Bull Durham
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Kevin Costner stars as "Crash" Davis (named after Lawrence "Crash" Davis, an actual player for the Durham Bulls in the 1940s and 50s), a veteran of countless years in the minor leagues unwillingly sent down to single-A Bulls for a specific purpose: to educate a hotshot rookie pitcher "Nuke" LaLoosh (Robbins, playing a character loosely based on Steve Dalkowski) about being a major-league talent, and to get Nuke to control his haphazard pitching. Crash immediately begins calling Nuke by the degrading name of "Meat", and they get off to a very rocky start.
Thrown into the mix is Annie (Sarandon, the character named for the "Baseball Annies" groupies), a life-long spiritual seeker who latched onto the "Church of Baseball" and has, every year, taken on a prospect with the Bulls to be a lover/student. Annie flirts with Crash and Nuke but Crash walks out, noting he's too much a veteran to 'try out' for anything, although before leaving he and Annie share some sparks of mutual interest.
Annie and Crash then work, in their own way, and with a lot of animosity from Crash, to shape Nuke into a big-league pitcher: Annie by playing mild bondage games, reading poetry to Nuke, and getting the rookie to think in alternative ways; Crash by forcing Nuke to learn "not to think," by letting the catcher make the pitching calls (memorably at two points telling the batters what pitch was coming after Nuke had shaken off Crash's calls), and lecturing to Nuke about the major leagues with both the pressure in facing big league hitters that can hit Nuke's "heat" (fastballs) and the pleasure of enjoying life in 'The Show' that Crash briefly lived for "the twenty-one best days of my life" and has tried desperately for years to get back to. Meanwhile, as Nuke matures the relationship between Annie and Crash grows, until it becomes obvious that the two of them are right for each other, except for the fact that Annie's currently with Nuke. Along the way, Annie asks Crash what he believes about life, and Crash delivers a spectacular harangue.
After a rough start to Nuke's career, he becomes a dominant pitcher by mid-season thanks to the coaching of Annie and Crash. By the end of the movie, Nuke is called up to 'The Show' and the Bulls, now having no use for Nuke's personal mentor, release Crash. This incites jealous anger in Crash, who is frustrated by Nuke's failure to recognize all the talent he was blessed with. Nuke leaves for the big leagues, effectively ending his relationship with Annie, and Crash overcomes his initial jealously to leave Nuke with some final words of advice.
Eventually Crash, an experienced and skilled hitter, joins another team, the Asheville Tourists, and breaks the minor league record for most career home runs, achieving a personal milestone that he has striven for. Annie wants to tell The Sporting News about it, but Crash swears her to silence. Crash then retires as a player and returns to Durham to begin a life with Annie. He tells her that he will accept a baseball coaching job. Foreshadowing suggests that he'll succeed both in this coaching role and in his life with Annie. Both characters end one phase of their lives and begin another. We see Nuke one last time, being interviewed as a major leaguer, where he recites some answers to questions which he practiced earlier in the movie with Crash.
