Clint Eastwood’s new movie is fantastic. Baseball fans everywhere will love it. But this film goes far beyond the ballpark. At the heart of the movie is the father/daughter relationship between crusty old baseball scout Gus Lobel (Clint Eastwood) and his estranged daughter Mickey (played by Amy Adams).
Mickey is not short for Michelle. No, Lobel named his daughter after his favorite ballplayer (and mine) Mickey Mantle. Here’s an autographed picture that Mickey Mantle signed when I was a kid. My mom actually got him to sign it when she met him at some conference– I don’t know how — but it’s one of my prized possessions:
Mickey Mantle
But I digress. In this movie, Mickey is a lawyer who’s on the corporate fast track to partnership. The last thing in the world she wants is to take care of her aging dad, who is on the brink of losing everything. Gus may have diamond vision, but he is going blind with macular degeneration, making it nearly impossible for him to scout talent for the Atlanta Braves.
Eastwood plays the cantankerous, mean old man to perfection. He’s bitter about losing his sight and can’t see how his behavior over the years has driven his daughter away. But the chief scout for the Braves (played by John Goodman) trusts Lobel’s instincts and somehow convinces Mickey to go on the road with her dad to check out the top prospect for the baseball draft.
Turns out Mickey knows a lot about baseball and is befriended by a rival scout (played by Justin Timberlake) and together they keep an eye on the man who can’t see. But Gus’s ears still work and he’s able to hear the sound of the bat and knows that something rings hollow with the hot prospect.
I don’t want to give away the ending, but Mickey uses her own baseball instincts and everything Gus has taught her to find “The Natural”. From the opening pitch, this movie plays like the antithesis of Money Ball — in which computers and sabermetrics dominate every baseball decision. In Gus’s world, computers can’t measure heart, desire or love for the game.The only way to truly evaluate a player is to see him in action — if Gus could only see.
Gus is old-school in every way and fails to account for the one element you can’t scout — luck. And that’s where Mickey comes in, by finding the true talent who will change her career and her dad’s life forever. Their troubled relationship unravels in the movie like a baseball that’s lost it’s cover, but emerges newly stitched in a way that will touch every dad and daughter’s heart.
I loved this movie and hope you will too! Check out the trailer for a sneak preview below:
