1

“Baseball players aren’t so square

They’ve got beards and stringy hair”

“The Sixties”

Do you know this song? It’s from T-Bone Burnett’s 1983 album “Proof Through the Night.” He tried to make it as an artist before he broke through as a big time producer… I’d say the Counting Crows’ debut was his breakthrough…remember when there used to be a buzz on a band, when you wondered who’d they’d sign with, when you’d go to the Whisky for the record company sponsored debut? I do. And I remember seeing Counting Crows but…

But, I bought T-Bone’s solo debut, “Truth Decay,” because by then we knew who he was and I’d purchased the Alpha Band record, which I was disappointed in, and if you were invested in an artist, you followed them through. Which led me to “Proof Through the Night” and “The Sixties”…you should listen to it, especially now, it’s a time capsule of what once was, which is kind of funny, because at the time it was a reflection upon what had come before.

Baseball players were clean-cut. Music and dope and long hair was not for players, they were part of an American institution. And then they started wearing double-knits (“Eddie, Are You Kidding?”…if you don’t get the reference, you’ve got something to look forward to in life) and doing cocaine and it turned out being rich and famous they were further over the line than the hoi polloi. And T-Bone captured this head-scratching change in this song.

Because by the eighties, everything was up for grabs. Baseball had been supplanted by football as America’s Pastime. MTV made musical stars bigger than they’d ever been. Reagan legitimized greed and even Jerry Rubin became a stockbroker (I doubt today’s kids even know his name, never mind Abbie Hoffman’s…) And Steinbrenner resuscitated the Yankees and the Mets had another run and then we came to the hedonistic nineties and..

Baby boomers were still invested in baseball, the same way they’re invested in the Beatles, they’d been there, done that.

2

Turn seventy and your life can become one big victory lap, revisiting your old haunts, reminiscing about past activities, stuck in the mire. You can be an aged act singing songs you wrote in your twenties to those maybe a step from the grave.

Or you can re-evaluate and try to push forward. Take risks, march towards new horizons.

Or you can get even deeper into what once was.

I was baseball-crazy in the early sixties. Could tell you every player, knew the stats from the baseball cards and the magazines…but somewhere along the line I lost my dedication. Started after I realized I was never going to play in the major leagues. Which as a kid you believe you can do. Before the aforementioned Beatles it was the heart’s desire of nearly every young American male (before girls started playing in the Little League).

Records were broken by faceless players, at least to you, but the game soldiered on. And compromised its gravitas in the process. Pursued the NFL instead of walking its own way. Focusing on television and the bucks as opposed to the game.

Baseball was a daylight sport, to be played in the afternoon. We hated that the World Series started while we were still in school, but we caught the full games over the weekend and…we rushed home to catch the last few innings on TV during the week…hopefully the principal put the game on the PA before class ended.

That’s how big baseball was.

It’s not that big anymore.

It’s kind of like music. Football is Taylor Swift. Actually, bigger. And then every league has its own following. Every sport has its own following, with community available on the internet, and baseball is just another sport.

I hate that they modernized the rules, but they had to, the games were becoming interminable. Which I thought about during last night’s marathon…it would have been twice as long if they’d allowed the batter to keep stepping out of the box, the pitcher to take extra time on the mound. Now the game flows, it’s comprehensible.

Other than for the relief pitchers.

3

This is one thing I can’t get past. It’s changed the character of the game. A complete game is a rarity, akin to a diamond certified album, something from the old days. You pitch your five innings and…they bring in endless relievers.

It’s all about statistics. And the statistics say not to bunt, to go for the home run, but they also say that pitch count is everything and…

You bring in a reliever and often the game changes completely. This is not a one inning closer with a smoking fastball, and when you’re fresh from the bullpen how’s your control?

In many cases not good. So you walk people and the whole game changes.

