve enjoyed.