There are many, many reasons why 41 years later \u201cThe Natural\u201d remains the gold standard for baseball movies (and probably for sports movies as a whole). There are so many things to like across its 122-minute running time.<\/p>\n
I like that Joe Don Baker completely hams it up as The Whammer, and doesn\u2019t even pretend like he\u2019s anything other than a (verrrry loosely) fictionalized version of Babe Ruth. Buford Pusser has company in JDB\u2019s personal hall of fame.<\/p>\n
I like that the movie was shot at War Memorial Stadium in Buffalo, and that the ballpark\u2019s nickname was \u201cThe Rockpile,\u201d a term of both affection and derision proffered by the locals. (I saw a baseball game there once. It was a dump. But it felt like you\u2019d walked right into 1938.).<\/p>\n
Robert Redford starred as Roy Hobbs. Everett Collection \/ Everett Col<\/p>\n
I like Robert Duvall, even if he made a lot of people automatically despise sports columnists. If it wasn\u2019t already taken, I might\u2019ve actually used \u201cMax Mercy\u201d as my newspaper pseudonym. And it makes me wish I\u2019d taken a stab at being a cartoonist, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There are many, many reasons why 41 years later \u201cThe Natural\u201d remains the gold standard for baseball movies…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":171358,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[88,102628,97885,99,362,1625,3015,358],"class_list":["post-171357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-open-mike","tag-robert-redford","tag-sports","tag-sports-columnists","tag-sports-entertainment","tag-sports-media","tag-sports-plus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171357\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/171358"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}