Art vs. Formula (Bot9 #329)
In preparation for my trip to San Francisco this past weekend, I decided to watch Clint Eastwood in Escape from Alcatraz on the plane. I had never seen it and wanted to check it out in preparation of visiting the legendary jail during my trip. Fairly early in the movie and on the trip, I wish I hadn’t.
The Shawshank Redemption is one of my favorite films. I’ll watch it a couple of times a year and will keep it on the screen if I run into it on TV. The beats and structure of Shawshank are so similar to Escape from Alcatraz that people who have seen them both have commented about their similarities online in a number of places. Thankfully, few have seen both. Once you do, though, you can’t unsee it. It’s like so many things in life you might wish your innocent eyes have never seen.
However, one is a treasure (Shawshank has a 9.3/10 on IMDB and a 98% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and the other is a pedestrian recounting of how some men escaped from a famous jail starring some recognizable stars (Escape has only 7.6/10 on IMDB and an 85% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes). So what’s the difference and what’s it got to do with baseball?
The whole reason we were headed to San Francisco was to attend Will Clark’s number retirement ceremony. One of the fun parts of sports is wondering whether or not the heroes of yesterday would have the same kind of success today. With baseball in particular, you have this whole new approach to the game around so many metrics and measurements that every strength and flaw of every player is known and out there for all to see. I even took a look at baseballsavant.com during the game to gain a better understanding of both starting pitchers. The analytical approach made me wonder if Will Clark’s flaws would have held him back to the point of having less success in today’s game. I allowed the logical side of me to win…for a little while.
And then I watched the video they played showing Clark’s highlights before he took the microphone. It highlighted the memorable moments from hitting a home run in his first at bat off of Nolan Ryan to all of the memorable moments that occurred in clutch situations throughout his career arc. And then he gave his speech and pumped his fist the way only Will Clark can. All doubt was gone. I went from logically wondering about his flaws to thinking, “the modern game needs more Will Clarks in it.”
And therein lies the difference between today’s game and the modern game, as well as the difference between Escape from Alcatraz and The Shawshank Redemption. One is told artfully where the other one only attempts brief toe dips in the pool of beauty. One contains memorable lines speaking to the depth of the human experience (i.e. - “get busy living, or get busy dying”) and the other uses a flower as a symbol a couple of times throughout the movie. It is the art, the beauty, and the poetry that is now missing from our once beloved national past time.
Does anyone running the game care about this stuff anymore? We have lost the game of my youth, the days when larger-than-life personalities like Clark’s could bring a stadium to their feet during a regular season or spring training game. Today’s game looks so much more like the formulaic, semi-soulless execution of Escape from Alcatraz, where the game of years gone by resembled the poetry and beauty of Shawshank. When did science drown out the beauty of the game? I’m more guilty than the guy next to me at losing that perspective of the magic of the game. My freshly minted concern now is if we don’t at least attempt to point the next generation at the things that made the game so memorable, we run the risk of losing them altogether. Trust me, we don’t want a society that looks like Escape from Alcatraz. We need it to look like The Shawshank Redemption. We need life and not just knowledge. May we begin to recapture the play, the joy, and the mystery of our games (and our films) before we succumb to world where we think we can explain everything away. The fact of this beautiful world is that we can’t. May that beautiful fact be something we become more comfortable in while passing through this world.
And may there be another swing as beautiful as Will Clark’s again some day…