Jaylon Thompson profiles… Bill Duplissea! It’s the Royals ace replay man.

“The first four innings, I’ve got to be 100%,” Duplissea said. “I can’t lose a challenge in the first four innings. The fifth and sixth (innings), a little tougher for me. And the seventh, I’ll roll the dice.

“… I try to play it like leverage. Importance of the game and stuff like that.”

…and, that’s all the official stories for today.

How about this official non-Royals story from David Fischer at the Associated Press? The Tampa Bay Rays and local leadership announced a deal for a $2.3B ballpark and surrounding neighborhood.

The Rays ownership reached an agreement earlier this year with Hillsborough College to build the stadium and mixed-use entertainment district on the college campus and to renovate some of the college’s buildings. The property is located next to the New York Yankees’ spring training facility and across a highway from Raymond James Stadium, home of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

The Rays have said they hope to have the new stadium built within three years.

That leaves just the A’s to get their house in order. Then, once MLB sorts out the CBA over the coming months (hopefully), we’ll see 2 expansion teams.

Blogs are a little short, too. Lesky didn’t write yesterday. Craig Brown hasn’t been seen since the start of the month. Royals Keep didn’t write anything yesterday. Is there some news embargo I don’t know about?

How about we give Darin Watson and U.L.’s Toothpick the top spot? For the last few years, he’s done something unique. He picks a notable Royals season and writes a “This Date In Royals History” every day. This year, he’s writing about the 1976 Royals. And, for instance, yesterday, he wrote about what happened to the Royals on May 14th, 1976:

Kansas City picked up its fourth straight win, outscoring their opponents 43-11 in those games. The hot hitting continued as Tom Poquette led off the first inning with a single against Chicago’s Pete Vuckovich. Amos Otiis followed with his sixth home run of the season for a 2-0 lead. John Mayberry doubled with one out, and Al Cowens singled with two outs for a 3-0 lead.

He even adds in little nuggets like this:

Somebody who did have three hits was White, who had been struggling at the plate as he was in the process of taking the second base job from fan favorite Cookie Rojas. White admitted that he had been hearing criticism from the fans.

“They’re even throwing money at me. The other night they threw 35 cents at me, I gave the umpire a nickel. A quarter sailed past my eyes out there. I don’t want to get hit, lose an eye, or be out of the lineup for months. I just wish they’d quit throwing at me.”–White, quoted by Sid Bordman, The Kansas City Star, May 15, 1976

We haven’t done movie reviews in more than a month and this is only our third set all year, even though it’s May. We have an odd mix today: a trio of Disney movies we watched after the Olympics and another trio related to the state of Iowa. A common thread? I don’t know that there is one.

This is exactly the movie you’d expect to get if you told Disney to make an inspirational movie about the 1980 Olympic hockey team. Kurt Russell does a great job as Herb Brooks. But, aside from him, it’s a mostly no-name cast that plays a couple of steps up from a made-for-TV movie. It tries to be a lot of things and underdevelops most of them. There are dashes of Herb’s family drama, little bits of Jim Craig and Mike Eruzione, and some Forrest Gump-esque touchstones of 70s history. That said, the central narrative of Team USA pulling together is strong. The movie is fine – there’s nothing glaringly wrong with it – I just don’t understand how it finds its way to some Top Sports Movies lists.

Speaking of Disney, here’s their cleaned-up hockey version of The Bad News Bears. But it has enough going for it that it spawned a couple of sequels, an animated series, and an NHL franchise. It rode the early 90s wave of NHL popularity and has both the look and sensibilities of that time. It’s a paint-by-numbers sports plot where cliche kids and cliche adults do sports movie cliches. But director Stephen Herek has everyone and everything doing what they’re supposed to do. The movie never takes itself too seriously, and Emilio Estevez plays along. There are some memorable scenes like the kids quacking at the principal, Estevez quacking at his boss, and the Flying V. We all learn a lesson and go home happy.

To say Cool Runnings is a cliché sports movie is fair. But it also sells it short. Jon Turteltaub delivers a clean, well-paced, and well-structured movie that isn’t a complete retread. It had an interesting production history. The Jamaican bobsled team was originally funded by the Jamaica Tourist Board and American George B. Fitch. It was treated as a joke by North American media but became a focus of American Olympic TV coverage after the USA ice hockey team lost. The movie was originally supposed to be a drama and a more authentic Jamaica tale. However, between a director change and studio pressure, we received the finished product. Similarly, the movie earns its “loosely based on true events” descriptor – it’s no documentary. I’m not Jamaican so I’m in no position to say how paternalistic or caricatured it ended up and/or whether it’s well received. What I can say is that John Candy does well in his earnest straight-man role rather than as a cut-up. The movie is quotable, has a good soundtrack, and is looked upon fondly today.

