The Rookie commentary, part 3: ‘Yeah dad, bring the heat!’

Quick-cut to sprinklers popping up at ground level on a luscious football field full of crisp, green grass. Then the camera pans over to the school’s baseball field, which is very clearly a pile of dirt without any green to be found. Score another touchdown for the football tally.

With 10 players on the Owls high school baseball team practicing on the sub-par surface, coach Morris says they’re “waiting for the grass seed to take.” The players aren’t buying it, and one remarks about how the school’s football field “looks like Tiger Woods’ backyard.” There’s a timely reference for golf fans in the early 2000s.

At the end of practice, the team’s catcher, Joel, takes off his gear and asks his coach if he wants to throw. See, the catcher lets him know that he’s seen Jimmy tossing the ball at the old legion field at night; it’s no secret. Joel tries to sweeten the deal by saying that it helps to have someone to throw to, so the coach obliges. Hunter is also here, by the way. It’s subtly clear that he loves baseball just as much as his dad and is a young team manager, of sorts; Hunter’s busy putting the equipment away in the dugout.

Coach brings it 
Jimmy goes out to throw to his catcher, still wearing that Jiffy Lube hat and red shirt. When asked, he says he threw 85-86 mph back in the day. Then he adds that he “promised too many doctors” that he wouldn’t throw a “real” pitch anymore. That doesn’t stop the encouragement from the catcher and Hunter to get him to try anyway.

“Yeah dad, bring the heat!”

Who can resist that?


via GIPHY

So, Jimmy fires one into the catcher’s mitt, producing a “whoa” from Hunter and then a happy, 360-degree twirl in the dugout. Then it’s a little montage of pitches from Jimmy, in slow-motion with sound effects of his arm movement and the smack of the ball in the catcher’s glove. Joel is also quite impressed. When he’s finished, Jimmy asks to keep it between them, and that goes for Hunter not telling his mother either, “because I said so.”

Leaving school that night, a custodian tells Jimmy that he knows why the grass isn’t growing on the baseball field. The custodian flips the switch for the field lights to reveal a small group of deer eating away at the seed. It’s a nightly visit for three or four deer, apparently. Mark down another tally under the football column as Jimmy makes a crack about all the “big budget money they got.” Texas really loves its football.

Throwing ‘real’ BP to the Owls
Jimmy must not be able to contain his excitement about his pitching, or want to keep secrets, because while drinking wine on the porch with his wife that night, he tells her: “I threw today.” He also promises her that he’ll stop if his arm starts to hurt, but he must have touched a nerve because she abruptly gets up to go check on the kids. Stay tuned.

Back at baseball practice, Coach Morris ends up throwing batting practice because of some flimsy movie excuse that their pitcher, Rudy, is in the locker room looking for a shoe or something. Basically, the writers wanted to find a way to get Jimmy on the mound in front of his whole team. The players laugh and mock him, especially when the first kid up – nicknamed Wack, who’s cocky right out of the gate – crushes a pitch for an obvious home run.

Coach and the catcher make eye contact and silently agree that he should throw a “real” pitch now, if only to shut up Wack, probably. So, he does, and it draws a “What was that?” from a bewildered Wack as his teammates start to laugh in disbelief as the loudmouth getting schooled for a pitch.

Want the grass to grow? It’s all about that flow
We’re back to the old guys playing games (poker this time) in town, Henry asks Jimmy about a bunch of job applications he’s sent out. It seems like another throwaway scene, where the movie wants to let the audience know that perhaps Jimmy is looking elsewhere for work. Remember this plot point for later.

The other part of the scene has the fellas asking Jimmy about the problem with the baseball-field grass. Henry tells the coach he’ll have the field looking greener than Dublin on St. Patrick’s Day if Jimmy can keep his players off the field for the next three weeks. More on that later, too.

The Owls are finally in action playing a ball game, but unfortunately, they drop their season opener. The game ends with Rudy caught looking at the plate to finish off with a strikeout. He and the rest of the team look pretty dejected.

At a local barbershop, Cal – who’s one of the guys in the old-guys’ club, plus apparently a barber and also the public address announcer for the Owls games – is serving a customer when Henry and the other old fella come into the shop and start sweeping hair into bags and take it with them. Curious, but you can guess that this has something to do with their plan to fix up the baseball field. A little later, we’ll see the trio spreading this human hair on the ball field to keep the deer away from the grass seed.

Interesting tactic. Let’s see if it works.

The Rookie commentary, part 1: ‘What kind of baseball do they have? … They don’t.
The Rookie commentary, part 2: ‘There are more important things in life than baseball’