Virtually every spring since 2016 I’ve written about a ritual that I call “my personal spring training.” Baseball’s regular season, of a sort, starts tomorrow with the March 18–19 two-game series in Tokyo between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago Cubs. The rest of the regular season begins on March 27. I’m just under the wire.

What is a personal spring training, you ask? Well, mine consists of reading a baseball book and re-watching Bull Durham. It is tough duty but sometimes a player’s got to do what they’ve got to do to get in shape for the long season ahead.

I’ve written about my love for the movie Bull Durham multiple times at MORE TO COME. On what was to be Opening Day in 2020, when the Washington Nationals were to celebrate their 2019 World Series Championship, I wrote a post entitled No Baseball Today. I quoted extensively from a smart piece by Washington Post writer Alyssa Rosenberg where she writes about “one of the greatest movies ever made about baseball, a brilliant romantic comedy and a film that stands as a rebuke to many of the false choices the entertainment industry now seems to take for granted.” She got most of that right, but Bull Durham is simply the best baseball movie ever. Here’s her synopsis:

“’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.”

Rosenberg also provides this analysis:

“One of the central insights of ‘Bull Durham’ is that baseball and sex and romance are of equal interest to men and women. This is not a movie where a woman blithely wanders into a male realm she knows nothing about and finds love, nor one where a hard-bitten professional man finds himself distracted by a woman who reminds him that domestic life has its charms. Instead, Annie and Crash are both deeply knowledgeable about baseball history and the technical aspects of the game, even if they disagree about the best way to improve Nuke’s performance. ‘Bull Durham’ is a love triangle, with Nuke and Crash competing for Annie’s attention, but it’s also a triangle built around mentorship, with Crash and Annie jostling for preeminence in Nuke’s journey to the big leagues.”

I wrote again in 2023 when I reviewed filmmaker Ron Shelton’s gem of a book The Church of Baseball: The Making of Bull Durham. Shelton, a former minor league baseball player turned writer and director, has a passion for this multi-faceted story that still shines through. 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 is worth knowing as well.

Here are two great clips, the first being “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” scene.

And then there is the mound visit that the studio “suits” wanted to cut. It became so iconic—with Larry’s “candlesticks always make a nice gift” line—that it made Joe Posnanski’s Why We Love Baseball.

Bringing up Posnanski takes me to the book I read for this year’s personal spring training. I went back to what was an instant classic, an intimate and very personal look at baseball history through the lives of the 100 greatest players of all time.

The Baseball 100 (2021) by Joe Posnanski—the self-described “writer of sports and other nonsense”—is characterized by the publisher as “a magnum opus…an audacious, singular, and masterly book that took a lifetime to write.” It is pure baseball bliss. Posnanski originally wrote this over a 100-day stretch for the web pages of The Athletic. But the compendium is much more satisfying. First, the rankings are important—and instantly give the reader a chance to argue with Joe, which he encourages. But they serve the larger purpose of providing this talented writer and lifelong fan with a chance to explore baseball’s rich, deep, diverse, and at times challenging history. A history that—like all history—is under construction.

For the past couple of months I’ve been re-reading chapters off and on before heading to bed. Truth in advertising, I did not go back and read every one of the 827 pages on what is, in some instances, my third pass through this work. But I did read enough to get my juices up for the coming season, and I finished it off by reading the chapters on each of his top 15 players.

15. Josh Gibson—the great Negro League catcher and slugger

14. Lou Gehrig—the Yankee ironman

13. Roger Clemons—the “son” part of one of many poignant father and son stories Joe includes in the book

12. Honus Wagner—the greatest and most beloved player of his day

11. Mickey Mantle—just the name is enough

10. Satchel Paige—the Negro League and MLB great who could put the ball wherever he wanted because “home plate don’t move”

9. Stan Musial—Stan the Man

8. Ty Cobb—the most dominant player of the Deadball era

7. Walter Johnson—the Big Train

6. Ted Williams—the greatest hitter ever, and the Ella Fitzgerald of profanity (you’ll have to read the book)

5. Oscar Charleston—baseball’s greatest forgotten player

4. Henry Aaron—Hammerin’ Hank, and to many the true home run king of baseball

3. Barry Bonds—the only player who got two profiles in the book, one for fans and one for critics, because “that’s just the deal” with Barry Lamar Bonds

2. Babe Ruth—the Babe will never die . . . nobody would ever argue that any other 1920s athlete is still the greatest ever

And #1—in Joe’s book and mine—is Willie Mays. “The greatest baseball player is the one who lifts you higher and makes you feel exactly like you did when you fell in love with this crazy game in the first place. Rest in Peace, the Say Hey Kid.

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Remembering John Feinstein

Finally, I want to take a couple of paragraphs to remember the great Washington sportswriter John Feinstein, who died on March 13th at the age of 69.

“Feinstein started his career in the 1970s at The Washington Post as a night police reporter before covering sports. He also contributed to NPR, ESPN, the Golf Channel and Sirius XM, and wrote more than 40 books on a variety of sports, in addition to novels for young readers. Most famously, Feinstein followed Indiana University’s basketball team for a season for his renowned 1986 book ‘A Season on the Brink.’”

Feinstein was not always great as a writer, but he was always certain about his opinions. He graced the pages of MORE TO COME on several occasions, most recently when I quoted his column about the egregious trade of Juan Soto by the tightwad owners of the Washington Nationals. He was spot on in calling out their love of money and disdain for the fans.

Feinstein’s father was the director of the Washington Opera, and I wrote about that part of his life in a 2021 piece on false patriotism. And in 2016 I reviewed his book Where Nobody Knows Your Name about minor league baseball.

But other sportswriters have the best vantage point to comment on Feinstein’s life and legacy. Posnanski, of course, has a great take in his appreciation.

“John did not perform his magic with flashy prose or poetic verve. He just reported the hell out of stuff. Over the years, he wrote about everything in sports — ‘A Good Walk Spoiled’ about golf, ‘Where Nobody Knows Your Name’ about minor league baseball, ‘A Civil War’ about the Army-Navy Game, ‘Forever’s Team’ about 1978 Duke basketball.

Oh how John loved his Duke basketball.

He was centerstage of his generation of sportswriters, the generation I idolized, those sportswriters who wrote about every sport and knew everybody and, yes, just reported the hell out of things.” 

My good friend Ed Quattlebaum sent me part of Dan Shaughnessy’s tribute from the Boston Globe. It is classic Feinstein.

“Feinstein was a ferocious Washington Post reporter who authored more than 40 books, 23 of which became New York Times bestsellers, including the groundbreaking ‘A Season on the Brink,’ the story of the 1985-86 season with Bobby Knight’s Indiana Hoosiers. Knight was unhappy with Feinstein’s No. 1 bestseller and called Feinstein ‘a whore and a pimp.’ Never one to back down, Feinstein said, ‘I wish he’d make up his mind so I’d know how to dress.’”

Rest in peace, John Feinstein.

Let’s play ball!

More to come . . .

DJB