Santa Barbara’s Ron Shelton has taken his baseball film Bull Durham into extra innings.
It’s been 34 years since he made his directorial debut with the silver-screen classic that Sports Illustrated ranks as the best sports movie of all time.
“I don’t actually think about the movie much,” confessed Shelton, who’d been a quick-footed infielder for both Santa Barbara High School and Westmont College. “I’ve frequently been asked to write about the movie and have always demurred.”
But he changed his mind after a trip to Durham, North Carolina, for the 30th anniversary of the film’s release. It inspired his book, The Church of Baseball: The Making of Bull Durham — Home Runs, Bad Calls, Crazy Fights, Big Swings, and a Hit. It was released this summer by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
A Q&A session held during the anniversary celebration in 2018 settled his own questions about writing a book.
“A married couple raised their hands with more than a question,” Shelton said during a recent book signing at Chaucer’s Books in Santa Barbara. “They said they moved to Durham because of the movie, and they wanted to meet me and take a photo with their two young sons.”
When Shelton asked their names, the 10-year-old replied, “I’m Crash.”
“I looked at the younger brother and said, ‘I’m afraid to ask,’” he continued. “The 4-year-old said, ‘Yep, I’m Nuke.’
“That’s why I’m writing this book.”
Having the names of Bull Durham’s principal male characters taken by future generations wasn’t the only reason he put pen to paper. He also wanted to correct some bull about Bull Durham that made its way into the media.
“No, Harrison Ford was not offered the part of Crash,” Shelton said. “Cher was not given a script to play Annie. Where does this stuff come from? Maybe I can set the record straight for anyone who cares.
“Maybe I can also share with young film directors the problems a first-time director will almost certainly encounter.”
Bull Durham Nearly Struck Out
He told of how arranging — and then retaining — his all-star team of actors Kevin Costner, Timothy Robbins and Susan Sarandon was as big a miracle as the 1969 New York Mets.
“After two weeks, the studio hated it so much that they were going to fire Tim Robbins and replace him with Anthony Michael Hall,” Shelton said. “And they thought Susan looked so bad that they fired my director of photography in the middle of a shoot.
“And I was next on the list to be fired … They said the movie wasn’t funny, it wasn’t sexy, wasn’t romantic, and nobody would believe Susan Sarandon would ever go to bed with Tim Robbins.
“I’m the godfather of their first born, by the way.”
Also, by the way, his script was nominated for an Academy Award and honored as the year’s Best Original Screenplay by the Writers Guild of America.
Shelton, who developed a keen interest in literature as an English major at Westmont, was born to make this film. He tapped into the five seasons he spent as minor league infielder in the Baltimore Orioles organization to tell the story of Nuke LaLoosh, Crash Davis and the baseball groupie Annie Savoy.
The relationship between Nuke, the Bulls’ gifted but raw rookie pitcher, and Crash, the veteran and savvy catcher, was based loosely upon former minor-league roommates Joe Altobelli and Steve Dalkowski.
Altobelli was managing the Orioles’ Single-A farm club in Stockton when Shelton spotted him slipping money to a drunken fan during a game against Bakersfield. The drunk turned out to be Dalkowski, who many claimed threw one of the hardest — and wildest — pitches in baseball.
“His average during his 10-year minor league career was 13 strikeouts and 13 walks a game,” Shelton said. “In one game, he struck out 21 and walked 21 and threw a complete game.
“He was also an alcoholic, could never shake the bottle. I said, ‘Wait a minute, Joe, you were his roommate in Triple-A? What was that like?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know, I never saw him. I roomed with his suitcase.’
“When I wanted to tell the story of my life in the minors, not the specifics of Dalko and Joe, but their behavioral dynamic, was Bull Durham. Nuke just doesn’t have Dalko’s dark side.”
A Religious Experience
The book’s title comes from a sequence in the film in which Annie, the love interest of both Nuke and Crash, explains her passion for the game and her hometown Durham Bulls.
“I believe in the Church of Baseball,” she says. “I’ve tried all the major religions, and most of the minor ones. I’ve worshipped Buddha, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, trees, mushrooms, and Isadora Duncan.
“I know things. For instance, there are 108 beads in a Catholic rosary and there are 108 stitches in a baseball. When I learned that, I gave Jesus a chance. But it just didn’t work out between us. The Lord laid too much guilt on me. I prefer metaphysics to theology.
“You see, there’s no guilt in baseball, and it’s never boring.”
Neither is Shelton’s book. He keeps its bases full of interesting anecdotes from his experiences in both baseball and the movie industry.
