'Long Gone' is prophetically titled for reasons unintended, but it is worth seeking out: Way Late Baseball Movie Reviews
An all-but-forgotten HBO flick makes stars out of those who are often rendered invisible in the popular version of 20th-century baseball history (CW/TW: Discussions of racism, institutional racism).
Long Gone, which is the most mysterious baseball movie found only on the internet, walked so that Bull Durham could run.
The emotional currency of minor-league baseball is either youthful naivete or disappointment, and this HBO movie from 1987 hits at both. It is almost a piece of lost media that was adapted from a novel by Paul Hemphill, who was a biographer of the country singer Hank Williams. Long Gone was also made well before HBO had its assembly line of Emmy-winning shows. It only had the equivalent of a cup of coffee in the cable channel’s programming schedule, was never released on DVD, and does not appear to be on any streaming service. It seems like the only way to see it in 2023 is to search for it on YouTube, where it hangs on since perhaps no one cares enough to bother with a copyright claim.
Growing up in a cable-free home with 3FC (three F-ing channels), I saw it as a 12-year-old by sheer luck. It was released on VHS in the late ’80s, and my mum would rent any movie with baseball on the cover if it meant her firstborn would stop being such a mope for a few hours.
It has lodged with people who were fortunate enough to see it. Craig Calcaterra, whose Cup of Coffee newsletter is essential to my morning ritual, discussed it in an episode of Big Screen Sports with Kyle Bandujo not too long ago. Authors Ray Didinger and Glenn Macnow also rated it No. 50 in The Ultimate Book of Sports Movies: Featuring the 100 Greatest Sports Films of All Time (Running Press Book Publishers, 2009).
Coming out a year before Ron Shelton’s Bull Durham introduced us to Crash Davis, Nuke LaLoosh, and Annie Savoy, Long Gone also captures the vibe of being in the minors. It has the same grizzled veteran-greenhorn rookie-Southern femme fatale dynamic. Sharp dialogue and solid performances by leads William Petersen, Dermot Mulroney, and Virginia Madsen kick this up a notch from the standard rags-to-riches sports-movie template.
Petersen — more than a decade before he became Gil Grissom on CSI — plays antihero Cecil (Stud) Cantrell.
Stud has sunk into a bittersweet rut as the 30-something player-manager of the hapless Tampico Stogies in the lowest rung of the minors in late 1950s Florida. He might even be called comfortably numb, riding it out with caustic humour, chasing women, and his dedication to playing the game the right way.
The Tampico Stogies are a surpassingly sucktacular outfit who play ball in scratchy, unlaundered wool uniforms in the Florida humidity. Stud seems resigned to being unable to change that as long as he can pitch every fourth day, hit for power, and score off the field. At this level of the minors, and in this movie, he’s basically a cigar-smoking, hard-drinking combo of Shohei Ohtani, Lou Boudreau (the last World Series-winning player-manager), Sam Malone in Cheers, and Reggie Dunlop in Slap Shot.
Stud lives by “Cantrell’s Rules,” which are essentially:
You’re the asshole you have to look at in the mirror each morning.
Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.
In the opening scene, Stud charms small-town beauty pageant contestant Dixie Lee Boxx (Madsen, later an Oscar nominee for Sideways) to go home with him.
The following morning, the second of three people who are going pull Stud out of his funk arrives. Jamie Don Weeks (Mulroney) is an 18-year-old second baseman who shows he has a premium glove. That is good enough to get him a contract without having to take batting practice, since Stud “already knows you can’t hit but .200.”
A set-to-soft-music scene explains how Stud ended up in this inferno of dominating the low-level competition in America’s Wang, without air conditioning to boot. It reads as if it could have happened to so many athletes of the Greatest Generation. Of course, popular history does not give as much play to people who lost potential major-league stardom. It is more concerned with those who already had it and put it on hold for the war effort, or attained it later. But there was, understandably, a lot of people in that generation who lost their dream to the global conflict.
Stud: “I was one of the all-time high school phenoms. My senior year, there were so many scouts on my dad’s porch that sonovabitch collapsed under the weight. The St. Louis Cardinals offered the most money and I signed right away. For four years I knocked their dicks off in the minor leagues.
“In 1942, the battle for the starting left-field job was supposed to be between me and this Polish kid from Donora, Pennsylvania who batted like this, like he was peeking around a corner—”
Jamie: “Stan 'The Man' Musial!!”
Stud: “He had a prettier swing, but I hit the ball harder — and from both sides of the plate. Would have been a helluva battle. Just wish I’d been there for it.”
Jamie: “Why weren’t you?”
Stud: “Ah, the (Japanese) bombed Pearl Harbor. Like a sap I signed up for the Marines. I took so much shrapnel in Guadalcanal they were going to amputate my leg until I convinced them not to. By ’46, my career was down the tubes. All I can say Weeks, is learn a goddamn trade.”
Long Gone is also set about a decade after the racial integration of the top leagues in the late 1940s by Jackie Robinson in the National League, Larry Doby in the American, and Johnny Ritchey in the Pacific Coast League along the U.S. west coast.1 A scouting friend of Stud’s sends him a Black power-hitting catcher, Joe Louis Brown (the late Larry Riley, of Knots Landing).
There is a confrontation with the father-and-son ownership of the Stogies, whom Stud privately calls, “Asshole, and Asshole Junior.” The interaction between the two, played by the late Henry Gibson and the magician Teller (yes, he speaks in this), is hilarious. Stud, on the spot, tells them that the newcomer’s name is a Venezuelan named José Brown, and that seems to be acceptable.
Peterson has the most screen time and laugh lines. Madsen, who was 25 years old during filming, is the movie’s MVP.
