While there are many good baseball movies I was thinking this weekend about one more, a comedy based on the real life wife swap of Yankee Pitchers Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich, who traded wives and kids in March 1973. You can click on the link to read more about it, but Kekich summed it up best: “Unless people know the full details, it could turn out to be a nasty type thing. Don’t say this was wife-swapping, because it wasn’t. We didn’t swap wives, we swapped lives.”
So now we have the plot and in my mind it has to be a period piece occurring in the late 1970s to early 1980s. I want to see baseball players smoking cigarettes and taking amphetamines while guzzling beers and parties of Quaaludes and a George Steinbrenner-like character who orchestrates the swap. I want a Rickey Henderson-like character that only refers to himself in the third person and knows he’s the greatest player ever.
One of the guys has to pitch on acid like Dock Ellis as Hollywood loves doing trippy scenes (that don’t match the actual experience at all). There needs to be many full-on mustaches and afros and mullets and the uniforms should be based off of the Astros rainbow unis or the baby blues of the Cardinals. The White Sox Disco demolition night has to be referenced, and we need a competing owner (and foil for the Steinbrenner character) like Charlie O. Finley of the A’s; I mean, just look at this picture:
We don’t even need MLB’s sign off and with their level of no-fun who even wants it? Who can’t imagine John C. Reilly and Will Ferrell playing the pitchers? Or pick whomever you want; let’s just find some good comedy writers and let them go to town, right?
Please, blog, may I have some more?