But that’s the new sport. And I enjoy going to Dodger Stadium, love the experience, because it’s still one place where all races and economic classes mix. But I never watch at home. I don’t have that much time. Or I’d rather dedicate my time elsewhere. And people tell me how they’re watching and I say I’ll do so in the old folks home (which maybe they’re already living in, in their mind anyway).

But that does not mean I don’t pay attention.

But that gets harder now that the paper doesn’t print the standings.

So I knew the Dodgers were playing the Blue Jays. And I followed the initial games from afar, being many time zones away, but now I was back and…was I going to watch?

Baseball, unlike basketball, is never over. You can always come back from behind. And now with the endless relief pitching, who is dominating at first might be far behind in the later innings. So I watch the score and…

Stopping Netflix for Felice’s bathroom break, I switched to the game and it was the eighth inning and it was tied and…

This I was into.

And needless did I know I would be into it for another three plus hours.

4

Like George Carlin said, baseball can go on forever!

Well, not anymore. They put a runner on second.

But not in the World Series!

And by now the Blue Jays were wise. They wouldn’t let Ohtani hit. And the Dodgers weren’t connecting at the plate, especially the bottom of the order.

As for the Jays…

I’ve always been an American League fan. I hated the Dodgers when I lived in Connecticut. Started to warm up in the days of Orel Hershiser and Kirk Gibson’s pinch hit home run…

But that was 1988, nearly forty years ago. Can you believe it?

I certainly can’t.

And in the passing time our country has completely changed, now it’s the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots, and the haves possess dugout seats, and sit behind the plate, roped-off from the hoi polloi, and by time I tuned in, a number had already left, or never got there to begin with. FOR THE WORLD SERIES??

Tickets to the Series were a dream. Unattainable. To just be there. Now if you’re rich enough you can do anything, and say you did. You don’t need the same passion. But passion is everything.

So the innings played out, one by one. One nailbiter after another. The commentators creating nonexistent controversies… Like the umpire expert ultimately said, if the catcher has the ball, he can block the plate. Everybody knows that. The rules are baked into us from those days back when.

Inning after inning. Like the sixties. You’d wake up and find out a game on the west coast went twenty two innings. Wow, to be there!

Now eventually, by time the game ended, at nearly midnight on the west coast, a good number of people had left. But if you believed, if you were hard core, you had to be there.

And you couldn’t turn the TV off.

The thing about baseball is you manage yourself. I’m sitting there thinking…doesn’t Dave Roberts know he’s going to run out of pitchers? Is he so baked into the data that he’s lost common sense?

And first the Blue Jays burned out the bench and then the Dodgers, pinch runners and pinch hitters didn’t move the needle.

And then there was little base activity and it looked like NO ONE would ever score. We know, unlike Carlin, that a game eventually ends, but would this one?

I’d say the Jays had a bit more momentum. And our pitchers were not as good.

And pitching became everything.

And at this point, I’m a Dodger fan. Felice has abdicated, resigned, she can’t get over them going to the White House. We all take our personal stands.

But the thing about the Dodgers is… It’s L.A! Not like New York. It’s not gritty, but airy. We are not so eager to cut our heroes down and keep them in the doghouse. Baseball retains some of its core elements here. November is too late for baseball in most of the country, but not in L.A. Used to be the season never started before April and the Series was the first week of October… The Boys of Summer played in the summer.

But not anymore. Now it’s about the bucks.

That was the great thing about baseball. It was pure, based on the record… If you had the best in your league, you went to the World Series. Not anymore. Which sucks.

But it’s getting colder in the nation and we’re still playing this game, WE’RE STILL PLAYING THIS GAME!

Roberts brings in Clayton Kershaw… If he’s retiring, how old am I? And I’m worried about control, especially with all those men on base, you don’t want to walk someone in.

And then Roberts pulls him after he closes out the inning.

Which leaves us with the dregs, Will Klein, who even spent part of the year in the minors. A closer who’s only good for a few pitches, an inning or maybe two…

But Klein turned out to be the Hanukkah pitcher… The lamp kept burning, long after they thought the fuel was gone.

