I remember the first time I saw Bull Durham. It was 2004 and I was still living in mom and dad's basement. I was drinking cold bottles of Miller High Life with my buddy Al, and we were flipping channels when we stopped just in time to see Susan Sarandon – who was still in Vintage Babe Form back in the late 80s – walk out of her house and into a minor league ballpark. She delivered an A+ monologue to start the movie, and I was hooked as soon as she mentioned that there are 108 beads in a Catholic rosary and 108 stitches in a baseball. I've since learned this is an outright lie, albeit a poetic, beautiful tiny lie, but even so, her claim cemented for me a relationship between spirituality and baseball that I had always felt but had never been able to express. She called it The Church of Baseball.

Even if the rest of the movie weren't wonderful, even if it rested on the laurels of its opening monologue and Kevin Costner's passable home run swing, I would have loved it still. Thankfully, the movie goes on to hilariously and sincerely portray the difficulties of love and friendship, as well as the beauty and tragedy of the sport. Just as Harbach's The Art of Fielding isn't just a book about baseball, Bull Durham isn't only a baseball movie; like Millie says of Ebby Calvin "Nuke" LaLoosh, it's "sort of all over the place."
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