An Honest Review

Rating: 10/10 (29 November 2016)

I don't even know where to start on this one. I mean, when I was in college I picked a crap apartment because it was in walking distance of a few of my favorite bars. Now that I am almost 40, just turned 37, I picked my last apartment because it was across the street from a very active softball diamond.
I don't have kids, but that has never stopped me from going to high school and little league baseball games just to spend an afternoon in the summer watching baseball.
For anyone that has their soul crushed time and again because they had the misfortune of being raised in the cult of the Cubs...or I guess the Red Sox too, you already know the peace it brings when you get to watch a game whose outcome you don't really care about.
The minors have that appeal as well, at least when you live in a major northern city. But up here minor league games are often hard to find.
And, in 1988 they made a movie about minor league baseball.
Not only that, but they summed up a lot of the pure obsession we have for the sport.
In fact, "Bull Durham" opened with it.
"I believe in the Church of Baseball. I've tried all the major religions, and most of the minor ones. I've worshipped Buddha, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, trees, mushrooms, and Isadora Duncan. I know things. For instance, there are 108 beads in a Catholic rosary and there are 108 stitches in a baseball. When I learned that, I gave Jesus a chance." I could never throw a baseball well, I could never get my body to move in that awkward way, so I played football instead. A football I could throw no problem, but it was a sport I never really watched. It was always baseball I tuned into. It was baseball I loved. It was baseball I cared about.
It even got to the point where, after Sosa and McGwire in '98, I tried to stop, to shake that monkey off my back only to be relieved, 3 years later, when Bonds stole that honor away from the Cardinals...a team that I hold an irrational hatred towards for reasons only baseball fans can really explain.
"Bull Durham," explains ALL of that, the love, the hate, the euphoria, the deep depressions, and that affirmation of life in a way that lovingly mocks it all.
It feeds into the psyche of every baseball fan in a way the "Field of Dreams" and the "Sandlot" appealed to the child and the sense of perpetual summer in all of us.
It makes you laugh and it does it with wit and it's own little wisdoms.
Not only that, but it brings baseball to life for everyone, fans and laymen alike.
It's a masterpiece of comedy and a must see for any addict of the sport.