The Natural and the Mythology of Baseball

Bernard Malamud published The Natural in 1952. Barry Levinson released his film adaptation in 1984. They tell the same story and arrive at opposite conclusions, and the gap between them reveals something fundamental about how Americans want baseball to work.

In the novel, Roy Hobbs is a gifted but flawed ballplayer who is shot by a mysterious woman as a young man, disappears for 16 years, returns to baseball as a middle-aged rookie, and ultimately fails. He accepts a bribe to throw the pennant game. He strikes out to end the season. The corruption wins. The hero is human, and being human means being corruptible.

In the movie, Robert Redford plays Hobbs as a golden figure of American mythology. He still gets shot. He still disappears. He still comes back. But in the final scene, instead of striking out, he hits a towering home run that shatters the stadium lights, sending sparks cascading down like fireworks while the soundtrack swells and the crowd erupts. He wins. Good triumphs. The Wonderboy bat, carved from a tree struck by lightning, delivers one last miracle.

Hollywood gave the story the ending America wanted. Malamud gave it the ending America deserved.

The real-life inspiration for the shooting was the 1949 case of Eddie Waitkus, a first baseman for the Philadelphia Phillies who was shot in a Chicago hotel room by a woman named Ruth Ann Steinhagen. Steinhagen had developed an obsession with Waitkus and lured him to her room with a note. Waitkus survived, returned to play the following season, and helped the Phillies reach the 1950 World Series. He never fully recovered physically and died at 53.

Malamud wove other baseball threads into the novel. Roy Hobbs's moral collapse echoes the Black Sox scandal. The corrupt team owner and the gambling subplot recall the forces that nearly destroyed the game in 1919. The novel is a baseball story, but it's also a reworking of Arthurian legend, with Hobbs as a failed Percival and the Wonderboy bat as Excalibur.

Levinson's film, released in the same summer as The Karate Kid and Ghostbusters, grossed $47.9 million and turned Randy Newman's score into one of the most recognized pieces of sports music. It also permanently altered how Americans picture the mythology of baseball. The image of a home run shattering the lights, a moment that does not exist in Malamud's novel, has become one of the defining visual metaphors of the sport. It says that baseball is a place where the impossible happens, where one swing can redeem a lifetime of failure.

Malamud, who died in 1986, reportedly disliked the film's ending. He had written a tragedy, and Hollywood made it a fairy tale. Both versions remain in print and widely watched. The tension between them is the tension at the heart of baseball itself, a sport that sells hope but is governed by failure.