The movie, in order to work, needs Dixie to look like a 20-year-old ingenue with a Marilyn Monroe hairdo and curvaceousness who has a 45-year-old’s perspective and sees the world in What Is2 terms to the same extent as Stud. Both of them cling to some ideals, respectively, about how marriage and baseball should work. Dixie is sharp as a tack and as ambitious as a sexist society will allow, and she gets her hooks into Stud, rather than him pursuing her as a kind of trophy like in other sports movies where the guy gets the girl (looking at you, Major League, The Program, and even that greatest of antiestablishment football movies, North Dallas Forty).
The big moment also falls on Madsen, when she shows disappointment in Stud for letting himself be jammed by the film’s antagonists for the sake of a possible career opportunity. Ultimately, Stud, taking a lead from Dixie and from Joe Louis Brown, will sum it up by taking his stand against, “The givers being told to give up the only thing in the world that’s important to them.”
You can probably extrapolate how that will play out in the late innings of the movie. The Stogies are Chaotic Good, blocked by Lawful Evil. In this case, it’s not a farm team of the New York Yankees, but an affiliate of the St. Louis Cardinals, and that scans very well.
Plot-wise, the Cardinals were the organization Stud would have played for if circumstances had played out better. In the story of baseball, the Cardinals also innovated the farm system that enabled them to win pennants and win World Series titles against the Yankees and other better-bankrolled teams back east.3 The farm system was adopted throughout baseball.
It arguably harmed the long-term popularity and growth of the game. Every team outside of the American and National leagues eventually became subservient to The Big Club. Baseball would have been better off if it had developed like soccer in England, but that is another post.
In the present, the Cardinals’ place in North American fan culture has been defined by Drew Magary buddy-roasting Will Leitch about a decade ago. The Cardinals make the playoffs regularly, but their whole vibe is cornpone.
(All together now: “Every fucking October, Leitch morphs into an eight-year-old wearing a propeller beanie and shooting marbles on the living room floor. GOLLY GEE GUYS ISN'T CARDINALS BASEBALL JUST THE BESTEST?!”)4
Long Gone is by no means a great movie. It is a very good one for something made for $5 million with some long shooting days on a non-union production. The arc with Larry Riley’s character also affirms that institutional racism in baseball did not vanish with integration. It was much, much slower in other nooks and crannies of the United States, and cultural sensitivity was often nonexistent.
Put it this way. It has been almost 29 years since first seeing watched Ken Burns’ Baseball. But the trauma that Curt Flood shared about one of his experiences as a minor-league prospect playing for a Savannah, Ga., minor-league team in 1957 has never been forgotten.
Flood was 19 years old when that happened to him. That is one life stage, those bridge years between teenager and full-fledged adult, when you are at your most fragile. Here you are, ready to leave behind the circumstances of your youth, and eager to earn your chances on merit (ideally), and then you get hit with a rude awakening about how some things will not change. At least that was my very ginger half-arsed attempt to empathize with what a Black ballplayer generations ago faced.
Long Gone also premièred just weeks after Los Angeles Dodgers executive Al Campanis made his infamous racist remarks on ABC’s Nightline about Black baseball men not having the “necessities” to be a field manager or general manager.
Joe Louis Brown wears the No. 42 of Jackie Robinson, and his skill set as a catcher with power and fielding skills approximates the matchless masher Josh Gibson. Sadly, like Robinson… like Gibson… like Curt Flood… like Chadwick Boseman, Larry Riley also left the world far too young. He died at age 38 as a casualty of the AIDS crisis only five years after Long Gone was made.
Long Gone has undercooked pieces you can page past, such as puppy love between Weeks and a local girl, which only seems to get play in order to contrast the relationship between Dixie and Stud. The latter couple has an age gap, but it soon becomes clear Stud has more than met his match in having someone who is not ready to become a dogged victim of inexorable fate.
There is a bit that I related to as both a kid and an adult who feels like he failed to fulfill his potential. Chalk that up to being a survivor of Gifted programming.
That Long Gone disappeared into obscurity is unfortunate. It scores 7.7 out of 10 on IMDb from some 1,100 users. That is about 1 percent of the number of users who have rated A League Of Their Own.
It kind of has acquired a bit of way under-the-radar mythology. Some accounts say William Petersen picked Long Gone over the role that Tom Berenger played, and won an Oscar for, in Oliver Stone’s Platoon. The real story is less sensational. Petersen apparently decided that he was not interested in doing six weeks of basic military training before having to go work for Oliver Stone. He took the easier way, which is consistent with the character.
Madsen also told the Tampa Bay Times in 2015 that Ron Shelton took notes at a Long Gone screening, and later told her he borrowed from the movie for Bull Durham. Shelton has denied that, responding that the only thing he takes into screenings is a hip flask.
Hmmm. That sounds exactly like something Stud Cantrell would have said, so score that as a non-denial denial.
Spring 1989; March 20, 2023
RR1 Napanee; Hamilton, ON
That is more than enough for now. Please stay safe, and please be kind.
There were no AL or NL teams in the American West until 1958, when the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants simultaneously relocated to California from New York City. The Pacific Coast League was the big time on the U.S. west coast. The PCL made a push for major-league status in the post-Second World War years before the Dodgers, Giants, and further west coast expansion kiboshed that movement.
As opposed to What Should Be; stick tap to Lenny Bruce (1925-1966).
St. Louis was the western terminus of both the AL and NL over the first half of the 20th century. Its second team, the St. Louis Browns, became the Baltimore Orioles in 1953 after its plans to relocate to Los Angeles fell through. Cross-state neighbour Kansas City regained major-league status with the arrival of A’s (1955-67) and then the Royals (created as a 1969 expansion team).
You cannot spell “schadenfreude” without C-a-r-d-s for a reason.