ron leflore story

 there were five baseball movies in a row tonight on the network known as 'movies!' when i got home from work i watched part of the first one, 'Ron LeFlore story'. i recall buying a paperback copy of the book that inspired it from a resale shop when i first moved to the twin cities many years ago. i watched some clips from this movie found on YouTube in advance. it looks like this made-for-TV movie from the 1970s filmed at the actual ballparks he played in. tiger stadium in Detroit looked familiar. i made it there in its final season of 1999. i haven't been to the stadium in Clinton, Iowa, one of the minor-league teams that Ron played for. but i have been to some other stadiums in that state, as i am an Iowa native. attended games in cedar rapids and davenport, in the Midwest league, the same league Clinton was in at the time. knowing about it in advance it prompted me to order one of his baseball cards, but with the expos instead of the tigers. the next movie was 'kid from left field', the original one from the 1950s. found out the one with Gary Coleman that i watched as a kid was a remake. the team in the original one is the fictional 'Bisons', in the remake it is the San Diego Padres. as expected, i didn't watch all five, essentially just the first two. for one thing, i knew that one of them didn't start until after midnight. i had seen 'it happens every spring' before so i knew the premise to it. i watched the first few minutes and then took a walk, noticed that one of the actors playing a college student was Alan Hale, 'skipper' from 'Gilligan's Island'. and i have 'Pride of St. Louis' on DVD as i recall. this left 'it happened in Flatbush', about a Dodgers team from the 1940s. it serves as a sad reminder of how there haven't been that many popular baseball movies in recent years, as the newest one of the five being shown tonight was the first one, more than four decades old. the 1980s was a good decade for baseball movies- with 'the natural', 'Bull Durham', 'major league', and 'field of dreams'. but since then, not so much. the only standouts seem to be the biopics about Babe Ruth, and Jackie Robinson. and with both of those, not the first biopics about either. but i think this proves of how times changed. some still call baseball the 'national pastime' but i know football has become really popular for various reasons. at work the check printer shut off during printing of Fargo checks, but a little later than the previous day. i had to hit re-print on just over two hundred and fifty checks, those were carried over to the next day as i wanted to confirm that all of those were there. no more, no less. during my walks i found 5 cents.