‘For Love of the Game’ With Bill Simmons and Mallory Rubin
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Back in 2019, we did a special movie series for Luminary because we were celebrating the 20th anniversary of 1999, a really great movie year. And we did a bunch of podcasts, rewatchables podcasts about that year with a couple of special categories. One of them was For Love of the Game. I did it with Mallory Rubin. I kind of love this movie, even though it's a flawed rewatchable, which we dive into on the podcast. But we figured since Kevin Costner is having a rough summer,

you know, we'll hearken back to one of the movies that made him the sports movie goat. So this is for love of the game. We taped it in 2019. It's a really good pod. I got to say it's a good one. Me and Mallory talking Costner could do it, could do basically his whole movieography with her. Anyway, for love of the game is next. Here we go. Universal pictures presents.

I really have wanted to do this movie for a long time, For Love and the Game. It is the most flawed sports movie probably ever. Yeah.

Has 50 minutes of maybe the best baseball movie ever. Okay. And it's also being suffocated to death by a terrible rom-com. One of the worst love stories ever told. It's crammed down your throat. It's way too long. It didn't make sense at the time. And yet, it is a classic rewatchable because when you're flipping channels and you can go, oh, I'll just watch the first inning. Right. Oh, here's the eighth inning. Oh, the ending. Yeah.

And you can kind of navigate around all the other stuff. My first question, should they just show this on cable and cut out all of the Kelly Preston scenes so she wouldn't exist? It's just a baseball movie. There's no love story at all. If there's no Jane, do we still get Heather?

The masseuse? No, the child. Oh. I assume we'd get the masseuse no matter what. Sorry, you might know her as Freedom. Freedom? Is that her name? Her fake name. She's now at the Orchard Spa. I have a... Can't wait to talk about Bob Kraft 75 times during this podcast. Let's do it. I do think that, inarguably and irrefutably, Kelly Preston is the worst part of the movie. Oh my God, she's so bad.

But I don't know if you have a movie without the bad part of the movie. Like, I think that even though the baseball stuff is really good and the love story is somewhere between hard to watch and actively repellent, depending on which moment you're consuming, it all feels...

the seams on the baseball. Like, it wouldn't hold together somehow without it. Like, you need every one of those stitches to maintain the structural integrity of the original design. You could maybe take out 20 minutes of Kelly Preston? You could take out a solid, like, 40. Yeah.

I think that's all there was. I wish that were true. This movie's like two hours and 15 minutes. It's really long. It's unbelievable. It's really long. And somehow there's not enough baseball, and you could have actually added more baseball and taken out the color presence. She's really bad. Not to spoil casting what-ifs, but...

Allegedly, this was supposed to be a net betting and she canceled. And I do think... That's a tough alternate history to think about. It's really brutal. It's like finding out Brady was supposed to be the QB and instead it was Marcus Mariota. Oh my God. This was Costner's third baseball movie. That's right. It's a trilogy even.

I have a feeling he, in a weird way, regards this with the same love and respect as he did with the other two because when I did the podcast with him, he really threw himself all into this. He's in his mid-40s at this point. He was pitching day after day after day after day. He told a great story on my podcast about needing a little help from the Yankees trainer. And then the last day—we're going to run that story at the end of this podcast—the last day—

When he really had this long shoot and he couldn't feel his shoulder anymore. And he's like, can you give me this stuff you've never given me before? Right. The stuff you were afraid to give me. And the guy's like, sure. You're going to growl at some people. And he did, but he got through it. Hilariously, this was 1999 during like the height of the steroids era. When the Yankees had, I think Clemens was on there at that point, but had a whole bunch of suspects. So anyway, yeah.

heroic performance by him. It is. And I'm sure that you're right and that the movie is very important to him. I think that's clear not only in watching the film, but in all of the stories that you hear around it. Field of Dreams and Bull Durham are two of the

absolute best and most important sports movies of all time. Yeah. Bull Durham is my second favorite movie of all time, period. They're just in a different class. And that actually is a little bit hard to forget as a viewer. Like you bring your Kevin Costner baseball movie history with you to this experience. Now,

I really like the Costner baseball ease of this film. Like, I would happily watch the five-hour extended cut of him just changing into his uniform in the locker room and the infamous full frontal shower scene that I expect we'll be talking about at length. Well, didn't you believe that, though? Because when we do half-assed internet research, that seemed like 20% assed internet research.

I don't know. I'm ready to discuss that. I have thoughts. You have thoughts? Well, there are quotes from a studio executive. He was a legendary... He was legendarily healthy. That's right. How did we get here so soon? Carrying his own Louisville slugger.

Spy Magazine had a man at his best photo spread with a whole bunch of pictures of, it was like Jimmy Stewart and Koster, of them in slacks and things popping. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, do you think that's why he wanted the photo spread? Or not the photo spread, the uncut scene in there? Maybe so. Did he get it out? He's proud. Let that horse out of the barn? Yeah.

The steeple of Billy Chappell's church, you know? I loved Costner in this movie and I love Billy Chappell. And what's funny is he actually was really criticized in this movie. He got a Golden Raspberry Award. A Razzie. He got a worst actor. It's tough. How does that not go to Kelly Preston? Okay, I have a theory about this. I think that that is less about this movie in particular and more about the moment in time for Kevin Costner when Message in a Bottle also existed. Oh, okay.

That's a tough movie. So it's the, the, the wrong. Wait, you're anti-Message in a Bottle? One of my least favorite movies of all time. Oh, my, my wife loves that movie. Now, to be fair to the movie and to Carrie, who I admire and respect, um,

I have not seen that movie since I saw it in the theaters when it first came out. So I'd happily revisit it. When you were like 14? Yeah. Well, as you know, I'm a long time Kevin Costner admirer. 13. Would have been 13. Yeah. I've studied his career closely for quite some time. Maybe I'd feel differently about Message in a Bottle now, but I think most people hated that movie. And the fact that these came out so close together feels like it was a part of assessing his acting at the time. It was the tail end of the Costner run. He...

Was the biggest star in the world for a couple years there. Waterworld happened. Big comeback with Tin Cup. Late 90s, he's moving into close toward late 40s. Age 50s looming around the corner. It becomes harder and harder to make a movie like this where you're a professional athlete. He's even probably three, four years too old. He's playing a guy who's 40 in this movie. Right.

He looks like he's 45, 46, but it doesn't matter because he's slinging heat. He said he threw like 85 on my podcast. That's incredible. And I actually believe it. That's amazing. And he had a couple different arm angles. Like he was over the top. He was doing a little side-armed. He was throwing curves. When he buckles Sam Tuttle's knees on the strikeout-looking pitch, the arm action on that throw is super...

so fun to watch as an actual baseball fan thinking about how a pitcher changes the release point, changes the angle, what the spin is, especially when he knows it's going to hurt to do it. I did find myself thinking a lot about his repertoire and how that would have changed maybe after

The hand injury, which I assume that the bulk of this podcast will be about sawing his hand open and the full frontal scene we didn't get. But there's one moment when he's throwing a fastball, you can see the scoreboard in the back, you can catch the velocity, it's 89. And this is post-injury, post-hand injury, and we know he's also got a nailing shoulder, he's at the end.

But we also know that he's saying to Gus, I'm going to throw harder here than I've thrown in quite some time. So presumably he's been giving... 89 is probably on the high point of what his velocity would have been in that season. So you assume he's throwing like 87? Well, they showed his stats. He'd thrown over 200 innings. The stats are horrible out here. 111 strikeouts and 98 walks. The strikeout-to-walk ratio is...

I don't even know what current pitcher has that. Very concerning. Somehow his ERA was under four. You would have thought during the steroid era, that's like a six ERA. I found myself wondering, did he change? Was he a four-seamer pitcher before? Did he change to a two-seamer when he lost some of the heat? Was he always a fastball, curveball guy? Did he have a slider at some other point? Did he have a cutter? I wanted to know more about what he threw and how he threw when he was great. Well, I'm...

My assumption is he's basically a little Jack Morris-ish.

