Roy Hobbs
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[edit] Biography
Roy Hobbs was an outstanding pitching prospect in the 1920s, but his career was sidetracked when he was shot by a crazed fan. In 1939, Hobbs attempted a comeback with the New York Knights as a very old rookie outfielder, and led them to the National League pennant.
The movie begins by showing Roy Hobbs as a grown man, looking rather old for his years, silently awaiting a train that will take him to New York for a last chance at baseball. The specifics of his early career are not revealed until later. The film then cuts to a lengthy flashback showing Hobbs as a young boy playing baseball on an American farm, somewhere in the Midwest, with his father. He is obviously a highly-talented baseball player. When a tree, under which his father had died, is destroyed by lightning, Roy takes a piece of the tree and makes a bat from it, on which he burns a lightning bolt and the label "Wonderboy". He carries the bat with him throughout his career, in a trombone case.
Hobbs embarks on his baseball career, not as a batter but an ace pitcher. He travels by train throughout the country, hoping to land a spot with a major league team. Hobbs's talent is virtually infinite: in one incident at a fair, the teenaged farm boy accepts a wager to throw three pitches to "The Whammer," the top hitter in the major leagues and modeled after Babe Ruth. Honorable but young and a bit cocksure, the young Hobbs is seduced by Harriet Bird (Barbara Hershey), an alluring but dark and sinister woman who gravitates to him after judging that he is the best baseball player who ever lived. In a hotel room, Bird shoots Hobbs in the mid-section just before committing suicide.
The story skips forward 16 years. Hobbs is now thirty-five and has just arrived in New York by train. He helps a down-on-their-luck, fictitious National League team called the New York Knights (similar to Brooklyn Dodgers of that era; a laughingstock, unlike the New York Giants, who were successful in the 1930s) and is signed by a scout (in a blunder that later turns out to be part of the movie's main subplot) who thinks he is a washout, without consulting the team's manager and co-owner. The gruff manager, Pop Fisher (Wilford Brimley) is unimpressed by the aged Hobbs. However, Hobbs refuses to leave, and eventually gets a chance to take batting practice, where he hits every ball well past the fence. Still skeptical, Fisher agrees to let Hobbs play. In Hobbs's first at bat in a major league game, he hits the ball but not for a home run--instead, he literally tears the cover off the ball, sending an unraveling ball of string into the outfield. From that point on, Hobbs hits massive home runs time after time, rising to stardom and reversing the bottom-dwelling Knights' fortunes.
Despite his supernatural abilities and general goodness, Hobbs and his abilities are vulnerable to temptation. An unscrupulous and cynical reporter, Max Mercy (Robert Duvall), hounds Hobbs through the season. The mystery of those sixteen years is slowly revealed as Roy's childhood sweetheart, Iris Gaines (Glenn Close), returns to his life. It is later revealed that an encounter between Roy and Iris sixteen years earlier had produced a son. The corrupt owner of the Knights, The Judge (played by Robert Prosky), who hates bright light, tries to persuade, even bribe, Hobbs to throw the remainder of the season owing to a contractual agreement between The Judge and Pop Fisher, whereby The Judge will obtain full ownership from Pop if the team fails to win the pennant. Hobbs feels strong loyalty to Pop, the archetypical gruff but loveable coach, particularly as Pop has confided to him that his one dream is to win the pennant; Pop doesn't care about winning the World Series, he just wants to be there. Hobbs cares little about money and stands firm against The Judge's attempts to buy his honor. However, The Judge realizes Hobbs's one weakness--he can be corrupted by a woman. A gambler associate of The Judge, Gus Sands (Darren McGavin), introduces Hobbs to his mistress, Memo Paris (Kim Basinger).