But that’s not real life. In real life… Will Klein has pitched so many innings, can go so long, he can do it.

And he did. With his smoking fastball and good control.

Which started to flag at the last minute, but he closed out the Blue Jays.

And then came Freddie Freeman.

5

These are men playing a boys’ game. You realize this when you’re older than they are. They’re no longer heroes, just engines of profit (then again, I’m glad they get fat salaries, better they get remunerated than the deep pocket owners).

But the other thing is they’re professionals. Which means if the ball is catchable, if the play is doable, they will succeed. Not always, not like back in the day, the fundamentals are not imbued as much as they used to be, but when your heart sinks when you hear the crack of the bat…you know there’s a good chance it’s covered.

But these guys still live in the locker room. It’s a different ethos. A band of brothers based on jockeying for position. You fight on the field, but also off it, albeit psychologically.

But they’re out there doing it. The cash is good, but the dream is not as rosy as we thought it was when we were little. What’s it like to peak before you’re forty?

And it’s not like anybody is a national hero anymore. We’re subjected to all your warts, all your faux pas. But still, you show up and play the game.

Meanwhile, the biggest star in the game is from Japan. That’ll get your head twisting like Regan in “The Exorcist.”

And you knew the Dodgers always had the chance of coming back, that’s the beauty of playing in your own building.

But as time wore on you had to remind yourself, when your emotions and nerve-endings were shot, that this was not the final game, it was still early in the Series, and whoever won or lost…it made a difference, but it didn’t mean everything.

And then the players themselves seemed to run out of gas. You started to wonder if anybody could hit the ball. Was it going to be a matter of waiting for one of the pitchers, the last pitcher, to wear out?

And Klein’s speed started to wane, and he lost some of his accuracy too. At what point would this be determinative?

And the opposing pitcher, Little, had less time on the mound.

Nobody was scoring. Everybody was waiting for the big home run.

But it never came.

Until it did.

And then Dodger Stadium erupted. And I smiled. You had to. This was the joy of the game. As Bob Costas famously said, “sports are a metaphor for life,” and it’s the little victories that matter.

And they are little. With so much in the pipeline only diehards can remember award winners and champions.

But in the moment…

Actually, it was the team’s emotions that were the spark, in reaction to Freddie’s home run. After all, this was their workplace. They’d lived half the year for this, maybe their whole lives, this was a spontaneous release.

And you could feel it.

Will we feel it tonight, going forward?

Possibly, but this contest of wills that used to be seen in baseball is not as prevalent as it was previously. There’s the mid-game pitching change that can alter the momentum. And everybody’s swinging for the fences… They’re not eking out runs, they come in blasts, in packs. And they did earlier in last night’s game, but then the contest quieted down.

It was just like the old days.

And those days were best.

It’s a business. Just because you liked the film, that does not mean it will be a commercial success, which was my point.

Funny how all the left wingers who can’t understand how people vote for Trump can’t understand that the masses might not go to see this movie.

This is no different from the Swifties, who spew hate at me fifteen years later. They’re defending their turf. The rest of the public?

Shrugs.

The goal of making a major motion picture is to make money, how do you achieve that?

If you have a niche product, then your film must be extremely good, so great that it engenders word of mouth, such that people who were not paying attention in the first place are going to be motivated to go.

This is what happened with the Dylan movie, “A Complete Unknown.” It opened domestically the first weekend to $11,655,553 and then continued to $23.2 million in the first week and ultimately $140 in all.

As for Bruce’s movie… The initial three day gross was $9.1 million.

However, unlike “A Complete Unknown,” the reviews were not so positive. The Dylan flick has an 82 critics’ rating on RottenTomatoes as opposed to “Deliver Me From Nowhere”‘s 61. So will the general public be inspired to see it? Will people enjoy it if they aren’t fans of Bruce? You needed to know nothing about Bob to enjoy his movie, as for the Boss? 

