Trouble With the Curve

From January 2013

I began watching “Trouble With the Curve” in my hotel room the other day with these three certainties:

1. I love baseball.

2. Clint Eastwood made Unforgiven, which is one of my 10 favorite movies.

3. I love Amy Adams.

I came out of “Trouble with the Curve” facing only one certainty:

1. Justin Timberlake was, by far, my favorite character. Justin Bleepin’ Timberlake.

In other words, Trouble with the Curve was a very confusing movie experience.

I suppose I knew, going in, that it would be a lousy movie. Lots of people had told me that. The trailer had told me that. The reviews I’d read had told me that. My expectation was very, very low. On the movie plus-minus scale, I came in expecting, at best, a 2-star movie, and I was fully braced for a 1-star.

Instead, I got a movie that doesn’t really fit anywhere on the Movie Plus-Minus scale. Oh, as a movie, it’s probably a 1 or 1.5-star — harmless drivel, ridiculous plot turns, absurd dialogue, and the fun of seeing a few recognizable actors like John Goodman and the actor who played both the spitballer in “Major League: and Dan Devine in “Rudy.”

But the baseball … well, I’ll get back to that.

The plot — and there will be all sorts of “spoilers” in here, so stop if you want to see this movie, though I will say this movie seems kind of spoiler-proof since you see everything coming long before it arrives — the plot is built around an old scout named Clint Eastwood who is played by Clint Eastwood and looks just like Clint Eastwood. I guess the guy’s name in the movie wasn’t Clint Eastwood; it was something else, but there is literally not one second when you don’t think of him as Clint Eastwood. The movie begins with him trying to pee, and you think: “Hey, look, Clint Eastwood is trying to pee.” It’s like that throughout. Hey, Clint Eastwood is eating a hot dog! Hey, Clint Eastwood is breaking a bottle!

Actually, the opening scene is not of Clint Eastwood peeing, but instead of a horse galloping. Don’t ask.

I imagine everything I’m about to write you’ve already read somewhere… but I’ll write it anyway. Eastwood portrays the scout who has signed every single good Atlanta Braves player ever. Ralph Garr. Dale Murphy. Tom Glavine. Chipper Jones. Andruw Jones. Jair Jurrjens. You kind of had to wonder why the Braves even had a scouting department when this guy could do it all himself. Anyway, Eastwood is getting old and is beginning to lose his eyesight, but he’s still beating the bushes because he’s a baseball genius, and also he doesn’t know what else to do with his life.

Now, the one thing about this movie I knew going in was that it was supposed to be an attack on Moneyball — a crotchety old scout attack on the people who don’t watch baseball, don’t love baseball, don’t appreciate the little things in baseball but instead look merely at soulless numbers on insipid computers. To accomplish this, the casting director searched the nation for the most obviously unlikable person in America. So they got this other really unlikable guy — sort of a Michael Keaton meets Chucky — who immediately demonstrates his statistical chops by talking about a guy with a .350 batting average in Class AA.

Those computer nerds with their newfangled batting averages!

Eastwood has no use for computers … or people who use them … or people who have heard of them … or batting averages … or talking … or coffee tables that get in his way. He likes eating pizza for breakfast. I think that pretty much sums up his personality. He’s also the prototypical “lousy father … but with a secret reason.” His daughter is the normally wonderful Amy Adams, who plays a workaholic young lawyer about to be named partner but then finds out what “really matters in life. She finds this out (of course) by skinny-dipping with her clothes on.

Justin Timberlake is the “love interest,” the one-time can’t-miss prospect who hurt his arm but loves the game so much that he has decided he to become a baseball broadcaster. He also decides that the best way to achieve his announcing goal is to begin scouting for the Boston Red Sox. You know, that’s how all the great ones start. Who can forget Vin Scully scouting Duke Snider before getting his broadcasting gig.

I do have to say, though, I actually found Timberlake’s call of the Bernie Carbo home run in the 1975 World Series to be relatively charming and fun. By “relatively,” I of course, mean relative to the rest of the movie, which was not charming or fun in the least.

No, the rest of the movie was, well, let’s talk about the plot. Let me explain — no, it is too much, let me sum up: Eastwood, as a legendary scout, is supposed to keep an eye on the No. 1 prospect in the draft. Alas, Eastwood is losing his eyesight, so that causes a problem. The Braves’ scouting director, John Goodman, decides the best way to deal with this is to ask Amy Adams to travel with her father. She is supposed to be preparing for a monster case that will get her the partnership she has long craved, but she decides to go anyway. So, you know, that’s all pretty believable.