Because they say he starts game one of the 84 World Series. That's what Jack Morris started. He's at the tail end of his career. So it's almost like, what if Jack Morris had just stayed on the Tigers? And had been a little better. And been better. Because we hear... Jack Morris crossed with Greg Maddox, maybe. I was going to say Tom Clavin. Yeah. But Maddox would be a perfect alt there, too. Because I think the overall stat line for his career to justify the... Like, he's a surefire Hall of Famer. He's a shoo-in for Cooperstown framing that we get. Yeah.

you probably at that point in baseball history, 99, he's got to be at 300 wins, right? Well, he says he's on a date with Kelly Preston. And he says five years earlier and he said he's already lost 141, which is a lot. So then you add the other five seasons, 134. So he's,

close to 200 losses, which means if he was a good pitcher, he'd have to be close to 300. I feel like Vince Cully would have said that during the narration, though. Maybe. 300-game winner, Billy Chappell. He says that he's pitched 4,100 career innings. Yeah, so how many games was that? We're also in Glavinish territory there. So let's say he does six...

Six innings per start, 41. So that's like 650 starts. But even in this season, the bad season when he doesn't have it anymore, he's got before entering this game, so before he throws a perfect game, which is obviously a complete game, he's got two complete games on the resume already. I think he's going deeper than six innings in most of his starts. Right. Well, he said 30 starts, 211 innings. That's actually pretty good. He's going seven innings every start. Yeah, so Glavin...

4,413 innings. Oh, that's a lot. 203 losses, 305 wins. I think this is a good comp. Somewhere between Jack Morris, Tom Glavin. So it's Jack Morris crossed with Tom Glavin, but with an anaconda in his pants. That's our comp. I love it. And they look like a very handsome movie actor. He looks great. Is it?

I'll save that for nitpicks about whether he needed to try this hard to find a girlfriend. Billy Chappell, one of the most famous pictures of his era. I'm eager to discuss this. Stopping on the side of the road to pick up blondes, broken down cars. One of my unanswerable questions is how many women has Billy Chappell slept with? So I look forward to discussing this with you. Okay, great. We should say directed by Sam Raimi. Yep.

This movie has a really good pedigree, which I think is why people were disappointed. It had a good director. It had a good cast. Costner, baseball, Yankee Stadium, Vin Scully. There's a lot of things going on. $46 million it made on a $50 million budget. Roger E. Rick gave it one and a half stars. And he said, quote, it's the most lugubrious and soppy love story in many a moon. Of course, Craig, producer Craig loved it. Loved it. Maybe it's the fact that I just watched Never Been Kissed. But yeah, I did enjoy this movie. That's true. We...

Whatever movie he watched next after Never Been Kissed is going to be great. Craig's a little lugubrious. I haven't heard that word in like 10 years. That's a good word. The kicker to the Roger Ebert review on this movie is an all-timer. Can I read it aloud to you? The ending is routine.

This line is amazing. No, wait. He asked her. Okay.

This is backwards. It's really, she asked him this, but he asks her, what if my face was all scraped off? Basically, this figure had no arms and legs and no bracket. Something else can't read my hand. He wrote that in a review.

Would you still love me? And she replies, no, but we could still be friends. So again, he has that reverse. But still, I mean, that is just iconic. He hated this movie. That scene he mentioned is one of the worst montage scenes in the history of movies. It's rough. It's a four-minute, we're falling in love, we're spilling our feelings to one another, and it just is... It's rough. An atrocity. It's really rough. I want to get to the categories because I think we can cover a lot of the movies through the categories. But I will say...

I don't remember a movie quite like this movie where the lows are like comically really horribly low. And the highs are pretty great. Like there's a couple moments in here that are among the best sports movie moments of any sports movie. I really believe that. Yeah. And they're all little buried like little Easter eggs. Right.

in a bunch of shit. And I think that's why I'm so fascinated with this movie and I keep rewatching it over and over again. Like, the Mickey Hart scene when he saves the no-hitter is fucking a chill scene every time. I've seen it like 90 times. It's awesome. It's great. And yet, five minutes later, there's Kelly Preston batting her eyelashes over dinner asking what he's feeling. Yeah. It's so weird. It's so weird.

In that sense, it does sort of reflect the experience of being a sports fan, I guess. Like, it's very much anchored in extremes. And sometimes you're going to really loathe what you're forced to suffer through. Yeah. But it's going to feel like it's worth it for the moment when it all clicks. And I kind of like that aspect of it. Though, again, I don't really think that's the intention of it. I just think that's the very charitable read that you can choose to have if it's a movie that you enjoy returning to. Yeah.

It is, like you were saying before, though, a prime candidate for a re-edit. Because even if you don't change the actual structure of the movie, and I think that the structure of the movie, despite the flaws of the love story, is really smart. If you just recalibrate it, and also if you recast it, and you change a little bit of the dialogue, you could have an incredibly compelling movie. Because the basic ingredients, the basic recipe, which is...

Sports story specifically, baseball story, veteran facing his own mortality through the lens of the end of his career and sex and love as the catalyst that unlocks not only how he processes his career, but what the purpose of any of it really is and what the nature of achievement and human connection is. That's Bull Durham. Yeah. It's all there. It's kind of the Bull Durham sequel. Yeah. It's just they got it like four degrees wrong.

Well, all the ingredients are there. After the perfect game and he's back in his hotel room and he calls and she doesn't answer and just starts crying. It's a pretty moving scene. Yeah. And the movie should have ended there. And instead he goes to the airport and it goes on for another five minutes and it's excruciating. As we've talked about when we discussed The Natural and Field of Dreams and as I look forward to discussing with you one day when we finally do Bull Durham, the key to a great baseball movie is the poetry and the literary flair that's injected into every second of it. This movie just doesn't have enough of that.

Because it's a rom-com ultimately. But a rom-com that inexplicably has some of the best baseball footage ever. I mean, they really like, they nail it. They nail the Vin Scully part. The Vin stuff is incredible. They nail the crowd. They nail the realism of him. John C. Reilly as the catcher is maybe a little shaky, but we'll get to that. This episode is supported by State Farm. Think about your first reaction after you have an accident. What do you do? You scream, oh no, or man, why did this happen? On the flip side-

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The first inning's just really good when he goes out there and goes through those first three, and then Sam Tuttle comes up, and he's got the backstory with him, and Sam Tuttle moves in on him, and he throws at him. It's just from when he's warming up, and the guy's like, I want to bench Gus, play the other guy. He's like, no, it's just me and Gus today. All the way through, that's just a really strong 10 minutes. Me and Gus. Nobody else. I hope you hear me. Billy, you tell me how to run this team? No! No!

But today, it's me and Gus. I never ask you any other time, okay? Good. Glad you agree. Can't argue about this right now. Gotta warm up. Some great J.K. Simmons, Manager Perry action in this movie. Oh, yeah. Phenomenal mustache. Tiger's fan in real life. That's right. Yeah. What I love so much about that sequence and really all of the baseball action in the movie, it is...

brilliant giving us direct access to his stream of conscious. Yeah. Which I should say, I've not read the book. This is based on a novel. But as I understand it, that's how the novel is structured. Very much stream of conscious. Now, I don't know if that means it's like Finnegan's Wake, but baseball, or if it's just that we get a lot of access to what's going through Billy's mind at a given moment in time. But knowing and

And seeing what he's thinking, what he's feeling, what he wants the other player to know, what he wants to withhold from his opponent is thrilling. Like the chess game that baseball fans always like to think about. And you talk about it a lot with like a manager and how you're going to manage the game. But just to see what the pitcher is processing and how he's thinking in the moments where it's, you know, don't throw, think. That stuff comes later, obviously. And then you think of like a corollary where, you know,

Crash is going to say to Nuke and Bull Durham, you know, don't. It's the opposite, right? And like the subtleties of when as a baseball player you need to shift into a certain gear. I just love having direct access to that stuff. It's awesome. The Tuttle Eye bat is probably the best example of it. And then you get the other side of it with the Birch Hat bats because that's the one he admires and has real affection for. It's like, I'm going to miss you most of all, Scarecrow. Yeah. The Tuttle stuff, like what a great reason not to be a Yankee. Whatever that line is. I want to talk about him later.

So two things shouldn't have worked and worked anyway. One is that he's talking to himself on the mound the whole time, which nobody would ever do. I love it. And it works perfectly. And then the other thing is, if this was in the wrong hands, and I think Costner probably had a big part of it, but this also could have gone badly just the things he was saying to himself. Right. And it all sounds realistic and you feel like you're in there with Greg Maddux. That first scene's good. They did a really nice job with...