Now $9.1 million may seem close to $11,655,553, but the devil is in the details… “A Complete Unknown” opened in 2,835 theatres and “Deliver Me From Nowhere” opened in 3.460.

As for international…

Let me quote “Variety”:

“‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’ a musical biopic about the making of his beloved 1982 acoustic solo album ‘Nebraska,’ is falling flat with $7 million at the international box office and $16.1 million globally. Analysts suggest the film is struggling because unlike, say, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and ‘Rocketman,’ which were all-encompassing, crowd-pleasing looks at Queen and Elton John, ‘Deliver Me From Nowhere’ focuses on one, less commercial chapter in Springsteen’s expansive, decade-spanning career.”

https://variety.com/2025/film/box-office/box-office-springsteen-fizzles-overseas-black-phone-2-hits-80-million-1236561522/

There you have it.

And if that’s not enough for you:

“‘Springsteeen’ Box-Office Ain’t Glory Days”

“Though he delivered a number of worldwide hits, quintessentially American rocker Bruce Springsteen hasn’t been able to translate that into box-office success.

“The biopic “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” was released in multiple markets this weekend alongside its U.S. release and is bombing – the title earning just $7 million overseas. At the same time, its domestic debut is coming in smaller than projected – slipping slightly to $9.1 million and fourth place.

“Budgeted at $55 million, the film’s audience exit scores haven’t been strong, with the blame going less on the film’s makers or cast – rather its subject matter. Namely, the choice to focus on Springsteen’s depression and his arthouse album “Nebraska”. While critics may love it, the album has none of the major hits that made him a global superstar.”

“Springsteen” Box-Office Ain’t Glory Days

I could quote stories ad infinitum, but I think you get it.

I remember hearing “29 Palms” on “Fate of Nations,” Robert Plant’s 1993 return to form, and wondering why it wasn’t a hit. I was speaking with Danny Buch, the Atlantic promotion man responsible, and he said they tried with the song and album at rock radio, but the music didn’t react, it didn’t resonate with the audience, and therefore radio stations dropped it. Does not speak to the quality of the tunes, but the audience reaction.

Once again, it’s a business.

So you want to make a profit. You have the budget, the marketing and the theatrical gross, of which only half comes back to the studio. DVDs are dead, but there are streaming television licensing fees. That means so far, the studio is only entitled to $8.05 million of the proceeds on the Springsteen movie. How is it going to make its money back on a $55 million budget?

It’s not.

Now not every picture goes into profit, but a bunch of them better, or…

So looking for the highest grosses, studios decided to make big budget pictures that could play around the world…believe me, the average person in China is not a Bruce Springsteen fan… Ergo, superhero movies, high concept flicks. But along the way, the world changed. Now China has its own domestic production, with 2025’s “Ne Zha 2,” which has grossed in excess of $2 billion dollars (“Ne Zha,” released in 2019, grossed $707 million).

Now you might tell the studio to make cheaper films. But the irony is it may cost just as much to promote/market a $2 million film as it does a $50 million film. So the opportunity cost is just too high.

But by stopping the production of more adult/meaningful fare, by stopping taking risks, whole swaths of the public have given up on the theatregoing experience. YOU may have gone to see the “Springsteen” film this weekend, but most Boomers and Gen-X’ers never go to the theatre at all.

So the question is…is theatrical movie distribution dead?

Well, looking at summer grosses, as the year is not over yet… 2025 sits at $1.6 billion…whereas in 2019 it was $2.6 billion. It’s going in the wrong direction.

A great picture will draw people to the theatre… But those are always left field productions that no one thought would become juggernauts. Think of “Star Wars,” even “Pulp Fiction.” They were sui generis. Where are the unique titles made and promoted by the studios today? Nonexistent, because the cost and ultimate risk is too high.