Even more believably, even though Adams has been estranged from her father and has led a workaholic life, she has found time to follow baseball very, very closely and become something of a scouting savant herself. She becomes his eyes.

You know. Sure.

Eastwood’s Braves have the second pick in the draft, and they’re watching this super-hitting prospect. But the Red Sox have the first pick. And the Red Sox are so invested in their first pick that they send brand-new employee Justin Timberlake, who wants to be a broadcaster, as the only person to scout the prospect.

You know. Why not?

TWTC makes clear right away that this top prospect is a jerk. They do this by having him say a couple of jerky things. But, apparently, none of the scouts have ever talked to him, so they are either unaware of his bad attitude or they don’t care.

Thing is, the bad attitude isn’t the biggest red flag on this prospect. What Eastwood alone finds out near the end of the movie is that he can’t hit a curveball. He would have known this earlier had he just looked at the movie's title.

Despite this seemingly fatal flaw of not being able to hit the curve, the nerd assistant GM wants this kid badly because of his computer, or something, and so he convinces the Braves GM to draft him, if available. The kid IS available because Eastwood, having taken a liking to Justin Timberlake, convinces him to recommend passing on the player. It is one of the most astonishing bits of collusion ever captured on screen.

The Red Sox DO pass on the prospect, and the Braves snag him over Eastwood’s protestations, which makes Timberlake feel like he was duped, which is bad because Amy Adams has now realized that she loves him after skinny-dipping with him with their clothes on.

At this point, the movie does what only the premier dumb movies do — it takes what had been an entirely implausible premise and quadruples it by involving a phenom pitcher who happens to be playing catch outside of Amy Adams’ hotel window. window. This leads to a Whammer-Roy Hobbs like contest that the Braves apparently set up to humiliate the No. 2 pick in the draft in front of their own media and organization. The computer-toting GM is fired; Timberlake somehow gets to his true feelings about baseball and Amy Adams; Eastwood rides off into the sunset on a bus.

Along the way, there are also a few prostate jokes and the least funny scout banter I have ever heard.

But, hey, implausible and mindless movies are a part of Hollywood, a big part, and I didn’t really care about any of that. Make it unrealistic. Make it stupid. Make it pointless. I don’t mind spending a mindless 90 minutes now and again.

What I did not expect was this: I have never seen a movie that was so NEEDLESSLY dumb about baseball. Sure, all baseball movies, even the best, have their flaws and bizarre inconsistencies — Roy Hobbs’ knocking the cover off the ball not scoring the winning run, Shoeless Joe Jackson throwing left-handed but batting right-handed and so on. But the thing that makes TWTC so amazing was that it basically gets nothing right — and the movie suffers for each incomprehensible choice. It would be like making Bobby Thomson’s Shot Heard Round the World in the third inning.

The things they got wrong don’t make the movie any more tangible to non-baseball fans. They don’t make the movie more entertaining. They don’t improve the story in the slightest. They could have made a thoroughly ridiculous movie with the same ridiculous plot and actually gotten some of the baseball right.

Some examples:

1. The nerd assistant GM. Why would they have him quoting batting average? I mean, if you are trying to make fun of the nerd GM in the first place, the WHOLE POINT of it is that he uses these goofy-sounding acronym stats like VORP or xFIP — I mean, how could you leave that out of the movie? I’m not saying I would find it funny to hear Eastwood say, ”VORP? What the hell is VORP? That sounds like the sound I made last night after dinner.” But it would have been funnier than what he actually does.

2. The whole story hinges on the idea that organizations would base their entire decision of a first-round pick on the perspective of ONE SCOUT (in the case of the Red Sox organization, one scout who had never scouted a single game in his life). You don’t have to be a baseball fan to wonder, “Why won’t John Goodman get his butt out of the office and go see the player himself?”

3. At one point, the nerd assistant GM sends a “spy” to check out the player behind Eastwood’s back. Forgetting for a moment the sheer inanity of this — shouldn’t you PROMOTE the kid for wanting a second opinion — the whole point of this move goes against the premise, no? I mean, this guy’s a computer geek who only cares about his computer and numbers and doesn’t care what the player looks like. So why would he send someone to actually see the player? Does this make any sense at all? My head hurts.

