Sportsfrog.com

Shocking headline, I know. But if anyone saw Major League Baseball Presents The Natural last night after the ballgame, they saw what I hope to be the beginning of a much improved effort by baseball to improve its promotion of the game and its players. It was, in every way, phenomenally done. The set-up is that there’s a new DVD release of the movie coming out (of course there is). So what MLB did was find a bunch of its more charismatic talkative ballplayers and have them sit and watch the movie and talk about the emotions it brought out in them.

One of the best parts is that these guys, like me, were kids when it came out. So you get legitimate nostalgia. The production was superb, going from brief snips from the movie to player comments on the snips. They showed guys like Juan Pierre and Nick Swisher calling out the lines to the movie before it came up on the screen, and they allowed these guys to tell their stories.

Jimmy Rollins told the story of how he watched this movie every day when he was a kid, and would do the whole pause-play thing on his VCR to watch Redford’s swing so he could copy it. Eric Byrnes remembered that it was raining in Belmont when he saw it with his Mom, and he thought that was a cool coincidence because of the rainy scene where the cover gets knocked off the ball.

What was brilliant about the production though was when they started comparing the characters in the movie to today’s ballplayers. So The Whammer becomes Jim Thome or David Ortiz, Bump becomes Eric Byrnes or Aaron Rowand, and Hobbs is Albert Pujols or Manny Ramirez. They inserted clips of baseball highlights interspered with clips from the film. The wife and I were watching it getting goosebumps and getting completely pumped about the season starting.

It was the first time I have seen baseball start to market itself correctly (on purpose) in a long time. It put faces to names and gave fans access to ballplayers acting like kids again. And a head nod to whomever had the bright idea to use this vehicle to promote black players in baseball. As has been discussed here and in other spaces, the lack of black ballplayers in the game is somewhat disturbing. But this production included Rollins, Pierre, Bill Hall, Jermaine Dye, Mike Cameron, Ryan Howard, Dave Roberts, Prince Fielder and more. It was also - and I wonder if this was intentional - surprisingly void of Yankee or Red Sox influence.

What it showed was that MLB may finally be embracing the idea of promoting its strengths and addressing its weaknesses. It may finally be listening to its fans, and understanding how to recruit new ones.

Granted, it took advantage of a classic movie, and there are only so many such vehicles for promotion. But it maximized this opportunity, which is something I have not said very often in recent years. A job well done by MLB is something to take notice of.

So check your local listings. It’s well worth an hour of your time.