A Great Baseball Movie

Rating: 8/10 (10 September 2016)

Continuing my plan to watch every Kevin Costner movie in order, I come to For Love Of The Game.
Plot In A Paragraph: Before an unimportant last game of the season, Billy Chapel (KC) a 40-year-old pitcher for the Detroit Tigers, is having a bad morning. He wakes up with a hangover and learns (a) the owner is selling the team, (b) he's being traded, and (c) his girlfriend Jane (Kelly Preston) is leaving him. As he pitches the game he thinks back on his relationship with Jane.
This is two movies, it's a rubbish love story, with a good baseball movie trying to get out. I love all the baseball aspects of this movie. Everything is spot on, especially when KC zones out the crowd. But the love story leaves me cold, KC has next to zero chemistry with Kelly Preston. Both have been much better, with other actors in different movies, and they had better chemistry with other actors in the movie. As for their characters he is grumpy and self obsessed and she is moody and insecure, and to make it worse, both are selfish, and are pretty unlikeable at times.
I still get chills when Chapel realises what he is about to achieve, and he admits to his catcher, he didn't think he had anything left, and I feel a lot of pleasure in seeing Chapel get "more than a little help from his friends".
For a sports movie, it's surprisingly different, Chapel is not an under dog, he is a great athlete, who has had a wonderful career, who just happens to be in the twilight of his career and the game being played is "a throw away, that means nothing" as described by John C Reilly (who may just be my favourite character in the full movie) as catcher Gus Sinski. As for the rest of the supporting cast Jenna Malone is OK, whilst JK Simmons and Brian Cox also offers solid support as the teams coach.
Before watching it today I would have rated this 9/10, but now it's reduced to an 8/10