Earlier today, I finally watched The Natural.

As a baseball fan, it feels like heresy to admit that it took me this long to watch The Natural.  I had seen plenty of scenes from the film.  I knew the music because there’s no way you can watch as much as baseball as I do without hearing it at least a few times every scene.  I knew about Wonderboy and the big home run and how Roy Hobbs came out of nowhere to lead the perennially last-place New York Knights to the championship series but I had never actually watched the entire film from beginning to end.

Until this afternoon.

When the movie started, I was worried.  Robert Redford plays Roy Hobbs, an outstanding hitter whose promising career appears to be over when a mysterious woman (Barbara Hersey) shoots him in the gut.  At the start of the movie, Roy and his girlfriend Iris (Glenn Close) are supposed to be teenagers but Redford was nearly 50 and Glenn Close was close to 40.  The whole point of the first part of the movie is that Roy and Iris are young and they have their whole future ahead of them but the actors were both clearly middle-aged.  There was a scene where Roy strikes out the best batter in the league (Joe Don Baker) and the batter kept calling Roy a kid but Redford looked like he was older than Baker.

The good thing is that you only have to buy Redford as being a teenager for about 15 minutes.  After he gets shot, Roy stops playing for several years.  By the time Roy makes it to the major leagues, he’s supposed to be older than everyone else.  No one gives Roy much of a chance when he’s first signed to the New York Knights.  The other players (including Michael Madsen) don’t respect him and the manager (Wilford Brimley) refuses to play him.  But when Roy Hobbs finally does get a chance to swing his home-made bat, he hits homer after homer.  Roy is a natural, the next great player even if he is at an age when most players retire.  A journalist (Robert Duvall) tries to uncover his background.  A seductress (Kim Basinger) tries to lead him astray.  A gambler (Darren McGavin) and the team’s owner (Robert Prosky) try to get him to throw the big game.  Anyone who has watched a baseball game knows how it ends because we’ve all heard the music and seen that clip.  But even if everyone knows how the story concludes, it’s impossible not to cheer when Roy gets a hit and to feel bad when he takes a strike.  Redford may have been old for a baseball player but he looked good out there, swinging that bat and throwing that ball.

I loved The Natural.  It’s extremely sentimental movie.  Sometimes, it feels old-fashioned.  That’s perfect for baseball, though.  Baseball is a sentimental, old-fashioned game and the story of Roy Hobbs is what baseball is all about.  The Knights are behind for most of the season.  Roy hits a slump.  But neither he nor the team ever give up because they know that baseball is a game of endurance.  It’s not like football, where you just have to win 9 games to make it to the playoffs.  Baseball is about never giving up, no matter what the score is.  Even the movie’s supernatural aspects — the sudden storms, a lightning bolt hitting a tree and creating Wonderboy, and even Glenn Close looking like an angel in the stands — work because baseball is a mystical sport.  It’s the closest thing we have to a spiritual sport.

You couldn’t make a movie like The Natural about football or basketball.  Only the game of baseball could have given us The Natural.