This is a baseball blog, so I am supposed to talk about baseball. One of my other passions is movies, so I try to find any excuse to write about movies if I can’t think of a good baseball-related topic to write about. And in order to write about movies, I need to connect it to baseball. We may be facing a very long offseason, and not only that, an extended period where literally nothing happens, which tends to be the entertainment over a baseball offseason. So baseball is giving us nothing. What
else to do? I’ll be watching a lot of movies.
That is my very thin excuse for this post. I am going to pick great movies and connect it to a Cardinals player. I will connect a movie and a player for any number of reasons. I don’t know player personalities well enough to use that every time, but I am lucky enough to have been at Winter Warmup, interviewing the players, so maybe I’ll feel the movie just fits their personality. Maybe it will be their style of play. Action movies = offense. Maybe it will be how good they are. I will come up with some excuse. Anyway, here are some movies to watch over the offseason, loosely connected to a player so I can write this post.
Quinn Mathews
Movie: The Conversation
Mathews feels like a guy that is smart and a little bit kooky, and smart and kooky can lead you down a conspiracy path. Welcome to the greatest conspiracy movie ever made. Way ahead of its time, especially in its use of sound (which it does better than any movie ever), this paranoid thriller showcases Gene Hackman at his best.
To be completely clear, I am in no way comparing Mathews to Gene Hackman’s character, who is antisocial and quiet. And I doubt Mathews is paranoid about surveillance either: I’m nearly a decade older than him, but I did grow up as the Internet became what it is today and you just sort of accept the omnipresence of surveillance. Hackman’s character would be horrified if he had to live today.
Michael McGreevy
Movie: Singin’ in the Rain
I wasn’t sure whether or not to put Singin’ in the Rain for someone who is fun to watch, because the movie is an absolute blast, or whether I should pick it based on personality. Not that McGreevy can’t be fun to watch pitch, but McGreevy of all the players on the team feels like the one who would appreciate a good musical. Most importantly, he would admit it.
If you’ve ever watched an interview with Michael McGreevy, he is significantly more enjoyable to listen to than most other baseball players. Future broadcaster, if that’s the path he wants to take. He certainly seems like the player most likely to have actually seen this movie.
Leonardo Bernal
Movie: Hard Eight
You have probably seen Boogie Nights, you’ve probably seen There Will Be Blood, and you’ve probably seen One Battle After Another. But have you seen Paul Thomas Anderson’s very first movie? Currently on Youtube, for free, and I mean literally the movie is currently free to watch on Youtube, PTA pretty much knew how to make good movies immediately.
Gee, a young prodigy who comes bursting out of the gate with better things to come? I feel like you can crack the code on why Bernal is my pick with this movie.
Bryan Torres
Movie: Hoop Dreams
This fantastic documentary highlighted how truly hard and unlikely it was for a set of talented high school basketball players to actually make the NBA and what happened when they didn’t. The long, hard road of making it to the bigs is something that Torres can definitely relate to, having a windier and more unlikely road to big league success than just about any other big leaguers honestly.
Ryne Stanek
Movie: Toy Story
Bear with me on this one: Stanek is the resident old guy on this team at 35-years-old. He’s actually four years older than the next oldest on the team, Riley O’Brien. And unless I’m reading it wrong, the Cardinals have no other 30-year-olds on the team. Anyway, Stanek has two kids, and I imagine a cartoon of some sort is constantly playing in his house because of that. I do not have a kid, but I have a nephew, and I’ve seen the movie Cars like 10 times this year and I don’t even live with him.
So it might not be Toy Story, probably a much newer and frankly worse movie that Stanek has to watch all the time. But why not go with the best? And you might think Toy Story 3 is better, but if I am watching a movie with a 2-year-old, I’m not going to go with the movie that might make me cry.
Nathan Church
Movie: Pleasantville
Pleasantville is a great movie about a high school aged boy obsessed with the perfect reality he watches in an old sitcom, probably inspired by Andy Griffith Show. Along with his sister, he gets transported into that sitcom and well it turns out he wouldn’t actually like living in Pleasantville. How am I going to make this connection to Nathan Church? Torturously.