Hobbs battles through many distractions and adversities, including succumbing to the sexual persuasions of Memo, who, while not as clearly sinister as the woman who shot him years ago, is most definitely an amoral and corrupting character. As Roy falls further into Memo's embrace and away from his honor, his play suffers, as if he has been reduced from partly divine to just a flawed, over-the-hill man. Before the pennant-deciding game, Hobbs eventually resolves to break free of Memo's and The Judge's web, and The Judge (maybe?) resorts to poisoning Hobbs (leading to a reaggravation of the injuries to his stomach sustained in the shooting). Whether or not the Judge had anything to do with Hobbs' incapacitation is left somewhat ambiguous, it may merely be a recurrence of the old bullet injury being aggravated by Hobbs' intense play and the stress of a pennant race with the entire team on his shoulders. Up until the last minute it is doubtful Hobbs will be able to play, after he collapses while attempted batting practice, against doctor's orders, in collusion with the trainer and some of the Knight's players.
Hobbs, of course, plays in the game even as his stomach bleeds through his shirt. The game stays close, in part because at least one key member of the Knights has clearly been paid off by the Judge's underworld associates and is trying to throw the game.
As befits both an epic poem and a baseball movie, Roy comes to bat in the bottom of the ninth, with a chance to win the game. He looks to the stands and sees Iris Gaines (Glenn Close), his childhood sweetheart and as pure and good a person as the other two female characters are predatory and poisonous. She stands up, shrouded in white light. (Actually, she stands up earlier in the film, helping Hobbs break his unlucky streak.) She is with a boy, who looks to be about sixteen and bears a striking resemblance to Robert Redford. Despite this, Hobbs fails to put two and two together until Iris hurriedly passes a note down through the crowd to Hobbs. He reads it, presumably saying that the boy is his son, and with the realization that he is redeemed, again becomes more than human: Roy Hobbs, The Natural. His stomach is bleeding more than ever, and he realizes that he may die; of course, it is his duty and destiny to stand at bat. As he steps up to the batter's box with divine determination, he swings Wonderboy, infused with the soul of his father, at the first pitch: the culmination of his quest. And gets around on it: hard and dead foul. Having dropped the bat, Hobbs looks down and sees that Wonderboy had shattered. No longer able to depend on his tools, Hobbs tells the awkward but good-hearted bat boy to pick a good one for him. The bat is not magical in the way that Wonderboy was, but it is a good bat, one Hobbs had helped the batboy make earlier, as he had made Wonderboy as a boy, and Hobbs grips it in his hands, realizing that his success or failure is his own. His stomach has started bleeding more profusely, and he accepts the fact that the biggest swing of his life will probably kill him. Hobbs shrugs off the umpire's concern about the bleeding, telling him to play ball and staring down the pitcher (apparently a young pitching phenom, much as Hobbs had been at the beginning of his career). Unfortunately, the pitcher's sneer is no match against the demi-god Hobbs, and Hobbs proceeds to hit a towering home run, which soars into the stadium's lights and starts a chain reaction that bursts the lights and rains sparks down over the field and the Judge and his cronies in his private box and over Hobbs as he runs the bases, in a famous and really quite beautiful scene, backed by Randy Newman's iconic score (which is often played at baseball games following homeruns).
The Knights have won the pennant, and true to Pop Fisher's dream, we don't see what happens in the World Series. It's the end of baseball for Hobbs, and the film ends with a scene of Hobbs playing catch with his son in a sun-dappled cornfield, with Iris standing by. The ending--not just upbeat, but essentially showing Hobbs's quest ending in paradise--is often derided by readers of the book on which the movie is based, which ends as a traditional tragedy, with the tragic hero Hobbs succumbing to his wounds.
[edit] Statistics
Year Ag Tm Lg G AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI BB SO BA OBP SLG *OPS+ +--------------+---+----+----+----+---+--+---+----+---+---+-----+-----+-----+----+ 1939 35 NYK NL 115 400 92 140 26 3 44 106 75 85 .350 .447 .750 160
In the book, Roy is said to have broken the record for triples in a single game by a rookie. That means he would have at least 3 triples during the season