Yankee Stadium making it seem like it was full and just kind of the the magistrate of that stadium I don't think the new ones is good personally but yeah no I agree with that you definitely feel like you're in a cathedral and of course you get the VIN line at the end to that effect I the other thing that I like about getting to hear Billy Chappell talk as he's pitching is that

On the one hand, the movie is anchored around flashbacks. So you're getting his life story, but you're getting the wrong parts of it. So hearing the things that he says as he's pitching, that's how you get the baseball history.

Like that's how you learn about these relationships that frankly, I think we all would have rather spent time actually seeing unfold. Like why are he and Birch so close? What's the heart of that bond in that relationship? It was one minute where he's moving out and they just cut away. I'm not going to carry any books. Like where are the pillows? So I like that we got a little bit of that in that fashion, but I wanted more of that. Second most rewatchable scene.

The masseuse sequence is incredible. Literally one of the best things ever put to film. It's so good. It's, they must've cut it out, but if you see the movie enough times, she starts working on his left leg and he kind of looks down and it's like, oh, this is happening. I mean, and then the next scene is the doorbell rings. He goes down.

Kelly Preston. His response is great. Yeah. I just want you to know whatever happens the next five minutes that my heart left when I saw you. It left in my chest, much like my boner left off the massage table.

A mere hours ago. And then that girl, she comes down. She's on the second floor. The masseuse. So funny. Wearing a towel. Needs a hair dryer. She's in the like cut off t-shirt and her underwear. And she's got wet hair because she's just showered. It's pitch perfect. And he's in those hysterical pajama pants. That scene is on my list too. The way that she's like, I haven't seen you in a little while. Right? So we know right away they have history.

And then this is, of course, right on the tail end of Billy inviting Jane down. Yeah. And she rejects the offer before eventually showing up. So he immediately, his instant move is to go fuck someone else. Like, instant. No time wasted. He's a professional baseball star. I love it. Feels very true to life. Yeah. Also true to life that he would have a masseuse in Florida that's like kind of his go-to. Absolutely. And the second, the second that...

He stretches out on the table and she comes in. She grabs a little lube, a little ointment, a little massage ointment and just immediately starts working her way up the leg. Like there's no subtlety about what's happening. But the cut from that shot of her hands moving up his leg to the close up of his face with his arms behind his head. And he's just like, yeah.

Yeah. Well, obviously he's fabulous. The happy ending and the massages. You can either get it over with the beginning and then enjoy the massage. It's a happy beginning. Or save it at the end. He's a happy beginning guy. Billy Chappell. That was the original title for the movie. Amazing. Another rewatchable scene. Notice Kelly Preston not in any of the rewatchable scenes so far. Billy realizing he has a perfect game is fucking great. You just throw whatever you got. Whatever's left.

The boys are all here for you. We'll back you up. We'll be there. Because, Billy, we don't stink right now. We're the best team in baseball right now, right this minute, because of you. You're the reason. We're not going to screw that up. We're going to be awesome for you right now. Just throw. That's a good one. Yeah. And he looks at the scoreboard and he stops. And then Gus comes out. And this John C. Reilly is really only really good scene in the movie. It's complicated for him in this movie. And he was also in Never Been Kissed, which...

An absolutely historically bad performance by a great actor. He's not much better in this, but that scene's really good. The, we don't stink right now. We're going to be awesome for you. It's a nice little bit. It's a little over the top, but it's good. My only thing with that is...

I know that the premise of the movie is how distracted Billy is as he'll go on to say to Jane at the airport, this life achievement is unfolding and he's just thinking about her. You just think a great athlete would know he had a perfect game going. Yeah, I think he'd know. He's 18 years into his major league pitching career. As we hear from Vin, he's won every award. We can assume he's a Cy Young winner based on that. He's going to be in the Hall of Fame. I think you know that maybe the one thing you haven't done is this.

And I also think you realize, though there are a couple moments between innings where he pulls his cap down over his eyes and appears to be taking a mid-inning nap. Maybe he's just a little out of it, but no one's sitting near him. No one's sitting near him. They've moved away from him, as is a standard baseball practice when a perfect game or even a no-hitter is unfolding. He would realize that his teammates had shifted into that gear. I'm not totally against it. It's fine. I think he...

You're really into it and you just kind of don't realize. Okay. Do I think it would have actually happened? No. Sure. He's contemplating his existence. I think they needed to do it for that scene. I actually thought it was more unrealistic that J.K. Simmons comes out after he throws a couple balls, after he realizes he has the perfect aim, and he warms the guys up. Yes. And then he's like, I need this game, Billy. It's like, you're 64 and 97. I know.

You definitely don't need this game. Billy Chapo has a perfect game going right now. What are you doing? That was absurd. That's absurd. Even before the game even starts, when Billy's warming up and his manager tells him that he's going to play a different catcher. I had that for a nitpick, yeah. This is maybe his last game ever as a Tiger? He needs the at-bats. He needs to up the likelihood of getting one single in the game from your backup catcher. Are you kidding me? That was bad.

The next rewatchable scene, the I Love You, Mickey Hart. I love you, Mickey Hart! So I've tweeted about this movie a couple times over the years when it's on, and I'm always surprised how many people love this movie.

They could have done a better job with the Mickey Hart catch. It still really works well. Like, it's funny. It's not like he has, like, a hugely important role. No. But you would have—I would have put, like, the best athlete possible to really make, like, a great catch. Yeah. And it's kind of like he runs up almost like the guy in the naked gun when his head's about to go over the wall. He just kind of stumbles over and jumps up. But that whole scene's great. The tip to the cap and how they set it up earlier where—

Billy gave him the whatever and it all came around. And then J.K. Simmons, I love you, Mickey Hearn!

Just really great chill scene. Yeah, I love that. And I really love the prior scene that builds up to it. The obvious Jose Canseco homage with the ball hitting Mickey on the head in the first place and then bouncing into the stands. There's no wall that's that size at Fenway. No wall that size at Fenway, right? It's bothered me for 20 years. Yes. There's no part of Fenway that has that wall. The locker room conversation between...

and Mickey after that. Don't let them make a joke of you. Don't help them make a joke of you. That's a great moment. And I think that, again, because we're missing a lot of Billy's specific baseball history, something like that is really important because it shows you why he's a good teammate. It shows you why people root for him and why someone like Gus would be tethered to him for that long or why someone like Birch would have this bond with him where they're still going golfing together even though they're not on the same team and they're helping each other move and all this stuff. Like,

He is the kind of guy who's going to make you feel like you're worth believing in. Guess that looked pretty funny out there today, huh? Probably end up on ESPN or something. A lot of shit ends up on ESPN. I don't think it's very funny, Mick. I'm calling Mr. Chappell. There's a bunch of cameras out there right now waiting to make a joke of this, Mick. So you can either stop, give them the sound bite, do the dance. You can hold your head up and walk by. And the next time we're in Boston, we'll go out there and work the wall together. Don't help make a joke out of you.

By the way, that should have been the movie. Yeah. All that stuff was the movie. And the fact that Mickey Hart, they set it up earlier where he strikes out in three pitches, looks terrible. And he's clearly the dude who had the ball bounce over his head and he hasn't really made it. Probably had like a Byron Buxton type of five-to-a-prospect kind of guy who never panned out. So you drafted him five years in a row. I probably did. I probably drafted him. But maybe that catch turns his career around. Leaves the possibility. Next rewatchable scene.

I really love the Mickey Hart scene. The signing the baseball between the eighth and ninth innings. It's great. The whole setup of it. They really let it breathe. I love when he signs it. We don't know what he said. The guy starts to walk away and he kind of stops and does the turn. It's really nicely done. Yeah. Brings it up to the owner's box.

Perfect writing. The owner said, all really good. Tell them I'm through. And then that leads to them running out for the ninth inning. And J.K. Simmons going, Jesus Christ. Just a really good Jesus Christ for him. And Vin Scully doing his old Vin Scully thing. The best. We'll get to him. But that whole sequence, really nice. The ninth inning, great. Yes. Can wreck it.

The no-hitter... Wreck it is a great moment. The no-hitter outs are getting more and more absurd. We have a guy at third baseman doing a Brooks Robinson down the line. I don't... I will quibble with the nature of the final play. The final out. Do you want to do that now? Sure.

