"You throw the ball. You hit the ball. You catch the ball. You got it?"

Rating: 6/10 (21 February 2017)

I sometimes get this movie confused with "Major League"; they came out within a year of each other and quite obviously, they're both baseball films. Now that I've caught up again with this picture, I'll probably be able to keep them apart well enough. "Major League" had that great 'Wild Thing' sequence going for it, and it would have helped if this one could have snared a catchy tune of it's own. The closest it came was a brief snippet of Credence Clearwater's 'Center Field' song, but it didn't hang around long enough to make a lasting impression.
Of the three principals, Kevin Costner comes across as having the best character here, but I would have held him in higher regard if he didn't let his libido get in the way when it came to Baseball Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon). With all the sex and profanity in the film, there were times that it felt more like a locker room joke than a story about the national pastime. After Crash Davis (Costner) had his tumble in the hay with Annie toward the end of the story, I had to wonder whether General Mills did the right thing signing off on that box of Wheaties on her kitchen table. I don't think the Breakfast of Champions had that kind of competition in mind.
When the film does broach the 'love of the game', the dialog raises the standard of the picture up a notch, as when Crash describes his twenty one days 'in The Show'. I've heard the term used before, and it does seem to appropriately describe a reverence for making it to the Big Leagues. But then you have a scene in which Crash uses that one word that's a no-no with umpires, and it drags the story back down to the gutter again, at least for this viewer.
As a corollary to my summary line above, uttered by team manager Skip (Trey Wilson) to his hapless team in the early part of the story, Ebby 'Nuke' LaLoosh offers up his own version later on when he eventually makes it to The Show himself - "Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. Sometimes it rains". For me, this might have been one of those 'sometime it rains' pictures. Considering that Kevin Costner starred in the great Academy Award nominated "Field of Dreams" the very year following "Bull Durham", this one more closely resembles a strike-out.