by Countless so-called non-fiction books have been written on baseball, some of them good, others not so much, some of them true, others featuring blurred lines between fact and fiction. But when it comes to fiction books on baseball, the shelf looks deserted. It’s simply difficult to capture the essence of the game in an entertaining read, and even more so to translate the on-field action into well-written words. There’s arguably only one example that’s universally praised and that withstood the tests of time: The Natural. Written by Bernard Malamud and published in 1952, to some it is the quintessential book on baseball, the only one that does it right. Self-evidently, this book would be transformed for the screen. And self-evidently, the stakes were high. The 1984 movie starring Robert Redford as Roy Hobbs in the lead has been loved and derided ever since, and for a good reason.
To those that love the game, baseball has an inexplicable, almost magic and mythical sensation to it that is entirely lost on those that perceive a match of baseball as an afternoon in the park spoiled. Malamud captured this sensation by conceiving his debut novel as a tragic legend featuring a flawed hero who eventually fails. You have to understand this, then adjust your personal suspension of disbelief, according to Coleridge. Otherwise, and in a realist sentiment, few things add up or even make sense. Just like myths, The Natural is often exaggerated, as if the story had been passed on countless times to eventually being told by a boy of ten, maybe twelve, that still hasn’t lost his faith in the good things in life and adds a little wonder to it everyone knows is counterfeit, yet appreciated. Despite differences in the plot, the movie adaptation retains this quality that is lost on all those that never perceived baseball as a wondrous game.
Roy Hobbs is a farmer’s son growing up in Nebraska, playing catch with his father whenever time permits, which is beautiful in itself. But the old Hobbs is struck down by a heart attack, dying underneath an oak tree. One night, the tree is struck by lightning and split, a sign from above and a calling Roy accepts: out of a nice piece of lumber, he hand-carves his personal Excalibur, the bat Wonderboy. Roy could be seen as a featureless boy with no qualities other than his aptitude for baseball, but this is not true. Contrarily, he is a protagonist in the tradition of all the tight-lipped cowboys that, despite never speaking much or saying their mind often, are constantly analyzing and questioning their existence. We understand this when he is alone with his sweetheart, Iris, informing her that he’ll go to Chicago and try out for the Cubs. Here is a man willing to sacrifice a good life in order to follow his heart – and being a tragic hero, he’s prone to paying for his integrity.
On the train to Chicago, a chance encounter sees Hobbs meeting the Whammer, a baseball star with a striking resemblance to the great Babe Ruth, and a sly and sleazy sportswriter whose word apparently has some weight in the world, Max Mercy. The journey is interrupted when the train stops right next to a travelling circus, a plot device that doubtlessly drives every realist up the walls, and after the two baseball greats indulge in displays of their might and force, Hobbs’ scout challenges the Whammer that the new gun would strike him out on three pitches. Hobbs accomplishes the feat, and even though Redford’s performance is great anyone that knows a little about the game could tell he had nothing to offer that would impress the best hitter in the game. But there’s a margin for the wondrous here, remember?
Like all heroes prone to failure, Hobbs has another thing coming when he is approached by a mysterious woman called Harriet Bird, a black widow preying on him that invites him to her room at a Chicago hotel. Asked if he’ll be the best there ever was, Hobbs confirms what he firmly believes in himself – only to be shot in the abdomen by a woman in black hiding her face behind a veil. A small-caliber bullet brings the best that could’ve been down even before his career took off. Hobbs is not the first coming sensation targeted by the Black Widow but he has to deal with yet another setback, or defeat in other words.
We never learn what Hobbs did to make ends meet except that he couldn’t return home considering himself a failure, thus leaving Iris behind without a word of notice. We also never learn who signed him for the struggling New York Knights and how or where, but sixteen years passed, turning a nineteen-year-old prospect into a thirty-five-year-old who isn’t welcomed with much enthusiasm. Playing so bad it would put any Little League Team to shame, the Knights mess up plays so ridiculously it looks like a clown show at the circus. The Knights are managed by Pop Fisher, a man who epitomizes perfectly what a baseball manager should be like. It remains a mystery why Pop treats Hobbs as if he were an obligation even though he benches him and refuses to look at him during practice. It is coincidence again that grants Hobbs a shot, who shows his guts by reminding Pop that he’s always there for practice when ordered to do so, only to walk out on him.
Bump Bailey is the star on the Knights’ squad, if star is the correct term to describe him. The typical not-so-bad player who could be better if he cared, and if he were just a tad less in love with himself, takes booze and girls and gambling more seriously than playing ball. After a reckless play in outfield, Pop has had enough and sends Hobbs to pinch hit, telling him to knock the covers off the ball. Hobbs delivers again, doing the impossible and knocking the leather off the ball, but only when Bailey dies crashing through an outfield wall, he is finally granted a spot on the team. One could argue it was lady fortune herself striking him down.