Chip Caray and the Cardinals are trying to convince me that Nathan Church is Pleasantville, but the numbers don’t really back them up. Look under the hood, and Nathan Church is not as good as we’re being told. However, Tobey Maguire’s character helps improve the town, and that’s exactly what the Cardinals are going to attempt to do with Nathan Church.
Nolan Gorman
Movie: Grave of the Fireflies
Oh I feel so bad about this one. It physically hurts me to watch Nolan Gorman bat, because I was a defender of his for so long and it’s just not happening. I remember attending the game last Monday, and he came into the game with runners in scoring position, and I was just dreading the inevitable strikeout. It wasn’t hatred of Gorman. It was despair. Watching him fail over and over just makes me feel sad.
I can’t really spoil this movie, because you kind of know what happens right away, but let’s just say you will never want to watch this movie again after having seen it once. It is a great movie to be clear, but not particularly fun to watch. The fact that it really happened does not help.
Riley O’Brien
Movie: Babylon
Babylon is a very big swing of a movie from Damian Chazelle, the director of Whiplash and La La Land, and it pretty much flopped. However, it has some amazing sequences that rival the best of his work. It’s a movie of up and downs. You can in fact almost perfectly mirror what I think about the movie with the performance of Riley O’Brien as the season went along. The long, extended opening sequence of Babylon is awesome and if you don’t want to watch the movie, just watch that. I also really enjoyed the scene where they try to make a movie with sound for the first time.
But the 2nd half of this movie is a lot worse than the first half of this movie. If you stopped Bablyon at the halfway point, it would have made the All-Star game.
Jose Fermin
Movie: The Thing
I couldn’t think of whatever the equivalent of the best practical effects ever would be, so I chose instead to pick a player based on the the thing itself: an entity willing to be anything just to survive. What describes that better than a utility player? Fermin played 43 games at LF, 34 games at 3B, 23 games in center, 21 games at 2B, 5 games at SS, 3 games in RF, and one game at 1B. The Thing is a better movie than Fermin is a baseball player, but like I said, I am finding the thinnest excuse to compare.
Masyn Winn
Movie: Casablanca
What is the defense of moviemaking? I would argue the screenplay. It is mostly unnoticed and frequently ignored, but it is very hard to make a good movie with a bad script. It is also hard to be a good player with bad defense. When you watch Casablanca for the first time, you are shocked at how many lines you already recognize. Very few people come out of this movie not recognizing how good the writing is. Masyn Winn has that kind of defense. Even people who don’t appreciate defense like they should love watching Masyn Winn play defense.
Most great defense goes under the radar unless you watch them every day. Most great screenplays goes under the radar unless you’re paying attention. Both Casablanca and Masyn Winn make it impossible not to notice.
JJ Wetherholt
Movie: My Cousin Vinny
With how good Wetherholt’s defense, I can’t pretend he doesn’t make flashy plays, but I feel like you probably would not guess that he’s as good of a defender as he is. Much the same, I feel like people underrate how good the writing in My Cousin Vinny is. To be honest, the set-up of this movie doesn’t really seem like it’d be a good movie. And the comic nature of it – and I don’t think the score helps all that much – makes the movie sneak up on you with how good it is.
Alec Burleson
Movie: Die Hard
I was really trying to pick a different movie, because it’s such an easy pick, but as it turns out it’s an easy pick for a reason. Like as you were reading this, it would not surprise me if at least one of you thought “Alec Burleson has to be Die Hard.” Do I even need to explain this? Burleson seems like a player who would love this movie, his game is reflective of an action movie, and to keep with my writing comparison, Burleson’s defense is underrated!
It’s late and I’ve run fresh out of ideas for other players and I don’t want to force it and I want to keep a few players available for the comments to make a better pick than I would. In fact, I left quite a few good players uncommented upon in this article. Good luck to you if you think of any for the bullpen, I’m just happy I found two.