He begins by laying bare his own spiritual soul as the oldest of four brothers in the evangelical family of Peg and Rath Shelton. Their moment of “great moral crisis” came when the Milwaukee Braves and their Santa Barbara superstar, “Our Eddie Mathews,” were about to play the New York Yankees in Game Four of the 1957 World Series.
“We grew up with this evangelical whirlwind of a church — the First Baptist Church — which was on Chapala and Victoria,” Shelton said. “We never missed Sunday school or church. We also didn’t have a television.”
His father, however, risked eternal damnation one Sunday morning by whisking away his sons just as they were heading from Sunday school to the regular church service. He drove them home to where an employee of Ott’s Department Store — local baseball star and future coach Johnny Osborne — was hooking up a new TV.
“He understood the moment — he just said, ‘Eddie’ as he left,” Shelton recalled. “We watched the game in terror. Eddie Mathews was having a terrible series. But after the team tied it in the bottom of the 10th, our hometown hero hit a towering, two-run home run to win the game.
“A great weight lifted up out of the room. My father looked around. His shoulders lightened. And we started going to church less and less.”
Giving Mathews a Pass
Mathews, who died in 2001, hit 512 home runs before retiring in 1968. He was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame 10 years later.
Shelton said he’d “wanted to be Eddie — every little boy in Santa Barbara did” — but he never did meet him. He passed on the chance to do that while scouting locations for the movie in Durham.
He noticed a “balding, sweating” man unbutton his Atlanta Braves jersey in the dugout and take a drag on a cigarette after working with some of Durham’s players in the batting cage.
“He looked familiar,” Shelton said. “I stared until I finally had to ask a young player who the old guy in the dugout was. ‘That’s Eddie Mathews,’ the player said. ‘Ever heard of him?’
“The image of the aging Mathews sitting there stopped me in my tracks. I’d never met him but he still occupied a place in my private mythology … It was upsetting. I started to go over and introduce myself, but what would I say? … I left him alone.”
Much of Shelton’s spare time during his minor-league days were spent in movie theaters. He liked few of the sports films he watched, however.
“Their attempts to be inspirational felt cloying and false,” he said. “Sports movies all seemed to be made from an outsider’s point of view.
“They didn’t want to make a movie about what was going on inside Eddie Mathews’ head before he hit that home run. They wanted to avoid his serious drinking problem, his marriage struggles, even the bar fights defending his black teammate, Henry Aaron.
“What happens on the field is the least interesting part of the game.”
A Short Life at Shortstop
Getting moved around on the field was an interesting footnote to Shelton’s career. He started out playing a strong shortstop for the Bluefield Baby Birds in the Appalachian League when Altobelli took him aside.
“Joe says, ‘How would you like to play second base?’” Shelton recalled.
“Me, ‘I’m really liking shortstop.’
“Joe, ‘The organization just signed their No. 1 pick out of Long Beach, California — a guy named Bobby Grich — and he’s going to be their shortstop of the future.’
“Me, ‘Nah, Skip, he’s got to beat me out.’
“Joe, ‘He already beat you out.’
“Me, ‘Why?’
“Joe, ‘They gave him a lot of dough. What did they give you?’
“Me, ‘What about Jimmy Murrel, our second baseman? He’s playing great.’
“Joe takes another long drag on his Camel (cigarette). ‘Let me put it to you this way, son: Do you want to play second base or do you want Jimmy Murrel to play second base?’
“Me, ‘Skip, I love second base.’”
The irony is that when Shelton worked his way up to Triple-A Rochester, hitting .260 for the 1971 Red Wings, it was Grich that the Orioles summoned to play second base in Baltimore.
Shelton quit the game during the baseball strike of 1972 and went to graduate school at the University of Arizona. He didn’t want to become a Crash Davis, stuck endlessly in the waiting room of the minor leagues.
“A lot of guys were the model for Crash Davis,” he said. “They were consummate professionals. They were really, really, really good baseball players. There for the grace of God goes a big leaguer.
“I didn’t want to become one of those guys. I was 25, and when you’re 25 and you’ve worked your way up to Triple-A, you think you’re 80 years old. You think, ‘Wow, is there any life after 25?’
“When I walked away, it was to start something new.”
He will turn 77 this month, with many hit movies under his belt, and something new and good now on the bookshelf.
— Noozhawk sports columnist Mark Patton is a longtime local sports writer. Contact him at sports@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk Sports on Twitter: @NoozhawkSports. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook. The opinions expressed are his own.