It's absurd. Omar Vizquel in his prime on all kinds of PDs couldn't have made that play. No one makes that play. You can make it. You can't go to the ground. You can make it, but you have to stay up. You can't dive. Shortstop can't dive on the second base side, get up and gun the guy out by two steps. Also, he looks like a spry runner.

Right. So cast a different batter than someone who doesn't look like a fat guy. Yeah. He'd be able to maybe leg it out. But more so even than that, than the improbability of what unfolds, I just think from a storytelling perspective and maybe I'm wrong here. Maybe this is just too obvious and too cliche. It just has to be a strikeout. Right. It has to be like the whole movie is about this one person in this one moment and the pinnacle of achievement being totally inextricably intertwined with regret. Right.

And the nature of baseball is such a perfect vehicle for exploring that because it is, in theory, a team exercise that is so often an individual pursuit. And it just had to be a strikeout. It just had to be. It drives me crazy. Would you have had him hits the glove and the guy's safe at first and doesn't get it?

It's a good sliding doors. I kind of like that. I think it's better if he doesn't get it. Yeah. That's interesting to me. I like that. But the perfect game actually happening is an incredible scene. Despite quibbling with the nature of the final act, the whole scene is amazing. I mean, the Vin Scully lines are fucking incredible in that part of the movie. Incredible. Two homers down the right field line that go foul. Yes.

Steve Lyons wisely just steps aside for the end. We hear Steve the first couple innings and either they only paid him for one day or they were like, hey man, we're good. Vince Scully, we have Vince Scully, we're good. Can you go now? You don't think he like pulled his pants down on Saturday? He did a first base that one time. Might have.

Any other rewatchables for you? I have a few. I don't think you're going to like them because they are scenes that involve Kelly Preston. Then they're eliminated. Let me make my case. No. Let me just try. No Kelly Preston scene is allowed to be in rewatchable. You can put them in What's Aged the Best. I want to nominate them as rewatchable specifically because they are engrossingly bad. Okay. Now you wouldn't be over. There is something...

about how absurd these scenes are. I have three of them. Okay, that's great. You quickly talked me into it. Like, you just can't believe what you're seeing. One, the first dinner. Yeah. Okay. The exchange about the notebooks in her bag is...

It's so hysterical. I was laughing. I watched this last night with Adam, and we were both laughing so hard at this part that I had to pause and rewind the movie because I realized I had missed the next few lines because I couldn't hear. So I was laughing so hard. This one is my article on lip gloss for Elle magazine. It's just incredible. I do like the part where he is basically like, yeah, of course, we count it, numbers. That's all we do in baseball. That part's good. That's a great quote. It is.

The reason that this scene will live in infamy is the how do you like to be kissed line. How do you like to be kissed? Yeah, that's tough. Which is... That's never been said in a movie. And there's been a lot of kissing in movies. How do you like to be kissed is not a thing that you say to another person. I think you might say it, but I think it's at like an orgy.

So, if that's the thing about it is, again, it's horrifying and so awkward. But because it's Kevin Costner saying it. Yeah. Like, I'm sorry. There's something like kind of irresistibly sexy about it. And I'm just watching it thinking, like.

You know, the way that it plays out from there is nonsensical because she ends up holding up a piece of paper later that says yes, which is not an answer to the question that he asked in any way. Obviously, it's to the unspoken question of do you want to go home with me? But, like, I just want her or any person across the table from Kevin Costner in that moment when he's saying, how do you like to be kissed to say, let me take my pants off right now so you can find out. Yeah. You know?

There's only one way to answer that. So that's one of my nominees. Do you think he should have given a toast? Here's to happy beginnings. Probably so. Maybe that's their wedding toast. The next one. Sawing open his hand.

This sequence... That's actually a pretty... That's an almost rewatchable sequence. It's so bad that it is... And then she doesn't get in the helicopter with him? Not only did she not get in the helicopter... And she's somehow upset. She feels aggrieved. Well, of course she does. Because he's like, I need...

the trainer is the most important person for me right now. Fuck you. Yeah, that was tough. Even though you just packed my oozing mauled maimed hand in snow and in your nightgown drove me through snowbanks at risk to your own life to the hospital and then stood in the middle of the hospital in your pajamas and shouted. Isn't this America? America. By the way.

By the way, of all the bad Kelly Preston scenes, that's probably number one. The histrionics in that scene are absolutely... I'm guessing Annette Bening doesn't play it that way. Iconic. And then the way that she is standing, like her physical posture, her facial expression when the helicopter is pulling away, there's something like almost like... I don't want to be too mean, but there's something like Gollum-esque about it. You feel like you're looking at Smeagol become Gollum in Lord of the Rings and she's like...

like this it's like my precious it's just unbelievable I could watch it 50 times in a row and never get tired of it and then my last one the fight that they have when he smashes all of her makeup horrible scene awful but the way that he she's like her whole point hinges on the fact that he can't drive himself yeah and then he says so stoically so seriously I'll hire somebody to drive me

I just think for the unintentional comedy of that moment alone, you have to nominate that scene. It's pretty good. It's a really good case. Now, we should mention Kelly Preston.

That you did a nice job. It was pretty hot coming out of Jerry Maguire. Yeah, of course. That was what, three years ago? Yeah, it was like, so she gets for Love of the Game two years later. I think she might have had a kid at some point, so it wasn't acting for a year or something, but really had momentum. And she was somebody, the kids from my generation, she was like a god to us. She was the best looking young actress of the 80s. Yeah, beautiful woman. She was a secret admirer. She was in Mischief.

And it was always one of the... Her and Sharon Stone were the two where it's like, why aren't these people bigger stars? What are they doing? What's Hollywood doing? She can't act. And, you know, turned out to be a problem. It's great looking though. I mean, she was really great looking. She's gorgeous. Also seems very sweet. So...

Going into this movie, it wasn't really apparent that she wasn't maybe a great actress. Right. But you find out immediately. The first scene. You know, you find out. I mean, that park scene to start is like, what is happening? She married John Travolta, but her husband before that, you Heat fan? Sure. She was married to Wayne Groh. Oh, my God. Yeah. For how long? For a couple years, I think.

Wayne Groh. Oh, I wish Chris Ryan were here right now. I had to get it on, man. So I say for most rewatchable, I really like the Mickey Hart scene. That's probably like, that's just going to get me every time. I think the first inning is really, really underrated, though. The Sam Tuttle at bat is awesome. It's great. I'm going to go with the ninth inning, stealing the perfect game. Mostly on the strength of...

Vin and the commentary on baseball history. Yeah. Which I love. Great Vince going, what's aged the best? Clear the mechanism. I still use this. Great. That's great. So good. The sound effect, all of it. Sam Tuttle, the perfect Yankees villain, the fucking asshole, everything I wanted from this particular character. And then...

If I didn't hate him enough, bunted to try to break up the perfect game. What a cock move. What a fucking dick move. Oh my God. What a coward. If we had the internet in 1999 like it is now, he would be like, oh, he would have been destroyed. What a jerk. Violating the unwritten rules. Perfect game. You can't lay a bunt down there. You just can't. You can't.

What's aged the best? Brian Cox, John C. Reilly, and J.K. Simmons. Brian Cox, who would become Logan Roy 20 years later, playing the Tigers owner, seems almost like a different person. Oh, yeah. Completely. But really, we should mention with J.K. Simmons, so this is the height of Oz, which was a show probably a little before your time, but it was a big prison show and really pushed the envelope. And he played Vern Schillinger, who is...

Nazi, like, what's that? Aryan. What am I saying? Aryan? Aryan, you, like... Aryan Brotherhood? Yeah, Brotherhood guy. Thanks, Craig. I'm not that guy from Succession. No, you know... Craig was ready to supply that for you, wasn't he? You know, in prison, they have the skinhead groups. And he was like the lead one. Right.

And had this whole kind of crazy relationship with this guy Beecher who ended up like there was like a big Beecher rape and this guy was like an evil. Mm-hmm.

