Going, Going, Gone

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

TITLE: ROOKIE OF THE YEAR

DIRECTOR: DANIEL STERN

WRITER: SAM HARPER

THE BOTTOM LINE: The winning ways of a tall baseball tale are sabotaged by sloppy detail work.

In our most basic baseball fantasy (Damn Yankees and The Natural are typical examples) an ordinary mortal suddenly, if briefly, finds himself endowed with superhuman powers. These he employs to upset the elegantly balanced geometry of the game by lending his services to some perpetually losing club, thereby turning it into a perpetual winner. In these tales, individual dreams of glory -- permanently arrested adolescent division -- are fused with the mass yearnings of a fandom frustrated by years of suffering in the cellar with their local heroes.

Rookie of the Year recycles this woozy wheeze for the family audience by granting baseball prowess beyond his years (or anyone's wildest dreams) to 12- year-old Henry Rowengartner (Thomas Ian Nicholas). As a result of a broken arm that heals eccentrically, he acquires a gift for throwing 100-m.p.h. fast balls, and he is quickly pressed into service by the ever hapless Chicago Cubs.

For a while, the conceit works surprisingly well. Despite the heat he's capable of delivering, young Henry remains a Little Leaguer among the big leaguers -- shy, abashed at performing before vast crowds, befuddled by but eager to join in the adult male rituals of his teammates. There's a beamy gentleness about actor Daniel Stern's directorial debut (he also contributes a version of his klutzy Home Alone crook, this time playing an addled pitching coach), and there are finely tuned supporting performances by Amy Morton as Henry's mom and Gary Busey as a fading pitcher who takes the kid under his faltering wing.

But the movie is slovenly about details. Relief pitchers sit in the dugout instead of the bullpen, and they enter the game without warming up; a significant plot point depends on a deliberate misunderstanding of how player contracts work; and everyone is so busy building a triumphant ending that the most basic inner logic of baseball is defied.

Movies can, and regularly do, cause us to embrace the wildest fantasies. But they create our suspension of disbelief by getting the familiar little realities of life right. When they don't bother to do that, it feels like an act of contempt. Our attention starts to wander and our temper grows short, the way they do when the home team is down 10-zip in a late inning with the bottom of the order coming up. "Do you believe this?" somebody says. "Nah, let's go," somebody else replies.