Anna-Maria doesn’t get baseball. She was taken to a major league game by a friend once. If it weren’t for the beer and peanut vendors and other colorful characters, boredom would have overwhelmed her. Craig doesn’t usually get Kevin Costner. His scratchy voice and a kind of plodding deliberateness in his delivery put Craig off.

Despite all that, we heartily cheered and wept watching For Love of the Game. The baseball story was self-contained and involving for those who do not understand or appreciate the game, and Costner’s range of emotions was genuinely gripping. He delivered one of his greatest screen moments when he portrayed Billy Chapel weeping alone in a dark hotel room.

Written by a woman who is an avid fan of the boys of summer and their all-American game, this movie is a show case of difficult dramatic devices used to good effect. Much of the power and meaning of the movie comes through the character of Billy Chapel (Kevin Costner). On the pitcher’s mound, Billy speaks his thoughts while he struggles to hold onto a rare perfect game (getting all 27 batters out with no one reaching base). The thoughts lead to flashbacks into Billy’s life from childhood to the present day, a day which started with lots of bad news. In his silken, masterful announcers voice, Vin Scully, the perennial voice of baseball, gives us  perspective on what Chapel's perfect game means to baseball and the history of the game.

With these positives, the movie still does not hang together completely. The love story is fragmented by the flashback method of presentation. Also, we have a hard time believing that Jane (Kelly Preston) a single mother/freelance writer from New York would have a long-term relationship with a baseball pro from Detroit. Jane is quite charming, but her emotional bond with Billy is never adequately developed.

We are prepared to accept an intense, but infrequent sexual involvement between lovers from different cities, and we certainly buy into a permanent relationship between people who live in the same town but who have not committed. Unfortunately, Billy’s and Jane’s relationship is neither of those, and yet, the story makes it look like it can be both at the same time. Even this scenario would have worked if we didn’t know that Billy and Jane have been doing this on-again, off-again thing for 5 years. Neither Billy, nor Jane seemed the kind of people who, if they really loved each other, could stay apart for so long. Also, when they are together, Jane never seems fully present in the relationship. She is always one step on the way out because she is afraid of getting hurt the way she did when she was a teenager and her daughter was born. In fact, it is the daughter (Jena Malone) who tells Billy that her mother has been so burned in love that she doesn’t believe a good man can ever love her. As much as we were grateful for that insight, Jane never comes head-to-head with Billy to reconcile the issue.

We suspect that the lack of integration of the baseball story and the love story arose out of the incomplete adaptation process. Many a movie suffers from the inherent difficulty of translating a novel into a powerful cinematic story where action, rather than thoughts, carries the meaning. Luckily, For Love of the Game comes across as a powerful story thanks to the director Sam Raimi's masterful sense of rhythm and scene composition. 

In the end, we are left with a man who gave his life to his team as a pitcher, and who manages to finish his last day with a perfect game that hadn’t been seen for decades. Billy plays his game with all of his passion and all of his pain. He inspires his team to play awesomely to support his flagging effort in the last inning when his arm is giving out. Billy’s greatness earns awe and respect from even the hard-core opposing Yankee fans. The beauty of baseball comes out so well here, and we are stunned by that magic that grows out of the human desire and need to give the very best and all of ourselves to a game, or an idea, or a job. Still, when baseball is over, and Billy has become as perfect as a pitcher can be, he finds himself empty and alone. His love for the game of baseball is not enough to make him complete. It’s the love for the game of life that he must learn to play just as perfectly.