Bull Durham director relishes visit to HOF

“My wife and son had never been to the Baseball Hall of Fame before and I always loved it here and I wanted to show them on my way to Rochester,” said Shelton at the end of his tour. “I love it because it’s really a great museum in the sense that I never want to get past the first exhibit. A lot of museums around the world I’m bored in a hurry, but here I can spend an hour-and-a-half on the first 20 feet. So every time I’m here I just sort of graze and then I come back and find something else to graze on.

“As a storyteller myself, I think the attention to detail here feels personal. This you feel as a baseball lover. Somehow I feel the sport then and now,” he added. “And I think it’s fairly democratic in acknowledging that the game has evolved and changed and will continue to do so.”

Shelton’s most recent visit to Cooperstown came in 2008 when the Baseball Hall celebrated the 20th anniversary of Bull Durham’s theatrical release.

“This Cooperstown trip was also a chance to come without an agenda so I could kayak with my son, play golf at the Leatherstocking Golf Course with my son, and go to the memorabilia stores on Main Street,” he said. “I have to do some interviews in Rochester in the next few days, but I’m just off-duty today having a blast.”

After five minor league seasons, Shelton left the playing field after the 1971 campaign and pursued a film career. His first directorial effort, from his own screenplay, was 1988’s Bull Durham, starring Kevin Costner, Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon. His other baseball film was Cobb, a 1994 picture about late-in-life days for the Georgia Peach, one of the first five electees into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

“For the most part I didn’t like baseball movies,” Shelton said. “There are some I like, obviously, but in general I don’t because somebody always hit a home run in the bottom of the ninth inning, and honest to God, I must have played thousands of games at every level I can remember like three times that actually happened.”

Among Shelton’s other successful sports genre movies in which he served as both director and writer include White Men Can’t Jump (1992) and Tin Cup (1996).

“I have a different view than most people because I played baseball my whole life, in high school, college and professionally. So I tend to try and make sports movies from the players’ point of view. Not the fans’ because the players see a different game,” Shelton said. “And also I try to concentrate on everything except the big play because you can’t do big plays better than SportsCenter. But I can go home with the player, I can go on the bus with the player, I can go into their private life and their love problems and their inadequacies and their flaws and their hubris. And once in a while there’s a play, but the rest of it is what’s interesting to me.”

Looking back on the success of Bull Durham, a film that was released three decades ago, Shelton explained: “I was just trying to tell a story and engage an audience in a world I knew, a world I had affection for, a world in which I thought there were a lot of guys like Crash Davis who, there but for the grace of God, goes a guy with a big league career but just wrong place, wrong time. And there are plenty of Nuke Lalooshes out there, too.

“The time is very short when you’re a player. And I have great admiration for the guys who managed to maximize their potential with the clock ticking so fast. When I walked away I was 25 on a Triple-A contract in Rochester just up the road, and I felt like I was 80. You’re 25 and you’re not in the big leagues. Honest to God, to think of 25 as being old now is stupefying, but I did. I didn’t get released, I just didn’t want to turn into a 35-year-old guy riding the bus. And I couldn’t look at the game for a little while except for watching my friends like Bobby Grich and Don Baylor and Johnny Oates and all those guys that went on. And when I finally got going in my movie career I said I’m going to make a baseball movie that I want to go see. Maybe nobody else will but I will. And it turned out people did.”