Like you're gonna live forever

Eight Men Out

(1988)

You know, when I notice stuff like Eddie Collins (Bill Irwin) batting right-handed, and Eddie Cicotte (David Strathairn) pitching out of the windup with a runner at first, and Ray Schalk (Gordon Clapp) flashing his pitcher a sequence of signals even though there's no runner on second to steal a straight one-finger-for-the-fastball-two-for-the-curve, I have to remind myself that there's just a shitload of complexity to keep track of in this simple game, and that doesn't change the fact that this is one of the best baseball films ever, and certainly the one that best balances the game's place in American mythology with its place in the real, nitty-gritty world. And the coda, with Joe Jackson (D. B. Sweeney, who gives one of the best portrayals of tragically profound ignorance I've ever seen) playing ball under an assumed named somewhere in the swamps of Jersey, is an elegy triumphantly sad. And as it happens, elegiac is how I want my baseball right now.