Ron Shelton, Minor League Baseball, and the Making of Bull Durham

Ron Shelton played 479 games in the minor leagues. He hit .251 with 10 home runs over five seasons in the Baltimore Orioles' farm system. He never made it to the majors. He never came close.

Sixteen years after he quit baseball, he made Bull Durham, and Sports Illustrated called it the greatest sports movie of all time.

The Orioles Organization

The Orioles drafted Shelton out of high school in the 39th round of the 1966 amateur draft. He chose to attend Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California, where he played both basketball and baseball, then signed with Baltimore after graduating. He reported to rookie ball in Bluefield, West Virginia, in 1967 and spent the next five years working his way through the system, playing for Bluefield, Stockton, Dallas-Fort Worth, the Florida Instructional League, and Triple-A Rochester.

The problem was that the Orioles were one of the best organizations in baseball. They had won the 1966 World Series. Their big league roster was loaded with Hall of Famers and All-Stars. Their farm system was stacked with future major leaguers. Bobby Grich, Don Baylor, and Johnny Oates were all moving through the minors alongside Shelton, and all of them were better.

Shelton finished the 1971 season with Rochester, helping Joe Altobelli's team win both the Governors' Cup and the Junior World Series. But he was 26 with a wife and child, and the path to Baltimore was blocked. When the 1972 season opened with a players' strike, Shelton walked away. He earned an MFA in sculpture at the University of Arizona, moved to Los Angeles, and drifted into screenwriting.

The Movie

The idea for Bull Durham was, in Shelton's words, "Lysistrata in the minor leagues." He pitched it to studios as a romantic comedy set in the low minors. Every major studio passed, twice. Orion Pictures gave him $9 million, an eight-week shooting schedule, and creative freedom.

Shelton chose Durham, North Carolina, as the setting because of its old ballpark, Durham Athletic Park, and because the city, surrounded by abandoned tobacco warehouses, looked like the kind of minor league town his story required. Shelton hired Pete Bock, a former general manager of the Durham Bulls, as a baseball consultant. He recruited minor leaguers to fill supporting roles, ran tryout camps, and conducted workouts with the actors.

Kevin Costner played the veteran catcher Crash Davis. Tim Robbins played the wild young pitcher Nuke LaLoosh. Susan Sarandon played Annie Savoy, the baseball devotee who serves as the film's narrator and moral center.

The characters were composites drawn from Shelton's years in the bushes. Crash Davis was partly autobiographical, a career minor leaguer who knew the game better than his talent allowed, fighting to squeeze out one more season. But the character also drew on stories Joe Altobelli told Shelton about being asked to room with and mentor a young pitcher named Steve Dalkowski. Dalkowski, who had passed through the Orioles' system before Shelton arrived, could throw harder than almost anyone and was legendarily wild. The dynamic between the grizzled catcher and the clueless young fireballer came directly from those Altobelli stories.

The character's name came from the real Crash Davis, Lawrence Columbus "Crash" Davis, who hit .317 with 50 doubles for the Durham Bulls in 1948 after a brief major league stint with the Philadelphia Athletics. Shelton found the name in an old Carolina League record book. When he contacted Davis to ask permission, Davis had one question. "Do I get the girl?" Shelton told him yes. Davis agreed.

What Was Real

When Dr. Charles Steinberg of the Baltimore Orioles met Shelton years later and asked about the validity of the film's more outlandish scenes, Shelton started providing citations. The mound-visit argument about what to bring to a teammate's wedding. The player wearing a garter belt under his uniform. The rain delay entertainments. Shelton told Steinberg that nearly everything in the movie was based on something that happened during his five years in the minors. He fictionalized and recombined, but the raw material was real.

Bull Durham opened on June 15, 1988, and grossed $50.8 million against its $9 million budget. It earned Shelton an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. It cemented Kevin Costner's status as a leading man. And it revived public interest in minor league baseball at a time when attendance had been declining for years. The Durham Bulls saw their ticket sales surge, eventually outgrowing Durham Athletic Park and moving to a new downtown stadium in 1995.

Trey Wilson, who played Durham manager Joe Riggins, died of a cerebral hemorrhage on January 16, 1989, at the age of 40, seven months after the film's release.

Shelton went on to direct White Men Can't Jump, Cobb, and Tin Cup. Every one of his sports films is told from the athlete's perspective, not the fan's. He learned that viewpoint in Bluefield.