The return of Kelly Leak

When asked about the most realistic baseball movies, my answer is simple – there are two that hold up. Unless you have a couple hours to kill the others aren’t quite up to the reality challenge.

The two: Bull Durham and the original The Bad News Bears.

At least from my point of view from spending the last seven years around a professional baseball team as well as a childhood and adolescence playing the game, those two films best captured the essence of the game.

It’s probably me, though. I don’t like the sappy side of baseball simply because I’ve never seen it in real life. People strike out, coaches and parents push too hard, there’s always someone bigger, faster or better. The best way to deal with it is to enjoy it and not take it so seriously – that’s what they learned at the end of The Bad News Bears, and what Crash Davis taught everyone on the Durham Bulls.

Although I do have that romantic, NPR, baseball-as-a-metaphor-for-life buried deep in the locus of my mind, I only bring it out when I'm killing time and watching The Natural or Field of Dreams… alone. Maybe that's because I've seen the real side of baseball and know that the romanticized view doesn't exist except for on Old-Timers Day or in Cooperstown. Baseball is curse words, a hot grounder that misses a glove and turns the shin purple, spitting and an obstructed-view, upper-deck seat next to a drunk who just spilled another beer on your shoes.

It’s also a bit of a metaphor for the life of Jackie Earle Haley.

Haley, as most remember, played Kelly Leak – the hard-hitting, motorcycle-riding badass in The Bad News Bears. He also played Moocher in Breaking Away, the coming-of-age movie that first made Dennis Quaid a star. I remember watching it on TV – before the proliferation of HBO etc. – in the 1980s and being mesmerized by the story and the bicycle scenes. Maybe that’s where the fascination with endurance sports started… who knows.

Either way, in two of the best movies released during the mid-to-late 1970s, Jackie Earle Haley was front and center.

And then he disappeared.

The transition from child star to adult actor appears to be a slippery slope that has claimed many – count Haley as one who didn’t make the transition from potential star to working actor so well. But in one of the great redemption stories that has caught the eye of just about every mainstream media outlet, Haley not only is back, but also will be in the running to win an Academy Award this Sunday night for his role in adaptation of Tom Perrotta’s novel Little Children. Prior to that, Haley had a significant role in the re-make of the adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men.

Not bad for someone who had spent the previous 15 years as a limo driver, pizza delivery man, construction worker and infomercial producer.

Check out his story:
from Salon.com: “I felt like it was supposed to happen this way”

from The Washington Post: A Former Child Star's Grown-Up Reward

Certainly, Haley doesn’t need a trophy to validate his work. And as we all know, the Academy Awards are the biggest bunch of b.s. out there. But if there is anyone up for the award who has paid more dues than Haley, then, yes, give them the trophy.

Let's hope Tanner Boyle can make a comeback, too.

Elsewhere...
Pat Burrell's engagement pictures are floating around on the Internets. Could the pending nuptials be the linchpin to a big season?

All that and brains, too
Chase Utley has joined a "virtual march" to help raise awareness about Global Warming. Let's hope that he can start his march by taking a sledge hammer to Jon Lieber's stupid truck.