George Will Opines on Pedro Cerrano

This faux George Will column originally appeared in the Washington Post edition of Tuesday October 3, 1989. It has been reprinted here with faux permission.

When the surging Cleveland Indians visited the slumping Baltimore Orioles earlier this summer, I attended the game and was invited into both locker rooms, happening upon the Indians’ young Cuban slugger Pedro Cerrano perched before some bizarre shrine. I asked questions and he graciously, if intensely, accommodated, explaining he was praying to the deity of Jobu, belonging to some mixture of Caribbean Vodou and Lowcountry Voodoo that the player picked up on his long journey to the Rust Belt. If it gave me pause, it also piqued my curiosity. After all, I believe religious freedom is an American inalienable right and so why should that not extend to Cerrano’s own unique religious customs?

Of course, baseball is a religion too, with its stately cathedrals and space for those who have athletically sinned to repent by coming through in the clutch. And this religion adheres to its own customs, a guiding set of principles generally referred to as an unwritten code, its vast and vital rules passed down from generation to generation, the meaning of those values transmitted from the old guard to the new. Upon taking the field at one of these houses of worship, you are agreeing to abide by the word of baseball.

If the one-game playoff on Monday night in Cleveland to determine whether the hometown Indians or their sudden rival, the New York Yankees, would represent the American League East in this years League Championship Series was filled to the brim with impeccable drama, so too did it stand out for one unfortunate transgression. It happened with the Indians down 1-0 and Cerrano at the plate. If he had been struggling simply to make contact, here he came through, belting a towering home run to deadlock the game. It was heroic, but his ensuing trot around the bases with his bat firmly in tow, was the opposite. He was not celebrating; he was preening.

“In baseball,” Yankee first baseman Clu Haywood said afterward, “you don’t show up your opponent. You put your damn bat down and jog around the bases.” True, Haywood has been admonished in some quarters for his derriere shimmies at the plate. But these are “all in good fun,” Haywood explained while spitting chaw onto the shoes of a female reporter whose name I forget questioning the shimmies in the first place. There is a thin line between good fun and showing off and Cerrano, despite the protestations of his manager Lou Brown, crossed it.

Some argued Indian catcher Jake Taylor crossed the same line in the bottom of the ninth when he “called his shot”, a la Babe Ruth in the 1932 World Series. But Ruth was nothing less than the game’s Saint Paul, spreading its gospel to all those who followed, like Taylor, who explained afterwards his intention was not to put on airs but get in the opposing pitcher’s head, a bout of good old fashioned gamesmanship. Cerrano, while manifestly talented, might do well to learn from his elder and seek absolution.

I wonder, what’s Jobu’s policy on forgiveness?

Some Drivel On...Major League

To a modern sports fan, the premise of 1989’s “Major League” – the Cleveland Indians (almost) win the World Series – can’t seem so far-fetched. After all, the Cleveland Indians almost won the World Series last year. They might win it this year. They are fresh off winning 22 games in a row, an American League record, and Cleveland itself, a city famed for its sports failure, has been trending the other direction for a while now, with perhaps the preeminent basketballer of his era leading the city’s Cavaliers to the NBA championship a year ago in a Game 7 worthy of fiction. But if “Major League” might sound like a preposterous tall tale to our 2017 ears, it is to the movie’s immense credit how quickly it puts you in the headspace of the late 80s Cleve by employing an opening montage set to Randy Newman’s “Burn On”, in which he hails Cleveland as “a city of light” simply because the Cuyahoga River once famously caught on fire. This inciting montage is The Cleve at its most grimily industrial, emitting a palpable beaten up air, where its citizens, as we see sprinkled throughout, are born to believe the worst about their Indians. The finished version of the film did not include writer/director David S. Ward’s actual opening as penned in his screenplay which states: “TITLES END and we WIDEN to reveal that the black b.g. (background) is actually the sludge-clogged surface of the Cuyahoga River.” Damn, would that have been a curtain raiser.

This deliberately unattractive opening then is the perfect connector to the movie’s overriding plot point – that is, new Indians owner Rachel Phelps (Margaret Whitton) wants to get the hell out of Cleveland and move the team to the warm temperatures of Miami. To do so, she must ensure the team’s attendance falls below 800,000 for the season which will trigger the organization’s escape clause from their lease with the city. To ruin the attendance, she will ruin the team, assembling a patchwork squad of washed-up has-beens and hapless rookies, the requisite underdogs who must and will rise up. And Ward, who penned “The Sting”, which was a fine example of cinematically putting a team together, does just as exemplary of a job of putting a team together here, outfitting his mostly loveable losers with enough personality to see us from start to finish.

The glue holding them together is the late James Gammon, playing manager Lou Brown, a character introduced by taking a phone call from the Indians GM not from the dugout of some farm team but at the Toledo Tire World he’s overseeing. The befits both Cleveland’s working roots and the character’s, magnified even more by Lou’s reply when he’s offered the managerial job. “I don’t know…..,” sighs Gammon, communicating a man for whom this role wouldn’t be his Last Best Chance but Just Another Job. It’s the best line reading in show, which is saying something considering all manner of wry line readings delivered by Bob Uecker as Harry Doyle, the team’s play-by-play man who knows he’s been served cold soup trying to make do.

The cast, in fact, is kind of a throwback to another time too, when Wesley Snipes was a cocky, charismatic star and Charlie Sheen could be kookily charming simply by sort of squinting and acting aloof. He’s so charming, in fact, that he floats above Ward’s attempts to shoehorn in some at-odds nonsense with aging third baseman Roger Dorn (Corbin Bernsen) near the end. (His climactic walk to the mound from the bullpen remains as timeless as the song that escorts him and gives him his nickname.) Then there is Tom Berenger, nominated for Oscar just a few years before, for whom “Major League” sort of unofficially marked a departure from his 80s stardom, appropriately playing injured, washed-up Jake Taylor who, unlike Lou Brown, is pining for one last shot at glory. He also, however, is trying to get back with his ex-wife Lynn (Rene Russo, receiving no funny lines), a subplot that’s less woeful (they are both too good of actors) than kind of weird. It’s weird not just because Lynn is, as she must be, about to marry some zero she would never marry anyway, meaning her entire existence hinges on being with a man, but more for the way that Jake keeps just appearing in her apartment, following and then, well, sort of breaking and entering……at least, a little? Sure, sure, you say, she wants him there, and maybe she does, but damn man, is it uncomfortable, unless you dismiss breaking and entering as P.C. horse hockey.

The subplot is also there to demonstrate how one cannot win on the baseball diamond if he is not also winning at life, which is laughably untrue, of course, but also entirely unnecessary in the face of Rachel Phelps employing these losers to try and move the team. This is because owners, nasty, narcissistic owners, have been ruining baseball, and sports, for eons now, treating players like commodities, treating fans like foolishly loyal ATMs. In “Major League”, however, the Cleveland Indians become a conduit for the city itself to stand up and stick it to their corporate overlord. That is a happy ending.