Hitler-loving rapist, basically. And then in this movie, it's like, hey, he's your good-natured manager with a tiger's mustache. Incredible range for J.K. Simmons. In the movie, seeing it in the theater, it was like, oh my God, that's Schillinger. He's the manager? It was inconceivable he could ever be in another movie. Now he's been in a bunch of movies. What's aged the best? Bob Seger's Against the Wind. Really nice use of it. Such a great song. Wonderful. Seems like yesterday.

music in this movie but it was long ago yeah Yankee Stadium was great yes Vin Scully I mean this so is this movie even released if it doesn't have Vin Scully he single handedly takes the baseball scenes from B to an A plus that's a great question like imagine if this was Tom Bresnahan and Steve Lyons oh my god that's a great question Sean McDonough and Steve Lyons or just anybody and Steve Lyons Craig and Steve Lyons

Wow, that's really... That's interesting. He really makes it. He's so good. It's the... Everything you'd ever want to know about Vin Scully, it comes out in this movie. He's absolutely fabulous. I mean, I have something about him in basically almost every category. You know, best quote, half-assed internet research. But I love the fact... So he did this interview with the LA Times in... Right when the movie was coming out. And one of the questions was about how much freedom he had with his lines. And like he...

I guess you never know really what is true and what is apocryphal with stuff like this, but it sounds like he had a lot of freedom to basically amend his lines of dialogue. I think he just ad-libbed. Yeah. Because that's what he does when he did baseball games. He could just do everything. I mean, and he's called multiple perfect games in real life. Yeah, he drops the Don Larson card. He does drop the Don Larson card in the movie, which is incredible. Yeah, that's pretty good. He's absolutely outstanding in this. He's the best.

I just put this next one in for you for what stays your best. Shirtless Costner. I know that meant a lot to you. It's important to me. I think we have Costner as a baseball player aging the best and then Costner in various states of undress aging the best. The moment when he's changing in the locker room and you get... First, you get the tighty-whitey shock. He's taking off his pants. I really asked for this. And then...

You think, oh, is it over already? Because he sits down and he's continuing to change, but he's still wearing his button down. And then, no, it doesn't. It's not over yet, Bill. It's not. It continues. He takes off his shirt. It's just the perfect spattering of chest hair. He looks fabulous still. Great dad bod action on him. And you think then, is it done? But it's not, because then he picks up his glove and he smells it so sensually, like he's smelling a woman. And then he takes his hand...

And he licks it. And then he's rubbing the glove. And it's just so overtly sensual and sexual. I find it invigorating to watch. He has the glove. How would you like me to lick you? How do you like to be kissed? It's funny because they really push his sexuality side. And Kelly Preston is treated like she's Amish in this movie. I don't even think we see her in anything that remotely resembles being sexy and sexy.

I didn't know what was going on. I didn't know if she had just been pregnant or, like, there was some sort of card they were afraid to play with her because she'd been naked her whole career. Like, that was part of her card. That's interesting. You know, we get the moment where she says kind of the opposite, which is, like, I don't like to wear sexy underwear. It's not comfortable. She's sort of deliberately portraying her sexuality in a different way. And I actually kind of like that because I think that, again, I wish, you know, we get the masseuse. I wish we had learned a little bit more about Billie's sexual exploits beyond that. But you can...

Stale and boring? Yeah.

The one time she looks great is the art museum scene when she's got the different boyfriend. It's like, oh yeah, you're smoking hot. Why aren't we taking advantage of this? I think she looks good in all movies. Well, she got outflanked by the masseuse. The masseuse was like a 10 to 1 underdog in that matchup.

Another one's aged the best. I love his relationship with Scarecrow. It's good. It's really nicely done. It's not too much of it. It makes sense. It's a baseball theme that's like a real theme of like small market team. And this guy, quote unquote, sold out, but he really didn't because he's like, that's my family right there. Early player empowerment.

How much money do we need? Yeah. Well, it was great. A lot. I liked that guy too. He was very Chili Davis-ish. And his name was Davis something. Birch. Right. Yeah. But had like a very Chili Davis-ish vibe. I liked the autograph scene for What's Aged the Best when he's arguing with Kelly Preston on the sidewalk and a couple people are coming up to him and he's just signing for them as he's in conversation. Yeah.

People, they always mangle autograph scenes in TV and movies. And that was like actually how it goes where you just have these people gawking at them and he's got to deal with that. But he's really like trying to make this point to her and he's like, ah, shit, I got to sign. I like how they did that. That's funny. I kind of had it as like a what's age the worst because it's just hard in the digital age to –

Allow yourself to think that could play out that way. But we can put that in What's Aged to Worst. I think it's both. Yeah. But I think that's what it was like in 1999, though. You wouldn't have a private conversation like that with your fans. Somebody would be like holding their phone. That's on TMZ 16 minutes later. John C. Reilly's We Don't Stink Right Now speech I kind of enjoyed. That's good. And then...

That's all I got. Any other What's Aged the Best for you? Couple more small ones. Yankee fans sucking and being assholes. Yeah. Obviously an all-time theme that we should return to for eternity. Yankee fans are losers in this. The hecklers at the stadium are, you know, caricatures, but it's very amusing. The airport bar guy, though. Save him. We're getting to him. Quintin.

Quietly, I think you could see Gus's stats on the jumbo. You could? I was looking for that. What were they? He's hitting 184, Bill. Oh! And I'm going to throw this out there. He's Cindy Leone. I'm going to throw this out there as a subtle what's aged the best. I think that Gus and the Tigers were early in the pitch framing value movement. Oh, wow. Don't worry about Perry wanting to sub him out in this game for someone who can hit.

Let's not think about that. Let's ignore that. He's out there earning regular playing time despite hitting 184. Must be a good framer. Call in a good game. I like that. Gus Sinski ahead of his time. I think that... By the way, we should mention... I keep saying we should mention. I'm doing a podcast.

it doesn't necessarily seem like John C. Riley was catching any of these balls from Costner. Yeah. They had a couple of closeups that was clearly like the closeup of John C. Riley catching, but I, it was a clear stunt double that whole game. I feel like, I think that's, that's fair. That's reasonable. I, I, I allow him to, to not be the person actually receiving high eighties fastballs from Costner or his body double. Uh,

The arrangement that Billy and Jane initially have that will end up blowing up in their faces, I like, as we talked about a few minutes ago, the honesty about Billy being a dog and what his sexual appetite would have been like. You think Verlander said that to Kate Upton? That sounded perfect. Maybe, you know? That just felt very true to life to me, so I liked that. And then lastly, again, even though the love story is...

So painful. I do think that the flashback structure as a storytelling mechanism is smart and has aged well. And it's, I would rather have that than a narrator. Yeah. I'm anti-narrator. Unless it's for the Shawshank Redemption, my favorite movie of all time. A great one. A great one. What's aged the worst? Oh, we didn't do, so what did age the best? I'm going to say Clear the Mechanism.

I really want to say it's Vin Scully, but I have to be true to myself and say Costner as a ball player. Okay. Love it. Love it. What's aged the worst? Kelly Preston. I described her in a column five years ago as a one-woman movie momentum tsunami. Oh, my. Yeah. Wow. She's really bad. What's aged the worst?

He stalks her at one point. He's just standing in the rain, staring at her through a window. Like what's happening? You're a hall of famer. You can get laid by anyone. What are you doing? I, I wrote this down as Billy watching Jane. Fuck Ian through her window.

There are two silhouettes behind the drapes. She's in there with a man. That is age the worst. Terrible. The weird daughter runaway plot in Boston. Awful. It's awful. My daughter's missing. She's in Boston. She can't get in. You have to go there. Most of my nippets are about that. I got your number from somebody. It's like, what? Who's giving out Billy Chappell's direct line at the stadium? Can I just call somebody's clubhouse? Can I call right now for Aaron Judge and get him on the phone? Should I save my nippets about that scene or raise them here? Save them. Okay. Save them.

than the experience of J.K. Simmons as Vern Schillinger as Age of the Worst just because now he's J.K. Simmons. It was much more fun to watch this movie when he was a crazy rapist. What shortstop could have made that last play for the 27th out? Omar Vizquel, Ozzie Smith. Yeah. You going any middle infielder here? Any infielder period? Oh, you're saying Robbie Elmer? I was just thinking a shortstop.

It's one of the great plays anyone's ever made in a baseball game. And somehow the guy's still up by three steps. It should have been closer. The play at first. It should have been like a half step.

