When Duke Snider helped the Giants beat the Dodgers

On May 2, 1964, the Giants played the defending World Champion Dodgers at Chavez Ravine. In the 9th inning, Dodgers pitcher Joe Moeller had a 4-2 lead and looked to get the complete game victory.

Willie McCovey led off the inning with a walk. Up next was the new Giants left fielder… Duke Snider.

Yup… The Duke of Flatbush actually finished his career as a Giant. The whole “Willie, Mickey and the Duke” trio once had two of them as teammates.

Snider was not a member of the Dodgers when they won in 1963. The Mets, hoping that his presence on the team would boost the box office. After a year of calling the Polo Grounds his home and wearing the N-Y logo on his hat, he was sold off to the Giants in 1964.

So up he stepped in 1964 and hit a line drive home run into the Dodger Stadium seats and tied the game up.

The Giants would win the game in extra innings.

In the last game of his career, the second to last day of the 1964 season, Snider came to the plate as a pinch hitter in the 9th.

The Giants were losing 10-5 and fading in the pennant race. Snider singled off of Cubs pitcher Lindy McDaniel.

With 2 outs, Willie Mays homered. The last moment of Duke Snider’s career he greeted his one time counterpart at home plate.

Farewell Duke.

A glorious era of baseball is getting a little more faint.

Geoffrey Rush, Kirk Gibson and Terry Pendleton

One foregone conclusion about tonight’s Oscars is that Christian Bale is going to win the Best Supporting Actor award for his performance in The Fighter.

He’s terrific in the film and he does everything you’d expect in an Oscar performance.

He is electric when he is on screen, stealing the spotlight from the star (the underrated performance by Mark Wahlberg.)

He does an accent. (A flawless Mass-Hole voice!)
He plays an addict. (Always Oscar bait.)
He does a physical transformantion. (He looks like he should play The Riddler, not Batman.)

All of the stats are there for him.

While I would not be upset if Bale wins (as I said before, he IS marvelous in the film) I would argue that the award should go to Geoffrey Rush for The King’s Speech. Seeing that this is Sully Baseball and not Sully Oscars, I will make my case with a baseball analogy.

Rush, who already has an Oscar on his mantle for Shine, brought the quality of The King’s Speech up merely by his presence. Without his performance as Lionel Logue, that movie is just a made for TV movie with compressed history and a lot of people saying expositional dialogue.

But Rush turns what could have been a big pile of nothing (a spoiled man stutters… I hope he doesn’t!) into a funny, engaging drama.

It’s kind of like the season that Kirk Gibson had with the 1988 Dodgers. Or Terry Pendleton’s season for Atlanta in 1991. Both players joined a team that looked rudderless and a mess the year before. They both brought a sense of professionalism to the clubhouse.

The entire team raised the level of their game. Improbably the Dodgers won it all with Gibson getting big hit after big hit (including the greatest home run in World Series history.)

Pendleton’s Braves went from last to first and took Game 7 of the World Series to extra innings. (If Lonne Smith hadn’t falled for a decoy play, Pendleton would have driven in the go ahead run.

Both players won the MVP even though they didn’t have the flashiest stats. Darryl Strawberry or Kevin McReynolds put up gaudier numbers than Gibson in 1988. And Barry Bonds on paper looked like the winner over Pendleton in 1991.

And both players had lots of help from their teammates. Orel Hershiser had one of the great pitching seasons of all time in ’88. And Tom Glevine was the 1991 Cy Young winner.

But the Award looked justified because of the clear influence those two players had on their entire team.

Kind of like Geoffrey Rush. Of course he had help. There were great performances by Colin Firth, Helena Bonham Carter, Guy Pearce and Michael Gambon among others. And the techincal qualities of the film were fine, if not spectacular.

But the film has become an unlikely box office hit and will probably win the big prize. And I think that Rush, like Gibson and Pendleton, raised the quality in ways that is greater than the stats.

Cristian Bale is like Strawberry, McReynolds and Bonds. He has the stats and I understand why he’ll probably get the award. But Rush? He’s got the intangibles.

He gets his uniform dirty.
And if he wins the Oscar, lots of people will say “I can’t believe what I just saw.”

Sully’s Oscar Predictions

I could very easily write a second blog called “Sully Oscars” but I’m spending a wee too much time writing THIS blog to do a second one.

But I do want my predictions in writing and out there for all my readers to see.

I like the 10 picture nomination change. It gives the Oscars a better cross section of the movies of the year.

This is an interesting Oscar year. A lot of years you have heard people whining that there aren’t enough mainstream hits being nominated (blame the studios for not making enough Oscar worthy films.) But this year with films like Black Swan, The Fighter, True Grit and The King’s Speech, you see a lot of Oscar bait have become big money makers even before the Awards are handed out.

Mix them up with some mainstream hits like Inception and Toy Story 3 and indie fare like The Kids are Alright and Winter’s Bone and you have a pretty interesting line up.

(And of course there is the obligatory “Man who cuts his damn arm off” movie in 127 Hours.)

All that being said, Toy Story 3 is still the best movie of the year… but who is counting?

Here are my predictions.
These are not the films I think SHOULD win but what I predict WILL win.

Let’s see how I do:

BEST PICTURE – The King’s Speech
BEST DIRECTOR – Tom Hooper – The King’s Speech
BEST ACTOR – Colin Firth – The King’s Speech
BEST ACTRESS – Natalie Portman – Black Swan
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR – Christian Bale – The Fighter
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS – Helena Bonham Carter – The King’s Speech
BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY – David Seidler – The King’s Speech
BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY – Aaron Sorkin – The Social Network
BEST ANIMATED FEATURE – Toy Story 3
BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM – Biutiful

BEST ART DIRECTION – The King’s Speech
BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY – True Grit
BEST COSTUME DESIGN – The King’s Speech
BEST EDITING – The Social Network
BEST MAKE UP – The Wolfman
BEST MUSIC SCORE – The Social Network
BEST ORIGINAL SONG – “We Belong Together” – Toy Story 3
BEST SOUND – Inception
BEST SOUND EFFECTS EDITING – Inception
BEST VISUAL EFFECTS – Inception

And yup, I make the Documentary and the Short Film predictions as well.

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE – Inside Job
BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT – Killing in the Name
BEST ANIMATED SHORT FILM – The Gruffalo
BEST LIVE ACTION SHORT FILM – Wish 143

I know a lot of people think the awards will be split between The Social Network and The King’s Speech, but I think the praise for The Social Network peaked. And I think The King’s Speech will rampage for 7 Oscars and even have the upsets in the Director and Supporting Actress category. (Helena Bonham Carter has been an incredibly respected actress for a long time without a golden boy on her mantle. I think she’ll get one over Melissa Leo, who was awesome in The Fighter.)

And I think the brilliant Roger Deakins will win Best Cinematography.
You may not notice that award or know his name… but he was responsible for the photography in The Shawshank Redemption, Kundun, A Beautiful Mind and Revolutionary Road… all amazingly well shot movies.

And oh yeah, he has shot every Coen Brothers film since Barton Fink.

That would include Fargo, The Big Lebowski, O Brother Where Art Thou?, The Man Who Wasn’t There, No Country for Old Men and this year’s True Grit.

You are hard pressed to find a better body of work than that!

Either way, I am going to enjoy the Oscars. I always do.
And as I do every year, enjoy my AMC Oscar segments.