4. A small but, I think, striking point: Everyone keeps referring to this prospect as possibly being “the next Albert Pujols.” They must say that three or four times in the movie. Why Pujols? The reason I ask is, as everyone in baseball knows, Pujols is precisely the argument AGAINST scouts, who whiffed on him 13 different ways (he went in the 13th round). If someone had been going solely on stats, they might have actually taken Pujols earlier. TWTC couldn’t have picked one of the countless players the scouts got right? Mickey Mantle? Ken Griffey? Somebody? Anybody?

5. TWTC decided, for reasons unknown, to cast a stunningly unathletic person as the prospect. I mean, this guy’s a chunk. I have absolutely no idea why they did this. Why would they not have cast a tall, athletic switch-hitter with speed and grace in the role? I mean, this was a pretty big budget movie — Eastwood, Adams, Timberlake — they couldn’t find a single person who looked like a great ballplayer? When the assistant GM later shouts that this guy could be a “five-tool player,” it was so laughably dumb to anyone who actually knows what “five tools” means that I wondered if anybody — ANYBODY — had actually seen a baseball game before the filming started.

6. At one point, the assistant GM talks about wanting to trade draft picks so he can get the No. 1 selection. You cannot trade draft picks in baseball. This isn’t an especially well-known rule, but baseball fans know it — so why would you have that line in the movie? Especially because the BETTER line would be something like, “Man, I want this guy so bad, I’d trade up if baseball would just let us.” That line is accurate, and unlike the movie line, it actually HELPS the plot.

7. When the amazing left-handed pitcher happens to be playing catch right outside Amy Adams’ hotel — he had sold peanuts at the big prospect’s high school games — Adams puts on catching gear and catches him for a few pitches. Now, let’s stop for a minute. Let’s say that Amy Adams, for various bizarre reasons that don’t immediately come to mind, really knew how to catch top-level pitching. I do not have a single friend who I would have any confidence in doing this, but let’s just say that during travels with her father, for some impossible-to-understand reason, she learned how to catch 95 mph fastballs and staggering curveballs. OK, even if that was true, we know from the movie that she has been a workaholic lawyer for at least seven years, working weekends, so it does not seem likely that she has been out catching big-league prospects. We also know she has been estranged from her father, so she did not really have access to big-league prospects. We also know … well, forget it, we know how patently ridiculous it is for her to put on catching gear and catch the guy.

But here’s my question: Why do it? Why put that in the movie? Adams’ baseball credentials have long been verified (she knew everyone in the Frank Robinson trade). Why could she not just watch the guy pitch, you know, the way scouts do, and determine from the side that he was a young Sandy Koufax? Why would you add this ludicrous scene?

8. At the end of the movie, the prospect is in the batting cage hitting batting practice home runs — this is how we end up with the scene that he faces the lefty pitcher Amy Adams found. And I realize this is obscure, but I found myself wondering: How did the team get the No. 1 pick — especially someone with this kid’s attitude and his father’s greed — signed so quickly and into a batting cage? I realize that this was necessary to advance the matchup with the kid who sold peanuts, but that plot twist is so stupid anyway; I remain baffled.

9. At some point, the evil nerd assistant GM shouts incredulously in the draft room something like this: “We’re going to base our No. 1 pick on a scout who can’t see and his lawyer daughter? Are we crazy?” It was, without question, the most baseball-savvy question of the entire movie.

10. At some point, Amy Adams and Justin Timberlake start clogging on the dance floor. This is not a baseball issue, but it’s so monumentally stupid that it had to be mentioned. “What are they doing?” Timberlake asks, “That’s clogging,” Amy Adams says. I doubt there has been a more stupid exchange in a movie since the famous Padame-Anakin thing from one of the Star Wars prequel fiascos:

Padame: We used to lie in the sand and let the sun dry us and try to guess the names of the birds singing.

Anakin: I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating, and it gets everywhere. Not like here. Here, everything is smooth and soft.

Here, finally, is my biggest beef with Trouble With The Curve: Nobody in this movie gets what makes scouts great in the first place.