Bad job by Ken. I don't think he makes the Yankees. Oh, no way. They're like, what the fuck, dude? The ball hit the pitcher's mitt. He's going to double A immediately. It bounced 10 times. The shortstop came across Dove and threw you up by three steps. He's not on the playoff roster after that. Any other what's aged the worst? The obvious one is cutting the full frontal. Just a terrible decision. That is a miscarriage of justice and a crime against humanity. If they hadn't cut it, you would probably own this movie in Blu-ray, DVD, and on Amazon streaming. Yeah.

Yeah, I'd always have a copy of it on my iTunes or Amazon to boot up anytime I needed to look. The New York mag write up on this that has the quotes from the studio executive. One of the quotes is, do we really need to see Kevin Costner's penis? And the answer to that question is yes, we do. I don't understand. What are you talking about? Of course.

Another what's aged the worst. I would love for you to tell me. I really, really would love for you to tell me that I'm wrong about this and that I'm misinterpreting what happened here. Please tell me I'm wrong. I've never wanted to be wrong so badly. The players on the airplane holding up numbers when Billy brings Heather on the plane. Are they joking about how young she is and pretending that he's dating her? Oh, what were the numbers? It was like 16, 13, 11. Yeah.

Oh, that was how I perceived that. Again, I would love to be wrong. I hope I'm wrong. I think if that's what that is, that has not aged well. Well, I think I think they're making statutory rape jokes, but know that she's that it's not a thing. I think that's just baseball. Yuck, yuck stuff. Not aged. Well, not aged well. I enjoyed it. Billy threatening to murder.

to murder Jane on the end of the phone call fight. Tough. You know, he's like, well, when I don't want to kill you, just a little light murder threat at the end of a phone call. Tough. OJ was still in the ether late 90s.

You thought maybe he could get away with it like OJ did. Oh my God. And you know what? Because Bill, I love baseball. And on the heels of our recent argument about Mike Trout and what an MVP is, I feel that Brian Cox, owner Gary Wheeler's curmudgeonly speech and lament about the sad state of baseball and how the modern movement has ruined the game has aged poorly. Because I think progress is a good thing.

I have thoughts on that in the later category. What's aged the worst? The answer is Kelly Preston. Casting what ifs. Annette Bening almost played Kelly Preston. That's aged the worst too, because God forbid that happened.

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I don't even know who is Sam Tuttle in this movie, but he's a good Dak guy. I've seen him in other stuff. Michael Papa John? Papa John? I looked this up because he was my pick too. Was he the original Papa John? Spider-Man, The Longest Yard, Jurassic World. Yeah, he's one of those guys. Also, apparently, actually a baseball player, I think. What a coward bunting in a perfect game. Jesus. How about...

Dominic Lombardozzi, the tow truck guy. Herc from The Wire. Oh, yeah. And the guy from Entourage. Yeah, and The Deuce, Boardwalk Empire, Ray Donovan. That's a better one. Let's go with that. Because he's... That's a great... That guy. The Saul Rubinick They Knew Award for most egregious overacting. This is easy. Yeah. Yankee fan in the bar. Oh, you're going Kelly Preston? It's got to be Kelly Preston. I mean, the Yankee fan in the bar is a great pick also. That character...

Does not need to be in the movie. You can't smoke in a bar. Now you can't talk either. I have no idea what movie he's in, but it's not the movie I wanted to watch. It's brutal. I don't understand the point. He yells that the guy was safe when he was three steps out on the last thing. It's like, this guy's just an annoying jackass. The way that he shouts, oh, this guy's a bum. When like at that point,

80 people are around him sharing the kind of beautiful, uniting experience that you, if you're lucky, you get like three times in your life when something brings you together with your fellow man and he's just like, this guy's a bum. You have any peanuts? Very tough. You could have cut out all of the airport scenes. Yeah.

And just had Kelly Preston walking in the gate, decided not to go. Yeah. And watching it and then cut to her one other time just praying for the last one. And this is the same movie, actually better. Better yet, have her board the flight, go to London and never be heard from again. Yeah, that's,

They should have had a deleted scene. When we see him in his beautiful brown outer coat and his bag, we realize he's going to find the masseuse after all that time. That's the alternate thing I want. Yeah, I wish he had ended up with the masseuse. The reason that it's Kelly Preston, though.

In addition to everything you've already outlined, the opening scene is so spectacularly bad that that alone would be enough to carry it. But the hospital scene, which we've already discussed, but the speech. Is this not America? Is baseball not America's favorite pastime?

What do you think the rest of that speech is? You could imagine her shouting absolutely anything in that moment. It's like the antithesis of any great baseball movie speech. Like, have you never shucked a peanut on the third baseline? Like, it's just so ridiculous. Nobody knows he's a baseball player. The only way it made sense is if he was so annoyed by how she was yelling that he's just like, can you just let me bleed to death? Yeah.

I just want to die. Just kill me. Half-assed internet research. Oh, Dan Waiter's award. I forgot. Oh, man. Who do you have for Dan Waiter's award? So, this was tough, but I had two picks. One...

I think you can make the case for J.K. Simmons. So that's who I pick. The mustache, the way he's chewing. He's really not in the movie. He's got like a little bit of a Terry Francona. Like you don't know what's in his mouth. You just know that it's probably some combination of like foul gum, tobacco, seeds. Maybe he'll give a press conference one day and say he found a tooth inside of it. That kind of vibe. And then I feel less sure of this pick, but I think you can make a case for Jenna Malone. Heather, the kid.

The moment when she says, so are you my mom's boyfriend on the plane? And he says, I'm not sure. And then she replies, but you've slept with her. Like anytime you're in a movie and you basically say, but you fucked my mom, you're automatically in the running for the Dion Waiters Award. That's one of my rules. I think it's a very fair candidate. And I also would say...

After this movie, I thought she was going to be a really good actress. I know. Her career didn't match the promise of this thing, but I agree. I thought she was good. I would vote for JK, but that's a good runner-up. The next category, half-assed internet research. I got to be honest. I really didn't do a lot of research for this one. I have a few. I've done most of them already, but I have a few I can run through. Yeah.

Not sure how much we need to do. On the full frontal scene again, so it's supposed to be a shower scene where you see Kevin Costner's penis again for reasons that remain unclear to me. This is not in the movie. So there are conflicting reports about why.

One of the stories is that the studio wanted to maintain the PG-13 rating. The other story is that it tested poorly with audiences. Again, in that New York Mag piece, the studio exec was quoted as saying, the audience giggled at Kevin's penis. I just refuse to believe that that's true. I refuse to believe that that's true. Giggled because it was smaller than they thought it was going to be? That's the implication here.

Or it was bigger than they expected. Maybe. Like maybe it was like nervous giggling. Maybe. Maybe. Like you think you're going to buy a regular hot dog and then you realize you can get the foot and a half for just an extra buck. You want a cotton candy, but you ask them to spin it for another 30 seconds in the machine. Fatten that up. Yeah.

And Castor was reportedly furious about them cutting the scene. So that tells me it was healthy. It's gotta be. Says that the studio lacked, quote, real courage. Ha ha ha!

Well, if he really cared about it, he would have leaked it to some magazine or website. I know. So good. A few other things. I don't know if these are true. Costner wanted Vin to be the announcer. That was... I saw these. Here's the thing about the half-assed internet research of this movie. It's not a meaningful enough movie to even have stories. And I feel like people make some of the stuff up. Almost all of them about this movie are about real baseball figures playing baseball.

figures in the movie, which is not super interesting, I guess. Yeah, like this dude who barely was a major leaguer for more than four years was the pitching coach. I like the idea that Costner had to convince George Steinbrenner to let them use Yankee Stadium because Steinbrenner didn't like the idea of the Yankees losing in the movie. That one's kind of fun. Yeah, that's a good one. Plus, it was during an era when the Yankees were pretty dominant. Yes. This was during their four and five years run. They did win the pennant that year. Yeah. Of course. The...

This isn't really like half-assed research. This is just a fact. But a little nugget that I do like is that Billy at one point is reading The Killer Angels. He's got books in his hand at a few different points. He's reading The Killer Angels and that, of course, is written by Michael Shara who won a Pulitzer for it. And he is the author who wrote the novel on which this movie is based. I always like when there's like a little nod to the creator. I do think they put a lot of time and thought and energy into this movie, which is what makes it so crazy that they missed the Kelly Preston scene so badly. It's tough.

