Dirtbags Baseball - Long Beach State 49ers

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Monday, September 19, 2005

Question Of The Day: Is Former Dirtbag John Bowker Actually Roy Hobbs In Disguise?

Remember the scene in The Natural when the character played by Robert Redford, Roy Hobbs, smashes a homer that breaks the scoreboard (actually, turns it into fireworks!). Fast forward to yesterday: when John Bowker led off the 3rd inning with a shot over the fence, the ball hit the San Jose Giants' scoreboard and broke it! At least the part that displays the balls and strikes on the batter at the plate. The San Jose Mercury News has this recap:

Following San Jose's 8-7 victory over Lake Elsinore on Sunday at Municipal Stadium, so much favors the Giants heading into today's decisive Game 5 of the California League championship series.

The Giants have the momentum after back-to-back, back-to-the-wall wins over the Storm. They have home-field advantage, which so far has meant everything in this series. And they have the hot bats and the hot arms and haven't trailed the Storm at Municipal Stadium.

What the Giants don't have is a fully functioning scoreboard. In a symbol of how dramatically this series turned over the weekend, John Bowker broke the balls and strikes lights when he crushed a line drive home run off of it in the third inning. [more].

On the subject of The Natural, I ran across this on the scoreboard scene (from the Internet Movie Data Base):

Three of the events in the movie are taken from real life incidents: The shooting of Hobbs was suggested by the 1949 shooting of Ed Waitkus by Ruth Ann Steinhagen, a 19-year-old obsessed fan. (She was judged insane and was released from an asylum after just three years.) Wonderboy was inspired by Caroliny, Shoeless Joe Jackson's special bat, which also was from a tree that had been hit by lightning. Hobbs breaking the scoreboard with a home run is taken from the May 30, 1946 hit by Bama Rowell of the Boston Braves, who broke the Ebbets Field scoreboard when he hit a double, showering Dixie Walker with glass. Though he'd been promised a free watch by Bulova for hitting the company's scoreboard sign, Rowell never actually got it until 1987.

posted on 9/19/2005 by Jeff Agnew