Yesterday, I told my sister that I wanted to watch a good baseball movie.

“How about The Fan?” she said, “It’s on Starz.”

“Is The Fan really a baseball movie?” I asked.

“It’s got people with baseball bats in it.” she said.

The Fan does have people with baseball bats.  Wesley Snipes is a baseball player who is getting paid a lot of money to swing a bat for the Giants but he’s in a slump because Benicio del Toro won’t let him wear his old number.  Robert de Niro is a Giants fan who uses a baseball bat to beat to death his best friend after de Niro kidnaps Snipes’s son and demands that Snipes play better.  Snipes has to win a game, even though it’s raining and he has terrible stats against the opposing pitcher.  De Niro sneaks on the field as an umpire and makes bad calls on purpose, which proves everything that I’ve ever said about umpires.

The Fan wasn’t bad.  I liked the baseball scenes and I also liked the scenes where de Niro would just start overreacting to anyone saying anything bad about the Giants because everyone knows a fan like that.  (Where I live, most of them are Cowboys fans.)  Whenever de Niro started to go crazy, Nine Inch Nails would play on the soundtrack, which was funny but also too obvious.  There was a lot about the movie that didn’t make any sense.  At the end of the movie, it’s raining so hard that there’s no way the game would have been allowed to continue but I guess once you accept that de Niro could sneak on the field dressed like an umpire, you have to accept that a baseball game would continue in the middle of a flash flood.  But we all know fans like the one played by de Niro.  At the start of the movie, I actually felt bad for him because it was so obvious that baseball was the only thing he had.  He still had all of his pictures from Little League and he wanted his son to be as big a baseball fan as he was because that was the only way that he knows how to relate to other people.  But then he started killing people and giving baseball fans everywhere a bad name.

Josh Hamilton once said that Dallas wasn’t a “real baseball town,” which hurt the feelings of fans like me who had supported him, through all of his struggles, when he was a member of the Rangers.  Whenever Hamilton would return to Arlington to play against the Rangers, everyone in the stands would chant, “Baseball town,” whenever he stepped up to the plate.  I still think it was rude for Hamilton to say what he said but he was right that Dallas doesn’t produce the type of baseball fans who will disguise themselves as umpires and take the field with a knife hidden in their cleats.  Rangers fans aren’t “the crazy fans,” like the ones who Snipes says he can’t stand in The Fan.  I hope that never changes but I also hope the Rangers get it together this upcoming season.  Support the team without kidnapping or killing anyone, that’s the duty of every true fan.  GO RANGERS!