Do you think they have any chemistry together? I think Costner can have chemistry with whoever. He can have chemistry with anyone. You're right. I was looking for the name of the masseuse, but I can't find it. Do you have the name? I don't. No. Yeah. I think he can flip the switch. We saw it at the Grantland party. He could have just waved over any woman at the party and it was over. Anyone at the party. Yeah. Pick a nits. Oh, we got to do Apex Mountain. No one, right? Can I make the case for Vin Scully?

You can. I'm prepared to refute it. Go ahead. I was ready for this. I'm ready. I'm not saying he's done some unbelievable baseball games. Yeah. Incredible career. Yeah. But all those baseball games have come and gone. They're just buried either, you know, on MLB classic games or whatever. This movie became the best ongoing evidence of how fucking awesome Vin Scully was. It's just on cable all the time. Be like, oh man, I love Vin Scully. So...

I don't know if in the moment it was his apex mountain, but it's become his apex mountain. It's like the last document for how fucking awesome Vince Scully was because he doesn't announce it. I think that while that is a compelling argument. Thank you. I can refute it easily. First of all, as you yourself said, nobody watched this movie. Right. Made no money. But it's been on cable forever. And I'm sure nobody watches it when it's on cable.

Because it's not very good. No, that's not true. Even though we love it. No, because it's always on cable and they wouldn't put it on cable unless people were watching it. So I do think people are watching it. They're just filling like a three-hour time block because it's so fucking long. But you can do that with any movie. They put movies on that people watch. Vin, in addition to having such a long and storied career, has enjoyed the modern media digital renaissance. So he's been reborn in the internet age. You can easily...

Get a clip of him, of any call, any famous call, our top 10 list. You're going to have a Twitter thread with all of his best calls, an MLB playlist, any of it. You can get it all at any time. You're going to see a highlight of a historic play. You're going to hear him. That's the voice they're going to choose. So he is like actually one of the voices of baseball history in real life. And as people move away from the game and away from caring about anything but either their own team or their own fantasy team, a figure like Vince Gulley becomes...

such a rare thing that... Why are you trying to sell me? I'm Vin Scully. I'm with you. What does this have to do with Apex Mountain? Because the real moments that he has have more power than the bullshit in the movie. But what moment, though? Well... 1999, he's at the peak of his powers.

He's still like he's aged into the old guy. He's still way better than anyone who's doing it. He's already called all these great games. So if you're just a kid today, you're probably going to say him like naming Kershaw's curveball public enemy number one, something really hip and fun like that. But here are just a handful of some of the calls he's responsible for.

The Koufax perfect game. Sandy Koufax, whose name will always remind you of strikeouts, did it with a flourish. He struck out the last six consecutive batters when he wrote his name in capital letters in the record book. The K stands out more than the O-fax. It's a local game. Nobody saw it. We didn't have a sports center back then. Don Larson's perfect game in the 56 World Series. I'll accept Don Larson. Do you know what he said about Yankee Stadium? Do you know how he described it? He said it was shivering in its concrete foundation. That is like

That's incredible. He called Kirk Gibson's Dodgers 88 World Series game one home run in a year that has been so improbable. The impossible. What do you say he caught it? He caught it on the radio.

But it's his voice. I know. Hank Aaron breaking Babe Ruth's home run record? If you're going baseball moment, I think it's got to be Gibson's Homer in game one. Incredible. So he's responsible for some of the handful of most important moments in actual baseball history. Those have to matter more. He's calling the Mickey hard catch. It was really great. Picking nits. Billy's stats. 30 starts, 8-11, 355 ERA, 211 innings pitched, 98 walks, 111 strikeouts. Yeah.

I just can't figure out the ERA with the other totals there. And also the 30 starts, 211 innings, but only two complete games is just mystifying. The strikeout to walk ratio is the thing that I'm hung up on here. So he's just seven innings every game.

There's no nine inning game and then he never gets shelled in a game. It's just seven innings. It's very puzzling. And this goes back to my, how the ringer should be a sports consultant for all sports movies where we could have been like, Hey man, fix those numbers. Tigers were 64 and 97. And yet JK Simmons is approaching this game. Like things might turn around if they get a win. It's ridiculous.

The high numbers on the Yankee jerseys? Oh, yeah. That's a good one. It's like number 60, number 68, number 72. It's like terrible. John C. Reilly running around the bases. Yeah. Just go wide shot with the stunt double. He rounds third base like he's on ice. It's tough. It's brutal. I guess. So...

Sorry, I'm sniffling. Are you sick? Do you have a cold? I'm a little sick. Oh my God. Oh no. It's starting at the ringer. Fall colds. God damn it. Chappell spent 19 years with the Tigers. 18. Right? This was his 19th season. He had 10-5 rights. I have this down. This is actually an unforgivable whiff. Unforgivable? Unforgivable. You cannot...

I want to trade you the Giants. Too bad I have my 10-5 rights. You cannot anchor the plot of the movie to a looming trade that he could veto. He has a no trade clause. He has the 10-5. It doesn't make any sense. Awful. Such a bad job by them. Such a bad job. And then I just think the movie should have ended when he was crying in his hotel room. Instead of having him go after her? Yeah. Because you want to leave it open to the imagination whether or not he does or because you don't want him to. Better ending. Better ending.

Sad instead of happy, though.

As I told you, I would have had him not get the perfect game and I would have had him crying in his hotel room. And I would have had Kelly Preston in Russia or wherever the fuck she went meeting some dude named Vlad within a day. In your ideal version of the movie, you know how she makes that joke about the plane crashing when the person at the help desk tells her that it's delayed because of the mechanical issue and she affects a terrible British accent for a second there to mock her and says that you don't want to make the crash. Do you want the plane to crash in your ideal version of the movie? Yeah.

No, I want her to land in Russia and then some Russian guy asks her how she likes to be kissed. And it works the second time. Plane crash wouldn't have been bad. Any other pick and nets? Got a few. So we talked earlier about the Boston daughter rescue scene.

On what planet, in what universe, would a mother who is so panicked about her runaway daughter's state of safety and well-being make a joke in the middle of that conversation? She says, when he asks what her name is, Freedom. And he says, Freedom? And she says, Scared you, didn't I? It's Heather. What is that? That is so...

fucking weird. You're calling him your ex, by the way. You're not together at this moment in the movie. Yeah, you dumped him after the happy beginning. You are estranged, but you are in such a state of terror over your child's well-being that you call your ex and you make a joke about your kid's name. It's ludicrous. Also,

Heather, freedom, is not in any random city. She's in Boston where her father lives. Are we really supposed to believe that Jane would not know anybody else in the city where her baby daddy lives that she could call instead of a guy she's not actually seeing anymore? It's a problem. That is ridiculous. Also, the hand scar.

I'm really hung up on this. This was a career-threatening injury, okay? Yeah, it should have been. He had to be medevaced to another hospital because this was such a severe wound. It looks like a really bad paper cut.

It's like maybe three quarters of an inch. It looks like the one I have from New Year's Eve 1993. I just... Opening a champagne bottle. Yeah. I didn't have to be medevaced to the hospital that night. His hand needs to be like a ruin after what happened. So that's a nit. I actually would have gone with the finger dangling. Oh, but then he can't come back from that, can he? He shouldn't have come back from this other thing. He said he couldn't feel the baseball. It's true. It's true. It's true.

Gus, you mentioned Gus. Gus Sinski. Gus wearing a tiger hat in a New York hotel. Yeah. It's ridiculous. Gus was like borderline brain damaged. The concussion protocol wasn't in existence back then.

He plays him like he's got like a 72 IQ. Why would he be wearing the hat of his team? Even when he goes to bed, when he passes out at the end, he gives him a water and he's just like passing out with the water. I thought about that sequence too because his fingers are in the water. Like he's going to piss his pants in that bed for sure. Billy's like, what a great friend. You left your buddy with a glass of water that he's going to spill all over him. Great job.

he pour it into a glass instead of just handling him the plastic bottle. Just put it on the nightstand next to him. He's going to pass out. I'm so hung up on that. It doesn't make any sense. And how is he that much drunker than Billy? I don't know. I don't know. It's so weird. The...

