America At Large / George Kimball: "The oddest thing about it," Ron Shelton was saying the other day, "is that baseball, of all sports, has such a strong tradition of dissent.
Think about it: In what other game do the fans and players sit back and watch while someone stops to have an argument with the umpire? They go cheek-to-jowl, they each speak their pieces, and eventually the game resumes.
"I don't know of any other sport that allows that. If you do it in basketball or soccer, you're thrown out of the game," said the Hollywood director. "In hockey, they just start a fight, but in baseball, dissent is a ritualised part of the game."
In a voice-over toward the end of Shelton's 1988 film the actress Susan Sarandon, who plays a cerebral Baseball Annie in Bull Durham, quotes the poet Walt Whitman: "I see great things in baseball. It's our game. The American game. It will repair our losses and be a blessing to us."
Widely considered the best baseball movie ever made, Bull Durham was scheduled to be officially recognised as such this weekend. Months ago the Baseball Hall of Fame had arranged a Bull Durham weekend, which was to include a special screening, along with personal appearances by Shelton and actors Kevin Costner, Tim Robbins and Sarandon, and Robert Wuhl.
The Hall of Fame's president, Dale Petroskey, was a deputy press secretary in the administration of Ronald Reagan, and served in similar capacities for a succession of Republican politicians. Sarandon and Robbins have been vocal in their opposition to the administration's foreign policies, and specifically to the war against Iraq.
In short order, the Bull Durham weekend was off. By fiat, Petroskey cancelled the event, publicly disinviting the couple in a letter he released to the media before he even bothered sending it to them.
In his letter Petroskey wrote: "The president of the United States, as this nation's democratically elected leader, is constitutionally bound to make decisions he believes are in the best interests of the American people," and "The National Baseball Hall of Fame - and many players and executives in Baseball's family - has honoured the United States and those who defend our freedoms." He went on to lecture Robbins on his "obligation to act and speak responsibly", and voiced his fear that "your very public criticism . . . ultimately could put our troops in even more danger".
Plainly, under the guise of removing politics from the issue, Petroskey was making a heavy-handed political statement of his own. ("Move over, Hootie," said Shelton.)
I should probably point out in addition to directing Robbins, Sarandon, and Costner in Bull Durham, Shelton directed me in Play it to the Bone. In any case, Ron is a former minor league player, and Bull Durham was his rollicking but touching portrayal of life in the bush leagues.
"I was appalled, but not shocked," Shelton told me this week after Petroskey ran Bull Durham out of Cooperstown . "But then, I'm appalled at a lot that's going on in this country right now."
"The arrangements for this have been under way for nearly a year," said Shelton. "We were looking at it as a weekend that was going to be without politics, just a celebration of a little movie we made 15 years ago."
So how did Petroskey justify his act of prior restraint? "What we were trying to do was take politics out of this," he claimed. "We didn't want people to espouse their views in a very public place, one way or another. The Hall isn't the place for that." Oh, Bull.
Even that sentiment would be more credible had Petroskey not leaned on his Republican connections just last year to invite George W Bush's press secretary, Ari Fleischer, to the Hall of Fame to provide his views on "the current political scene, which, of course, includes the War on Terrorism". Robbins, in any case, responded to the cancellation by firing back a letter of his own.
"I had been unaware that baseball was a Republican sport," noted the actor. "I reject your suggestion that one must be silent in times of war. To suggest my criticism of the president puts the troops in danger is absurd. If people had listened to that twisted logic we'd still be in Vietnam."
Robbins went on to inform the Hall of Fame president: "Your subservience to your friends in the administration is embarrassing to baseball. You belong with the cowards and ideologues in a hall of infamy and shame."
The cancellation, while applauded in conservative circles, provoked outrage. Petroskey was bombarded by over 25,000 letters and e-mails. Roger Kahn, the distinguished baseball author who was to speak at the Hall of Fame later this summer, cancelled his own appearance in protest.
Even Costner, who hadn't finalised his plans to appear at the weekend, was critical of Petroskey's decision, even though he is a dyed-in-the-wool Republican who introduced Bush at the 2000 Republican National Convention.
"I've never talked to him about it," said Shelton, "but I imagine Kevin supports the war. He's basically pretty conservative."
Even Major League Baseball, in a statement, moved to distance itself from Petroskey's act of censorship. The Hall of Fame president subsequently admitted he botched his handling of the affair, but made no move to correct his error. "With the advantage of hindsight, it is clear I should have handled the matter differently," he wrote on the Hall of Fame website.
"Nobody was going to talk about the war," insisted Shelton, who, though he has been quieter about it, is no more enthusiastic about the Iraq war than Sarandon and Robbins. "I work very hard at not being a celebrity, so I might express myself differently than Tim and Susan. But I share their view - which is, incidentally, the view of most of the rest of the world," he pointed out. "Still, one's point of view isn't supposed to matter as much as the ability to express it."
