Taking a Swing at the Movies

Baseball is a sport of social control.

The decision of an outside arbiter governs each inning, each at-bat, and indeed, each pitch. Baseball relies upon official rulings to regulate the game and the on-field behavior of its players.

The new movie Major League takes this idea--baseball as a sport of social control--to an extreme, depicting a manipulative, capitalist club owner's battle to subjugate the players that she considers mere commodities.

The concept is simple enough: the beautiful, wealthy owner of the lowly Cleveland Indians (Margaret Whitton) decides to move the club to the more profitable environment of Miami. In order to prevent resistance to the move, she orders her minions to gather a team so bad that it is guaranteed to land in last place.

Her flunkies spring hurler "Wild Thing" Vaughn (Charlie Sheen) from the slammer, take a veteran catcher (Tom Berenger) out of exile from the Mexican Leagues and find a voo-doo-worshipping Caribbean slugger (Dennis Haysbert), who can slam fast balls into left field but fans at any curve ball.

"Wild Thing" immediately finds himself at odds with the conservative world of baseball. His hair is goofy--spiked high with a razor-cut zig-zag on the sides. His casual attitude toward his appearance causes the manager to chide, "We wear caps and sleeves at this level, son."

Despite their odd quirks and diverse backgrounds, a bond develops between the teammates, and somehow they find themselves winning--a situation that the swanky owner will not tolerate.

In this part of the movie, director David Ward hammers home the influence of capitalist manipulation on baseball.

During each successful contest, Ward crafts a picture of the owner that makes her an extreme caricature of the capitalist class. Sitting in her luxury box seat, flanked by her lackey general manager and two servants clad in white dinner jackets with black bow-ties, she frets over the success of her ball club and sips a cool drink. She exudes the air of either a colonial plantation owner, who cannot squeeze any more productivity out of the slaves who are cultivating the fields, or a Roman emperor who condescendingly passes judgment over her subjects at a gladiator's match.

"We're 15-24, what's the problem?" she demands of the GM. But she believes she knows the reason: "We're coddling these guys too much."

Propellor-driven plane rides, nauseating bus-trips, broken hot tubs and cold showers follow as the owner makes it as hard as possible for the team to win.

Faced with so much adversity and so much social control, the players rely on the only thing they can be sure of: their skills as baseball players.

Knowing that even their owner wants them to lose and, in fact, does everything she can to make them lose, the players bond together and battle as a team.

Baseball's social control cannot diffuse the individual achievements on the diamond. With each hit, catch, throw and pitch, the players regain their humanity.

A baseball comedy lies within the midst of all this pseudo-theorizing. Now, I'm not an expert on baseball, but I know that Major League is a lot of fun. The baseball parts are exciting, the locker-room antics are funny and the love parts, as the veteran catcher trys to get back together with hisex-wife, contain an element of truth.

When you applaud a great defensive play thatoccurs in a movie, you know that it's realistic.Plus, even though most of the action is staged, itis frightengly accurate. In fact, the footage fromYankee Stadium and Fenway Park looks like it cameright off of NBC's Game of the Week.

Even though baseball is a reactionary sport, italso contains theatre, pageantry and imagination,all of which make more than a welcome appearancein Major League. See it