by John Walters

Starting Five

1. “Whoa!”: Canada

Eric Hosmer and Salvador Perez of the world champion Royals hit solo homers for the American League, which despite playing in San Diego’s Petco Park, was the home team because somebody has let the N.L. host the Midsummer Classic for the past four years.

For different reasons, Clayton Kershaw, Madison Bumgarner and Stephen Strasburg never entered the game for the N.L. The game has lost a LOT off its fastball in recent years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnC7mkmmMc8

Meanwhile, Canada woke up PISSED off this morning. I mean, PISSED! My closest Canadian friend (no, not Stana Katic) phoned in a froth of rage last night. If I were the Tenors, I’d never venture north of the border (they changed a lyric to addressed the whole _____ Lives Matter nontroversy).

2. Up and DOW

There was no rally in San Diego last night quite like the one at Wall Street earlier that day. The DOW finished at an all-time high of 18,348 while the Standard & Poor’s (S&P) extended gains on its previous day’s all-time high to hit 2,152.

Of course, what goes up must come down (Rule No. 1), so be aware….

3. What Color Is Your Parachute?

After a 45-year investigation, the FBI closes the book on the D.B. Cooper case. For those of you who don’t know, in November of 1971 Cooper boarded a Northwest Orient Airlines flight bound from Portland to Seattle, claimed he had a bomb in his suitcase, and demanded $200,000 in ransom. The flight landed in Seattle, Cooper got his money and the passengers were taken off, and then he and the flight crew took off again for the destination he intended: Mexico City.

Then, when the plane reached an altitude of about 2 miles, he strapped on a parachute and leaped out of the back of the plane. Neither Cooper nor the money was ever seen again. I’ve always just assumed he landed on Bigfoot and they both were killed.

p.s. My friend’s dad was the first officer on that flight. He doesn’t like to discuss it. Really.

4. POTUS, Dallas

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5IcMdwV6Hg

Didn’t get a chance to listen to President Obama’s speech at the memorial for the five slain police officers yesterday, so I’m posting it here. Heard the familiar refrains: people who approve of the president called it one of the most powerful speeches of his presidency, while those who don’t were aghast that he’d dare lecture the country about racism (“I don’t know who you think you are, FDR, but I’ll thank you NOT to tell me what I have to fear and what I don’t have to fear! Good day, sir!”).

I posted it so you can judge for yourself.

5.  The Film Room with Chris Corbellini!

In which our intrepid reviewer assesses the new “30 for 30” doc on Doc….Gooden and Darryl Strawberry.

Doc & Darryl

Stars (out of 4) ****

by Chris Corbellini

Man, these two were fucked up in the ‘80s.

 That’s not a compliment. It’s sad commentary — what you’d say to a friend when you spot the high school jocks that never left and stumble around the local bar. An all-too-frequent way to survive the pressures of the big leagues is to self-medicate with whatever bad shit you can find: booze, cocaine, and adultery. Whatever. But for New York Mets pitcher Doc Gooden and outfielder Darryl Strawberry, baseball was the medication for their broken lives, and a temporary one at that.

As members of the New Yawk Mets, Doc and Darryl were two comets that came together through a gravitational pull of scouting, drafting, and fate, and for a few baseball seasons, the sports world watched them alight the night sky. Sounds pretty, right? Celestial? Not behind the curtain. Gooden and Strawberry began their major league careers by exceeding the hype. Both ended their playing days with rap sheets that involved domestic violence and aborted rehab stints, and the mental scars and physical toll of what happened can still be seen on their weary faces 30 years later.

 There are interviews in this powerful 30 for 30 that describe in vivid detail how special Doc and Darryl were with those Mets teams: Doc with that rubbery, otherworldly arm, and Strawberry with that perfect name and Holy Jesus swing. Gooden’s ’85 season, and the ’86 World Champion Mets club obviously get warm mentions. No one can take that away from them, as athletes say. The demons were already there, though, for all to see in the clubhouse.

Both Doc and the Straw were drug users by high school. Both came from poor households. Strawberry had to deal with an abusive, near-murderous father; Doc grew up hard in Tampa. They then eagerly cannonballed into the nightlife of New York City during the Cocaine Decade, messed around, and due to the party atmosphere of that franchise, were never called on it until it was too late. When Darryl first met Doc, the pitcher was incoherently drunk. When first baseman Keith Hernandez noticed Doc was twitching on a team bus due to some kind of narcotic, he said nothing to the organization, because he had his own habit to hide.

