Makes ambitious promises to show baseball as a religion, and like sex, but then resorts to sport movie and love triangle cliches.

Rating: 4/10 (30 July 2004)

Baseball groupie Susan Sarandon only sleeps with one player a season: Tim Robbins and Kevin Costner both want to be that player. Except Costner refuses to compete - and now his assignment of getting star pitcher Robbins to buckle down and concentrate on Baseball is made much harder...
It starts well, with Sarandon's voiceover making these big promises to liken baseball to sex and religion, with a church choir playing in the background as the camera looks at various shrines in her room. I was so excited seeing this that when the movie turned out to be just another love triangle losing-team-triumphs sports movie, I was very disappointed.
There is still sex and superstition in it, but the film doesn't really fulfill its promise to demonstrate to me how baseball could be a religion to anybody except the players. Here's why:
1) The only two non-player characters we meet are a slut who sleeps with all and any of the players and Susan Sarandon, who only sleeps with one player a season, and is always in the power position, so she's more like a sexual predator. In introducing actual sex, the screenwriters have made it impossible for us to see how baseball could compare. We get the sense that sleeping with the men, and watching them play baseball are two completely different interests for these women.
2) The story is too small-scale to fulfill Sarandon's promises. We never get these global, grande feeling that baseball means more than just hitting balls and boredom. We only experience these few characters.
3) The other reason its not very effective is the screenplay is not well-focused. It meanders all over the place - giving us nondescript scenes of baseball, travelling on the road.
4) Costner's storyline is almost forgotten. Its just badly written. He never goes out of his way to pull Robbins in line because the love triangle interferes.
5) They pretty much assume that just showing us some Baseball will make us moan with ecstacy - but you pretty much need to already bring a love of Baseball to this flick to do that.
2/5