When tackling the question of “what is the greatest baseball movie of all time” one can come up with several correct answers.
You could say “Major League” with Bob Euker’s one liners, Cerrano’s inability to hit home runs without the help of his voodoo doll and Charlie Sheen walking to the mound as the entire stadium sings “Wild Thing” all make this comedy classic a great choice.
You could choose “Bull Durham” with its incredible chemistry between Kevin Costner and Susan Sarandon, the magic and grit of the minor leagues and Tim Robbins as the dim-witted prospect Nuke LaLaloosh.
“The Natural” would be a fine selection with Robert Redford as Roy Hobbs, the old-time player who finally gets his chance.
You could go for my personal selection “Field Of Dreams”. I actually believe that a response to the simple question “Do you like Field Of Dreams?” is a better personality test than Myers-Briggs or the Enneagram.
You also wouldn’t be wrong if you said “A League Of Their Own”.
“A League Of Their Own” follows the formation of the All Girls Professional Baseball League during World War 2.
This movie has everything.
Incredible performances by Geena Davis and Lori Petty as sisters who end up on rival teams battling it out for the championship.
You have the stunt casting of Rosie O’Donnell and Madonna who play best friends and actually end up being great in the film.
You have Tom Hanks in what you might consider his breakout role as the manager who was once a great player but alcoholism cut his career short and a leg injury made him unfit to go to war.
There are so many great pieces of dialogue (“Are you crying?? There’s no crying in baseball.) and scenes in this movie that it’s hard to pick a favorite. But one that I love almost never gets mentioned.
Jon Lovitz, who plays a scout tasked with recruiting only pretty girls for the league and has already picked up Davis and Petty, stops in a small town to check out a prospect named Marla Hooch.
We see Marla playing only against boys and absolutely crushing every pitch. But when Lovitz goes up to her after practice he gets a close look at Marla and realizes she’s not exactly pretty so he’s going to pass until Davis and Petty refuse to go with him unless they take her along.
And all that is great but it’s the performance from Marla’s father that gets me every time.
He explains to Lovitz that he raised Marla without a Mom and he raised her as if she was a boy and not to make her suffer for his mistakes.
After Lovitz relents Marla and the Dad have a final moment at the train station. She has second thoughts about leaving him alone. About going where she doesn’t know anybody.
The Dad takes a breath and says “nothing is ever going to happen here, you have to go where things happen”.
I've thought about that sentence far more often than you'd expect me to think about a throwaway line from a 34-year-old baseball movie.
And I think the reason is I talk to a lot of people who spend enormous amounts of energy trying to make things happen while remaining in places (physical places, routines, habits, social circles, schedules) where those things are unlikely to happen.
They are suffering from lack of proximity. A lack of connection. Of believing it can still happen if they keep it at an arm’s distance.
More specifically, a lot of people are waiting for fitness to happen in a place where fitness doesn’t happen.
They want to get stronger, but they keep doing workouts that never require them to lift anything meaningfully heavy.
They want to lose weight, but they keep eating exactly the way they’ve always eaten and hope that adding a couple workouts will somehow overwhelm everything else.
They want to become runners, but they spend six months shopping for sneakers.
They want something to change without going to the place, literally or metaphorically, where that change can occur.
Your goals require you to put yourself where they can happen.
We tend to think we need to become the person first and then put ourselves in the environment where that person belongs. But very often we've got it backwards. You have to go to the place to become the person.
There's an idea in fitness that we tend to overemphasize motivation and underemphasize circumstances.
People ask “How do I become more disciplined?” but perhaps the better question is “Have I put myself somewhere that makes the thing I want likely to happen?”
Training around stronger people is going where things happen.
Signing up for a race before you're ready is going where things happen.
Putting training on your calendar rather than hoping you'll find time is going where things happen.
Buying groceries on Sunday instead of relying on yourself to make a brilliant nutritional decision at 8:30 Wednesday night is going where things happen.
And there's a subtle but important distinction here: none of those things guarantees the outcome. They just put you in the path of it.
The lesson isn't necessarily that you need more motivation, discipline or willpower. Maybe you don't need another podcast, another training program or another Monday when you're finally going to get serious.
Maybe you're Marla Hooch standing on the platform. And it all feels big and scary and unsafe.
But the truth is, you don't have to become the person you're trying to become before you leave the station.
You become them by going.