I remember signing a contract, to play ball not to be put to sleep by some two bit carney hypnotist! I won’t do that Pop! I can’t.
Roy Hobbs when he’s told to go to the Minor Leagues by Pop Fisher
Finally unleashed and given a place for his grandeur, Hobbs smacks one homer after another, becoming a sensation. We see him swinging for the fences at the Knights’ ballpark in what has to be some of the best baseball ever on screen. The atmosphere is perfect, for the ballpark has a flair of its own, giving every serious fan of old-school baseball from the good old days goosebumps. By today’s standards, the ballpark might look ugly and used. By an enthusiast’s standards, it looks perfect. Mercy, the writer that taunted Hobbs on the train sixteen years earlier observes his career but fails to recognize him without a display of his pitching.
It becomes clear that Hobbs is not only an unexpected sensation but also an unwanted one. The Knights are wrapped in an intrigue involving Pop, who will lose his share of the team if they fail to win the pennant that year, and the team’s owner, the Judge, who wants to see his own team losing. Living in his personal sinister tower somewhere in Knights Field’s outfield, sitting with his back to the playing field, all shutters closed as not to see a thing, he is an incarnation of the witch in a fairy tale. Even if he started out a perfectly fine man in a distant past, life has crippled him until evil without a cause. He even tries to bribe Hobbs, offering 5.000$ for throwing the season, only to be defeated by a man’s integrity. But the Judge has another trick up his sleeve: a new Black Widow.
Our hero is flawed, we know that already, but seeing him making the same mistake again when he’s holding the whole world of baseball in his hands is devastating. When Memo, an intoxicating woman with a lot of looks and no qualities comes into his life, he experiences a slump so severe that he even fails to connect with pitches anymore. Hobbs is threatened to throw it all away, thus become like Bailey and eventually pay the ultimate price. Even when Pop warns him about Memo, his niece, Hobbs continues down this self-destructive path. The cycles almost closes when Hobbs’ slump continues as the Knights play the Cubs in Chicago, the place where he was destroyed before. Iris has come to see him, and when he spots her in the stands Hobbs has a revelation and hits a bomb out of Wrigley Field. Blinded by flashlights after the game, a perfect scene to express his condition allegorically, he loses Iris but later meets with her at a diner. When she drops a hint at him, telling him that they’re having a sixteen-year-old son together, Hobbs apparently doesn’t understand. But it seems that he is drawn between returning to the good life the two could’ve had together and pursuing his quest.
Now that the hero is back and identified by Mercy after he throws a pitch during practice so hard it breaks the netting, the forces of evil have to throw everything they have into the game to stop him in time, and with him the Knights that have been on a winning streak and now lead their division. It is the Black Widow’s second coming, as Memo poisons Roy and sends him to hospital. The hero’s integrity is challenged, as the bribe still stands, yet Hobbs, against his doctor’s advice, decides to play the Pirates in a last push to take the pennant and fulfill his destiny.
Everything is set for the finale, with Iris and her son watching the game in the stands, the Knights’ pitcher bribed by the Judge for throwing the game and a Hobbs who is bleeding through his jersey where a bullet struck him sixteen years prior, facing a young pitcher resembling himself that has a flamethrower for an arm. Giving all that’s left inside of him, Hobbs connects with an inside pitch meant to permanently take him out of the game by hitting his wound, only to shatter Wonderboy. The Natural is left with no weapon but the bat boy provides Wonderboy’s sister bat he and Hobbs carved together. It is not Excalibur that made him big, we understand. Swinging Savor Boy on two strikes, our hero prevails by knocking a bomb almost out of the park that hits the lights making them explode, and sparks are raining down on the field as the Knights take the pennant. Roy Hobbs rounds the bases through the spark rain that even reaches the infield, proving to the world that Pop was right when he told him before the game he was the best batter he’d ever seen. But that is secondary, for Roy admitted before that his father wanted him to be a baseball player, and we acknowledge what he had to do and sacrifice to make his father’s dream come true.
Whatever happens afterwards is therefore redundant, and seeing the cycle of life closing when Roy plays catch with his son, just like his father did with him, we know that The Natural is a film about myth as much as it is about life and great expectations. It is not a realist film and it shouldn’t be considered factual, which is a truth that is difficult to accept for those that fail to understand the beauty of the game or to acknowledge the atmosphere of the film, how it feels and what it means to knock a baseball out of the park with a cracking piece of lumber. And the film even tells us, when Hobbs asks Mercy if he ever played himself, which he didn’t. The Natural is a beautiful masterpiece and a monument to those that actually know what it feels like to play ball.