I’m not sure how much more I can add to this that hasn’t already been said. It’s an iconic baseball movie and Craig Calcaterra is 100% wrong. I don’t (didn’t) have a complicated father/son relationship, so that doesn’t hit me as it does some people. But I love its romanticization of baseball and second chances. Yes, it’s another one of those movies from the 80s and 90s that lionizes Boomers, the decades they grew up in, and the American Dream. As for the nuts and bolts of the movie, the cinematography is simple, but effective, and so is the music. Kevin Costner, Amy Madigan, James Earl Jones, Ray Liotta, and more all give good to great performances and that’s what makes it work. It was nominated for three Academy Awards and was added to the National Film Registry.

We watched the 1962 film version, starring Robert Preston, Shirley Jones, Buddy Hackett, et al. It’s from the 50s and it’s a musical, so it’s a little slow – but you know what you’re getting yourself into. Even through modern eyes, it’s eminently watchable (even without a monorail). The music is iconic, particularly “Seventy-Six Trombones”. There are lots of timeless jokes like an American Gothic sight gag. After starring for years on Broadway, Preston is a delight, owning every scene he is in. It’s amusing that the studio wanted to replace him with a bigger name. He is Harold Hill and no one could have given a better performance. His delivery of “I always think there’s a band, kid” is one of my favorite in all of cinema. The play is a love letter to Iowa: they’re not rubes, they’re the hardest to con and that’s how he got his “foot caught in the door”. The finale with the parents loving the horrible band is a fun twist that still lands. It’s a charming musical and well worth a look, even if it’s just to watch Preston chew scenery.

Bridges of Madison County (1995)

Needless to say our son did not watch the final movie with us. It’s easy to start out with the plaudits for this film: Meryl Streep gives an Oscar-nominated performance, Clint Eastwood is perfectly understated in playing off of her, and they have tremendous onscreen chemistry. Eastwood’s direction is superb, making it both earthy yet exotic. It’s slow and deliberate, but I rarely found myself clock-watching. The framing from the kids’ perspective is used to break up tension and add an additional thematic layer.

All that said, I’m not the target audience, and it was a hard watch for me. And I think it’s less about the movie than the source material. There’s not a lot of deeper meaning here, but it pretends to have some as does some of the analysis around the movie. Yes, I know it’s the 1960s, and women couldn’t even have bank accounts. But this movie isn’t about that. This isn’t a modern story about mental load and how that disproportionately affects women. Richard works when she works; they both have the same limited leisure time – life on a farm is hard and they both do what they can. The affair only happens in the first place because Richard is taking the kids to show a cow at the Illinois state fair – he’s involved in child rearing. While these are all things true of that time period, the movie goes out of its way to show that Francesca’s husband is a good man and she has a loving family.

So in the end, this is just a raw hedonistic fantasy all dressed up. We all make choices in our lives, and each time we go down a path, other paths close. If you want a family, as Francesca does, you can’t be a nomad wandering from place to place and person to person, as Kincaid does. There’s a scene where Robert explicitly points out how this led to his own divorce. You can have one or the other, but you can’t have both. Francesca wants to have her proverbial cake and eat it, too. She’s not trapped in a relationship by circumstance – she chose this life, warts and all, and willingly chose it again in the end. Could you imagine gender swapping this movie? Guy has a loving wife and family, but his job is a grind. He’s at a conference and has an affair with a free spirit there. Nobody is seeing that as a great love story; he’s just a jerk who should have bought a sports car for his midlife crisis rather than breaking up his family.

This all makes the core message, climax, and denouement fall flat with me. The affair makes neither sympathetic. Robert breezes into town, does all the right things at first, watches another woman trying to pick up the pieces of an affair, yet continues down the wrong path. Francesca knows all this, lives all this, and still goes down the same wrong path. In the end, we get “this guy I had an affair with for four days of my octogenarian life is my soulmate, so, kids, be a dear, and spread my ashes near his instead of your loving father”. Never mind that she admits to herself that this was a fantasy all in her head, and she acknowledges that if she ran off with him, it would never last, and she’d resent him for the life she left behind. That seems to run counter to Robert’s “this kind of certainty comes but just once in a lifetime” message. So why again are we cheering for this couple? Why do we want her to open the car door and run to him in the rain?

It’s frustrating because a lot of the “technical” aspects of the movie – especially the acting and directing – were so well done. However, the characters and themes are bad. Then again, I suppose that was true of a lot of the literature I had to read in school, too.

I’ve already posted the Field of Dreams speech twice (02.20, 03.27) this year. Not that I didn’t think about doing it again.

But how about something different: How about the finale from The Music Man?