None of their transgressions are new material, of course, and the filmmakers found those headlines relatively easily, I’m sure, amidst the ESPN archives. If that’s all this documentary was, a retelling of those wild stories with that tried-and-true “what could have been” angle, it would have been a decent watch for everyday ESPN watchers, and a little humdrum to New Yorkers who know the ’86 Mets so well at this point. And maybe the end product would glorify them to a degree, the way the bad boy ‘70s Raiders and ‘90s Cowboys lived large, drank, smoked, did some blow, and beat the milk drinkers on the field. The end justifies the means, right?

Not this time. Doc & Darryl is about addiction. Man versus Himself. The co-director, Judd Apatow – the famous Judd Apatow — admitted after the screening that whenever he sees a pro team win a championship, he thinks about the members of the losing team. He cited his Trainwreck star LeBron James finally winning a title for Cleveland as an example – as happy as he was for James, he also looked for the faces of the fallen Warriors. (What immediately came to my mind when Apatow said that was the ending of Hoosiers. I remember being blown away that a movie showed the losers amidst that swelling music).

You can see that sensibility in some of Apatow’s early TV work on Freaks and Geeks and sure as shit, that same undercurrent of failure is present in this doc.

Apatow added that his co-director, 30 for 30 veteran Mike Bonfiglio, conducted all of the interviews – including the famous folks that an A-List director should know, like Bill Maher and Jon Stewart. The co-directors soon discovered that this film wasn’t going to be funny in a boys-gotta-be-boys kind of way, with some regret sprinkled in. Quite the opposite, actually, which Apatow admits he regrets. Behind the scenes Bonfiglio must be a world-class interviewer, because while a recovering addict can be astonishingly candid about their low points — they say it matter-of-fact, as if it happened to another person — he got both Doc and Darryl to choke up at different points, and fall silent.  Apatow must have seen those skills up close, as Bonfiglio directed he and Lena Dunham in an episode of Iconoclasts a few years back. 

 I won’t reveal the subject matter that broke these grown men down, just that those interviews were done separately. What followed out of those talks was inspired and took the film to a higher place – the filmmakers decided to shoot the two ex-Mets together in a New York-area diner. Bonfiglio said after the screening that he asked the movie’s producer, Kelsey Field (Apatow gave Field a nice round of applause afterward), to find a joint that looked like the one in Goodfellas, when Robert DeNiro and Ray Liotta find out Joe Pesci was whacked. So Field made calls and found the real location of that diner in Goodfellas, a greasy spoon in Queens, and they shot the movie’s best stuff there – two once-invincible athletes, now weathered, humbled and aged by their vices, laughing the way ex-jocks do, unconsciously comforting one another, and even confronting each other about a decades-old slight.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dk-a1RAX2mU

 Of the two, if I had to make a truly insensitive wager, I’d guess that Darryl would be the one who stays clean. Sports stars can fool you, yes, especially when they are armed with tales of redemption. But you see a calm in Strawberry’s face and in his body language when this 30 for 30 was filmed. Straw had hit rock bottom, climbed out, admitted he became just like his father, and is now in a place where he can smile back at his reflection. It looks like a comfortable life down there in Florida, with a nice home, a second life through his faith, and above all, a warm, understanding wife he met during a stint in rehab. All of this is presented with just a few moments of b-roll, but you see it. You feel like he made it through.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpYeHsvdgTI

This scene came to mind: She’s his Eskimo. Maybe the life afforded to him through baseball was, too, despite his best intentions to ruin all of it.

I worry about Doc a lot more.

A lot.

There’s a now-famous Steve Jobs speech he made to a graduating class at Stanford about how painful moments in your life, and even seemingly random ones, can lead you to positive, fulfilling choices in the future – you just can’t see it while you’re suffering. Basically, and I’m really paraphrasing here, Jobs is saying have faith, young Jedi. It’ll all help one day. It’ll all make sense. Doc looks like he’s still dealing with some demons, with his sunken cheeks, late arrivals to get-togethers, and quick-and-easy explanations of some of his more notorious off-the-field incidents. To Doc, all of the pain may not make sense yet. He may not know where all the low points will lead. I don’t think the filmmakers do either, or anyone else who watches this film.

We do see some kindness. Gooden tells Strawberry “you still like sweets,” as he approaches their table at the diner, which made the bigger man smile a little. Perhaps that’s a memory Straw will carry with him when he thinks about all the good in a former teammate.

Indeed, everyone that has seen that genuine sweetness in Doc in a clubhouse, or witnessed him throw lightning at Shea, or watched as an entire city rallied around him during that no-hitter in the Bronx, wants him to find that peace. Myself included.