A combination of nostalgia for Duke Snider and this being the night of the Oscars has made me want to call back this post I wrote in 2005 about my favorite movie, “The Misfits.” This month marks the 50th anniversary of its release.
… Time and again in tense physical and emotional struggles, “The Misfits” takes the guileless idealism that we are born with, tears it down, and then rebuilds it. It shows how crushing the disappointment can be when the world does not live up to our expectations, and yet how few of us can resist trying to reinvent the world so it will. It shows how flawed we are and yet how sympathetic, how deserving of rescue, we can be. It shows the battles of our lives.
If it isn’t clear how this film relates to Dodger Thoughts and baseball, consider how often the team and game we love seem to let us down, and how often so many of us (though certainly not all of us) return to them, reconfiguring our passion for them in what we hope will be a workable equation. And how often we are rewarded for our pains. …
