Baseball Movies Don’t Get More Baseball than Mr. 3000
One of my favorite conversation starters is to ask people to name a movie they love that lots of people hate. The answers I receive generally come from the usual roster of critically derided duds that nonetheless have followings of some kind — your Batmans v. Superman, your Ladies in the Water, your Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporiums and so forth. (O.K., fine, no one has ever said that last one.)
If someone returns the question — which they almost never do because most people are capable of normal small talk — I always answer the same way: Mr. Fuckin’ 3000, baby. Their reactions are always the same. They laugh in my goddamn face.
But to quote the great philosopher of my time, everyone is stupid except me.
Baseball, like boxing, is a sport that has faded greatly from the American zeitgeist while still somehow making for the best movies. By leaps and bounds basketball and football are my favorite sports, but what great movies have they ever inspired? Hoosiers, I guess? That Al Pacino “YOU GOTTA FIGHT FOR EVERY INCH” movie with the fake NFL teams? It’s not a distinguished list, is what I’m saying. (There is Hoop Dreams, of course, an honest-to-goodness contender for greatest American documentary of all time, but that’s not a narrative movie, so we won’t count it here.)
But baseball and boxing? Now we’re talking. I’ve watched less than five boxing matches in my entire life, but that hasn’t precluded me from watching and loving all the Rocky movies, all the Creed movies, Raging Bull, Cinderella Man, Million Dollar Baby, and on and on.
It’s a little different with baseball. There was a time when Little Baby Greg LOVED baseball. I have vibrant, cherished memories of the summer of 1995, of running to the shed door each morning for The Boston Globe to track Mo Vaughn’s home run total. I stayed a superfan all the way to the mid-Aughts, obsessing over the ’98 home run chase, the curse-breaking Red Sox, the steroid scandal, the goddamned fucking relentless Yankees. And, then, I don’t know…I just stopped caring, I guess? Little by little I cared less and less about baseball until I didn’t care at all. Once, I could name nearly every team’s lineup, 1 through 9, without much trouble. Now, I’d be hard pressed to name 9 professional baseball players, period. I haven’t watched a full game — inning to inning — on TV in nearly two decades.
Baseball has always had the reputation as a geezer’s pastime, but I don’t think that’s exactly correct. I think it’s a geezer’s AND a child’s pastime. It’s a pastime, in other words, for people with shit tons of time available to be passed. There are stretches in one’s life when spending 162 nights per year, at minimum, watching millionaires trot from station to station on a human-sized board game seems like a good thing to do, but these stretches don’t normally coincide with periods of adult productivity.
Still, my childhood love for baseball lingers. It was too big of a thing at too impressionable an age to not. When those pangs of baseball nostalgia ache, usually around this time of year, when I delude myself into believing maybe this is the year I get back into the sport, there’s always a baseball movie or two that really hits the spot. And no baseball movie loves what the modern sport actually is more than Mr. 3000.
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Here’s the movies premise, which was lightly mocked when it released in 2004 but which I think is fucking delightful. Brewer legend Stan Ross is a 47- year- old retired baseball star, who nine years prior quit on his team the moment he got his 3,000th career hit. In the years since, Ross made the accolade his entire persona; as we meet him, he is holding court in his Mr. 3000 Milwaukee bar, waiting for his call to Cooperstown. (The movie trades in an old wives’ tale — at least, I think it’s tale — that says 3,000 career hits guarantees one admission into the Baseball Hall of Fame.)
Then a clerical error is discovered. Turns out that three of Ross’ career hits were counted twice, meaning that Mr. 3,000 is actually Mr. 2,997. Aggrieved and clearly missing the game more than he admits, Stan Ross rejoins the perpetually mid Milwaukee Brewers as a middle-aged shlub, trying to eke out three more hits.
Now that we know what the movie’s about, we must talk about its best quality. That would be, without a doubt, its star, the titular Mr. 3000, played wonderfully by the tragically- no- longer- with- us Bernie Mac. It’s a — pun obviously intended — pitch perfect performance, one that with every viewing makes me lament that we didn’t get twenty more years of such performances from the legendary comic. Effortlessly Bernie Mac exudes the otherworldly charisma of our greatest sports stars while letting leak out the little rivers of self-doubt and pain that that magnetism so often conceals. He’s funny and charming and cool and handsome. He’s also a little pathetic, a little angry, and a lot fucking lonely. It’s not always easy to play a character so cocksure, so rich and successful, and make him illicit such sympathy, but Bernie Mac does it. He makes it look as easy as Ken Griffey, Jr. stroking a hanging curve. (I told you: I haven’t watched baseball in decades. My references are gonna be dated!)
Bernie Mac’s talents as a comedian were carved in granite long before Mr. 3000 came out, but what I always take away when I watch the movie is how good he is as a dramatic actor. There are really sweet dramatic moments in this movie! I promise! One particular favorite is a scene halfway through, when Stan Ross is in the midst of his comeback and failing spectacularly. He’s the laughingstock of the sports media world. One night he’s home alone surfing the tube. He stops on the The Best Damn Sports Show Period. (Remember that show, fellow Olds?!) Their gang of talking heads is relentlessly piling on Ross until, almost like a dream, they’re outside the TV and surrounding Ross at his home. Tom Arnold says something like “Stan Ross doesn’t care about any of this! He’s probably out partying with a bunch of bitches right now.” The juxtaposition of that line against the image of old-ass Stan Ross pathetically eating Chinese takeout alone is deep stuff for a silly baseball movie. It hints at the cruelty of sports media; the toxicity of parasocial relationships; and the insane standards with which we hold uber-successful athletes — particularly, of course, black athletes. And it does so in a way that seems true to life rather than forced. That was EXACTLY how shows of that era talked. I watched all those shows. I felt that way, too.
That’s the thing about Mr. 3000: it’s made my people who clearly understand the sport. Rock critic Stephen Hyden once said of the Rolling Stones’s masterpiece Exile on Main Street that, while its status as the greatest rock and roll album of all time is certainly up for debate, there should be no doubt that it’s the most rock and roll rock and roll album of all time. Essentially, he argued that the album lived the concept of rock and roll better than any other, embodying everything from the very, very good to the very, very bad. That’s exactly how I feel about Mr. 3000. It may not be the best baseball movie ever, but it’s the most baseball baseball movie ever. This is to the movie’s eternal credit; watching it is like speedrunning an entire era of early 21st- century- Major League Baseball.
Most baseball movies use the sport to tell a story about something else. Field of Dreams uses it muse on fathers and sons, on generational trauma and the tragedy of death. The Natural uses it to retell the fable of the American dream, to break down the myth of our American exceptionalism. Moneyball is about satisfying Satan’s demand that Jonah Hill receive multiple Oscar nominations. You get the idea. Mr. 3000, on the other hand, uses baseball to tell a story about motherfuckin’ baseball. Sure, there are themes there, mostly about accepting aging and the consequences of the me-first athlete mentality, but Mr. 3000 never foregrounds anything but baseball. It’s about a baseball star, who discovers a baseball problem, and tries to fix it through playing lots of baseball.
The minutia of the movie is so believable. The presentation, the video games, the commercials, the personalities. It all feels exactly like I remember it when I was a superfan. It seems like a movie made by baseball experts who are just kinda learning how to make a movie as they go. I have a suspicion the opposite is true for most other baseball movies, and that makes all the difference.
Case in point is the skip, the Brewers’ long-time coach, played by character actor legend Paul Sorvino. Coach Sorvino, who was also the coach when Ross originally quit on the team, spends 95 percent of his scream time not. speaking. a. single. word. It’s amazing that this works — I mean, you got the don from Goodfellas! Give him six monologs — but work it does. Beautifully. With just body language and knowing glances, Sorvino expertly embodies the washed-up, no-more-fucks-given baseball coach archetype. Wordlessly, he and Bernie Mac create an entirely lived-in relationship and backstory. This restraint plays off beautifully, with the entirety of the coach’s dialogue coming in one profanity-laced tirade toward an umpire. It’s hilarious and oddly touching. And could only be made by people who understood the sport, implicitly and deeply.
Then, of course, there’s the ending. Look, I know that these things are more like personal diary entries that I’m forcing you to read rather than regular movie reviews. But I still don’t want to spoil everything. Let’s just say that the premise of Mr. 3000 naturally paints the movie in a little bit of a narrative corner, and that the way the screenwriters find out of it is perfect. Always makes me choke up a bit. (PUN ALSO INTENDED.)
So it’s springtime and baseball is back. The dream of a pennant begins anew for true fans, and the dream of renewed interest begins for lapsed fans like me. Maybe I’ll get back into it. Hell, maybe I’ll resubscribe to The Boston Globe and follow along, old-school style. (Just kidding, I obviously won’t do that.)
I’ll give baseball a shot, like I do every year, and I’ll fail by mid-May, like I do every year. And when that happens, I’ll just throw on Mr. 3000. Then, at once, I’ll be transported to a time when I had no issues caring, to a time when, in fact, I cared about it as much as anything in the world.