While I agree with you that in general, the Yankee Stadium stuff is great and the crowd stuff is great, the overhead shot that we get right before the game, not a sellout. I don't buy it. They're going for a pennant-clinching win. And they didn't make enough fuss about the pennant-clinching win. Yeah, I don't... Throw in the line of Steve Lyons being like, wow, if they don't get this... I don't buy that at all. I was...

Confused by the sequence where Billy is eating bread and milk in a glass? Is that a thing people do? I don't know. Maybe it is. I'd love to learn more. Send a person who asks how they like to be kissed. Anything's on the table with that guy. That's really strange. I also just don't buy that Jane wouldn't have just gone for some goodbye sex at the hotel before heading to London. I just don't buy it. Because she was a completely non-sexual person. But sex was a huge part of their relationship. Was it?

Yeah. We never saw her in anything less than 10 pounds of clothes. They hook up the first night and she gives her whole, I don't screw like that speech. And then, of course, there's the...

iconic discovery of the flashlight in her bed that he thinks is a vibrator. Oh, we get a lot of the sex in the movie. They fuck in her apartment with her kid like three feet away. The masseuse stayed in his life was my takeaway. Even if they got married, the masseuse is still getting called twice a year. I believe it. My last nitpick is just that, you know, we're allowed to believe many times from the opening montage onward that Billy's father played a really meaningful role in his life.

Yeah. When he is describing his father to Jane, one of the two descriptions that he gives, two of his father, two, to show how much this man meant to him is that he was, quote, very tall. I know Billy Chappell's not a poet, but come on, my guy. Do a little better. That was tough. I found the masseuse's name. What is it? It was Laura K.O. Yet. K.O. Yet. It's been a lot of stuff. Big, long IMDb. Like, yeah.

IMDBX? IMDB Red? No, regular. Regular old IMDB. That's great. Good for her. Best quote? I like Sam Tuttle. I can't think of a better reason not to be a Yankee. Sam Tuttle. I can't think of a better reason not to be a Yankee. That's a great one. We count everything in baseball, God. That's all we do. Give me two more. We don't really need to list 20 quotes. There aren't very many good quotes from this movie, candidly. My pick would be the Vin Scully line.

And you know, Steve, you get the feeling that Billy Chappell isn't pitching against left-handers. He isn't pitching against pinch hitters. He isn't pitching against the Yankees. He's pitching against time. He's pitching against the future, against age, and even when you think about his career, against ending. And tonight, I think he might be able to use that aching old arm one more time to push the sun back up in the sky and give us one more day of summer.

That's beautiful. That is chill-inducing. What's the line about the chapel and the cathedral? Billy Chapel has pitched a perfect game. The cathedral that is Yankee Stadium belongs to a chapel.

I don't like that one, actually. He forces that one, but I still like it. I don't like that one. I'm pro. All right. What else? What are other good quotes? You mean it doubles as a flashlight? The vibrator joke, very funny. I enjoy that one. That was good. We've already gone way too long on this movie. Could this be remade as a 10-episode Netflix show? No. Please, no. That'd be more Kelly Preston.

If it was a 10-episode Netflix series, we'd have to get like literally three full episodes that were just Jane presenting increasingly horrific scenarios for the Would You Still Love Me If. What if I had three nostrils of probably unanswerable questions? How many pitches did Billy throw in that game? I'm going to say like 120. He had nine Ks, only 27 batters, a lot of long counts. Mm-hmm.

Interesting. He's saying like 120 to 122, I'm guessing. His arm's about to fall off. Yeah. It's pretty high. I like that. That's an interesting one. What are his career stats? We already kind of did that. I think he was a 300-game winner and Vince Scully forgot to tell us. Had to be. So Brian Cox, he says, I was going to leave the team to my kids, but they don't even like baseball. Everything's changed, Billy. The players, the fans, TV rights, arbitration isn't the same. The game stinks.

I agree with you, Brian Cox. Come on. Great call. You called it. It's 20 years ahead of his time, the tiger's owner of this movie, Gary. How is this an unanswerable question? It's not. I just want to make you mad. The unanswerable part is when did you lose your mind about realizing that progress in baseball was a good thing? I think he saw everything that was coming. He should have been like,

Billy, in the future, baseball is going to be localized and we're going to give the MVP to a guy who's on a 73-win team. It's going to suck. Get out now. How many times when you were rewatching it did you find yourself wanting him to just reach over to Billy? We see in the newspaper headline, I'm going to tell his father, I'm going to take care of him like he's my own son. They're very close. Didn't you want him to just grab his head and say, you're my number one boy? That would have been great. Logan Roy. Oh, man. Who won the movie?

You could make a case for Vin Scully. I'm just going to say it. My two picks were Costner or Vin Scully. And I guess it's tough to argue for Costner given how much heat he took for it, but I just love him unapologetically. I just do. I love him as well. And I think the fact that he had to take PEDs to keep going just to give a good enough performance, he wins it. But honorable mention to Vin Scully. It's a great Vin Scully. How many women do you think Billy slept with? We didn't get to do that for Unanswerable Questions. Oh, that's a good one.

Thousands. How many thousands? Thousands. He's playing for 19 years. And he is famous. He's on the road for six months, plus spring training, which is a boondoggle. Spring training is just a free-for-all. The way that he engages in that initial deal-making conversation with Jane, it's very clear that he has setups everywhere he goes, right? Yeah. So that's actually an argument for keeping the number down. That's what professional sports is actually really like. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

When you're pulling over on the side of the road to help some lady that's car isn't working, you're just a walking boner. How do you think he sawed his hand open? Do you think he was thinking about the masseuse and got distracted? Failed to clear the mechanism? That was a borderline nitpick to me. If I'm pitching, I'm not doing anything that's jeopardizing my hands. It's tough. I'm like, hey, you know what? I'm not going to have near my hands a saw. That's up there with like burning yourself, ironing your shirt with the shirt on or tripping over the deer meat that you were carrying. Yeah.

Well, Craig, did we change your mind on this movie being great? You still love it? I'm a sucker for baseball movies. They just get me. I like it. So are we. Did you see the love story in the movie? Preston's tough. Who would you recast? Could you recast somebody that would be better? Well, Annette Bening would have been really good. That was a good point in her career. That would have been great. I think you could recast with literally almost anyone. How about any actress in 1999? You guys also didn't do the 1999 award.

Oh, what was the most 1999 thing about this movie? Damn, I forgot. Good call, Craig. I think it's John C. Reilly playing a Game Boy Color in the bus. I had this as an unanswerable question. That's a great one. Was what game is he playing on the Game Boy? I consulted my husband, Adam, who's a video game enthusiast, and he thought that the most likely thing was Pokemon, which had come out in 98. It was a big thing. I like to think that Gus is a Mario guy, maybe a Kirby guy, like a purist, a Game Boy purist. I said 99 was really...

Full scale, like Madden and all those, like all the sports games. I don't know. I don't know if that rang 1999 to me. The Game Boy? What other elements of it are 99? The tighty-whities? Very 99? I expect to see a man, an athlete of Billy Chappell's stature and caliber wearing a...

form-fitting black pair of boxer briefs. Not tighty-whities. Tighty-whities are $99. So that felt very $99 to me. There was no internet in this movie which felt $99 to me. Yeah. I think if they do it differently instead of the magazine pieces, maybe they're running blog posts. Though she must have a cell phone, right? Because she calls the tow truck from her busted rental car. So there's some technology. Actually, I know what ran the most $99.

That people love baseball. That's tough. Tough look for baseball. That Billy Chapo could have actually been a star that people recognized at airports. That you could shout, is this not America in a hospital? Because baseball is so important and people would listen. They'd make this movie now with Mike Trout walking through the airport and nobody recognizing him. That'd be it. For love of the game. Tell them we're through, Bill.

All right, that's it for the podcast. We are coming back with a brand new one on Monday night. And I'll give you a hint. It's a movie directed by James Cameron. I'm not going to tell you which one, but you've probably seen it a few times. So there you go. This podcast was produced by Craig Horlbeck. Again, go to Ringer Movies, our YouTube channel, subscribe, and you'll get full episodes, partial episodes, all kinds of stuff. But that's it. Enjoy the weekend. See you here on Monday.