In so, so, so many ways TWtC does a much greater disservice to scouts than Moneyball ever could. Sure, it morphs stats-people into unrecognizably cartoonish figures who hate baseball and love those crazy statistics like “batting average.” I guess that was the point.

But wasn’t the point also to celebrate baseball scouts? Instead, it makes them grumpy and unfunny old men* who have some sort of weird super-power ability to hear drifting hands. This is exactly the stale depiction of scouts that Moneyball did such a good job of lampooning in the first place.

*I cannot overemphasize how stupid the scout exchanges were. At one point, they were apparently trying to wind up one of the old scouts by saying that Ice Cube is a better actor than Robert DeNiro. No. Really. I’ve been around scouts’ banter many, many times in my life, and I have never once heard anything that stupid or stale in my life. They could have gone out to dinner with any three scouts, written down what they said VERBATIM, and it would have been funnier than that.

Scouts are an integral part of baseball. And you would think a movie ABOUT scouts would at least get at why. It doesn’t. I’ll give you just one point: For unknown reasons, TWtC decided to make the prospect utterly obnoxious and his father a greedy jerk and the high school coach a win-at-all-costs kind of loser. They did all these things as side effects — I can only imagine this was done so that the audience would root against the prospect, which is fine. That’s Hollywood stuff.

But here’s the point: If you want to celebrate a scout, why wouldn’t you have him NOTICE all these things? This gets at the very heart of what scouts do. They watch the games. They talk to the players. They learn all about the families. They listen to the fans. If you are doing a whole movie about what scouts can tell you that computers can’t — this is very crux of the argument. One of my favorite scout stories involves a scout in Venezuela who saw a kid play who was too small, too slow, and couldn’t hit a lick. But the scout loved him, loved him because he had these beautiful soft hands, the ball just stuck to his glove, velcro, and he had this marvelous arm and this wonderful attitude. The scout kept following around the kid — there was just something about him.

The scout called the GM personally to plead the case. He said he only needed $5,000 to sign the kid. $5K. It was nothing. The GM said no. Kid can’t run. Kid can’t hit. Who cares about soft hands? The scout said, “Fine, I’ll put up the 5K myself and prove you wrong.” The GM was impressed with that, and he liked the scout a lot, and he said, “OK, fine, you can have 5K.”

The player turned out to be Andres Blanco — not a star, certainly, not even an everyday player. But the guy got 654 plate appearances in the big leagues, made some dazzling defensive plays, and was one hell of a deal for $5,000.

This is what scouts do. They try to learn everything about players — it isn’t just noticing a hitch in their swing or that they land on their heel when they pitch or that they have heavy legs, which suggests they might someday be fat. No, the job is getting inside the player. Does the kid have a substance abuse issue? Is he selfish? Does he respond to coaching? Can he handle himself socially? Can he rebound from failure? Does he have a commitment to getting better? Does he have a hunger to be a great ballplayer?

You can make too much of these questions, of course. But you can make too little of them, too. I just don’t see why the movie couldn’t have had Eastwood saying, “Look, this kid is arrogant and obnoxious, and his father’s even worse, and while he has talent, he’ll never make it in baseball.” Follow that storyline. That seems to me a real conflict between computers and human observation, between stats and scouts. OK, maybe then you have to come up with a different ending from a dominant left-handed pitcher just showing up outside the scout’s daughter’s hotel room and then striking out the obnoxious prospect on curveballs.* Maybe you would even have to call it something other than “Trouble With The Curve.”

But that’s OK. The name kind of stinks, too.

*There is one final point. At the end, as mentioned, the lefty who had been throwing peanut bags faces the big prospect and makes him look foolish time and again on the curveball. But here’s something that really bothered me. Before he threw curveballs, he threw the prospect some fastballs. The prospect couldn’t hit those either.

Now, seriously, for me that was kind of the coup de grace of this movie’s impossible ineptitude. If you’re ALREADY going to the illogic of having the No. 1 baseball prospect in America not be able to hit a curveball, if you’re ALREADY having a left-handed pitcher with a great curveball selling peanuts at the park, if you’re ALREADY putting us through this whole mess: Why wouldn’t you have the prospect crush the guy’s fastball but then strike out on the curve? Doesn’t that get closer to the point? I mean, the movie is called TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE. The whole essence is that he had TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE. Now, suddenly, the guy can’t hit ANYTHING?

It’s enough to make you think that this movie might not have been completely thought through.