Let me start by saying this: Mr. Baseball is a piece of cinematic mastery.
I don't know how you people managed to let me go this many years satisfying my appetite for below-average early-'90s sports films solely on multiple viewings of Necessary Roughness and White Men Can't Jump, but I've finally caught on and I'm not pleased that it took this long.
Sure, I was like everybody else back in 1992, itching to see the new Tom Selleck flick the minute it hit the big screen. But come on I was 11-years-old, I also had my mind blown by Fred Savage in The Wizard.
And yet somehow, I went more than half my life without revisiting the story of Jack Elliot, an aging slugger inexplicably dealt to the Japanese league, who learns first-hand what it means to be a really tall outsider.
Now having done that, I feel as if I'm seeing the whole game again for the first time.
Beyond the film's redeeming qualities of painfully obvious size-differential humor and a cameo from a young Frank Thomas, it can teach every baseball fan today something valuable about how both the sport and world are changing.
Apparently in 1992, the West was still operating under the assumption that Japanese people were complete idiots and that only three of several million could understand English. When Elliot's slamming Japan in his welcome press conference, his translator tidies up everything he says and miraculously, all of the reporters blindly buy every word of it.
Meanwhile, we're talking about a player that gets sent packing by the 1992 Yankees, and somehow he's in a position to liken Japan (and for that matter, Canada) to Cleveland.
But the irony is this: in the world of baseball as it stands there's been a bit of a role reversal and it's the U.S. that's benefiting most from the free baseball exchange. Sure, American players still go to Japan, but the days when an aging slugger would have been an exciting addition to a Japanese team have given way to rising concerns from Japan about their simple ability to hold on to talent.
They get players like Gabe Kapler and Kevin Millar (before Theo Epstein inevitably yanks them back to Boston), while Major League Baseball gets the likes of Ichiro Suzuki and Hideki Matsui. You know, franchise-altering talent types of players.
And yeah, that seems like a fair trade.
If anything, what we need now is a sequel: the story of a brilliant Japanese star that comes to play for the New York Yankees under the pressure of a multi-year contract worth several million dollars. Instead of Elliot trying to squeeze his massive feet into undersized flip-flops you'd have Tomiko slipping comfortably into his crisp complimentary Nike training shoes before not only beating off a throng of American reporters (who really wouldn't have a clue what he was talking about) and an even larger congregation of Japanese media.
Now that would be funny. You know, USA at the World Baseball Classic funny.
Hey, who ended up winning that thing, anyway?
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