Begging the question whether a pivot is necessary…

Which is what Netflix is. It was such a joke in Hollywood that everybody licensed their content to the streaming company, helping them build a monolith while they were left behind. Can you see why the Springsteen movie is a dud?

If not, you know nothing about business…

Now it costs much less to make and promote an album than a movie… And the business used to be based on growing nobodies into ubiquitous somebodies. But the majors can’t manage to do that anymore. So, like the studios, they’ve retreated to signing and promoting that which will theoretically appeal to the largest audience…which is rarely unique…unique is too hard to sell!

Meanwhile, developing indie acts don’t spend 200k making an album.

But we live in an emotional world. Facts are secondary in not only politics, but the arts. And when confronted with the truth, no one wants to acknowledge it.

Split Ticketmaster from Live Nation and ticket prices will go down?

Don’t make me laugh.

As for the ticket fees… Without them, there’s no show, they’re part of the budget. But the acts won’t tell you that…they too beat up on the fees, even though the benefit from them…and Ticketmaster is paid to take the heat.

You may be an early adopter with a broad audience able to influence others. But everybody knows word of mouth doesn’t happen unless the product is good.

But if it’s good, something can build over time.

But with the movie business you get one shot, you fire all your guns at once, and if you don’t go boffo at the b.o. right away…good luck. Hell, insiders can tell whether a film will make money within HOURS of its opening.

You’re entitled to your personal biases. But if you think everyone is going to agree with you, even if you’re angry about it, you’re wrong.

Enjoy what you want, there are no rules. But that does not mean what you enjoy others will.

As for “Deliver Me From Nowhere”… As a streaming project with a low budget… The Mötley Crüe movie “The Dirt” only has a 37% RottenTomatoes rating…but I watched it, the viewing experience was baked into my Netflix subscription. As for the budget, it was less than half of the Springsteen flick, $23.1 million.

Netflix doesn’t need to have every project hit. Just enough that people won’t give up their subscriptions. And it’s always the left field, unexpected productions that become a cultural phenomenon. Like “Stranger Things” and “Squid Game.” They were not promoted for eighteen months ahead of time. They were dropped on the service and people checked them out, enjoyed them, told everybody they knew about them and then you had to watch the series to be in the know, to participate in conversation.

Meanwhile, Hollywood can’t stop beating up Netflix for not opening its films in theatres. As box office goes down, the studios consolidate and…

The worm turns.

Turn with it.

Tune in Saturday October 25th to Faction Talk, channel 103, at 4 PM East, 1 PM West.

If you miss the episode, you can hear it on demand on the SiriusXM app. Search: Lefsetz

We had to endure eighteen months of hype for this?

My favorite review was in the “Wall Street Journal”:

“It’s like a Mariah Carey movie about a Bruce Springsteen album.”

On Metacritic it gets a whopping 60.

On RottenTomatoes it did better, it got a 61!

“Bohemian Rhapsody” was a fluke. That’s what’s great about filmed entertainment, as William Goldman once said, “Nobody knows anything.” and as a result we’re regularly surprised. Superhero movies don’t meet expectations, and then there are left field pictures that succeed, like the Queen biopic, which grossed $910.8 million on a budget just north of $50 million. A movie that featured a guy who’s been dead for decades with a group whose hits are in the far distant past? A niche effort on the surface, but it resonated with the public. People feel warm about Queen. No other band has come up with a song as outré as “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and Freddie Mercury was the consummate frontman/showman. But still, nearly a billion bucks?

So in a business where if it worked once, it must work again, we’ve had a number of musical biopics since. The Elton John movie “Rocketman” was no “Bohemian Rhapsody, it grossed $195.3 million on a budget of about $40 million… So when it was all said and done, with ancillary rights included, “Rocketman” made a profit. But also, it was released at the same time as Elton was on his final tour… There was a tie-in, built-in promotion, the world was excited about Elton. But Bruce Springsteen and “Nebraska’? An entire movie about an album Paul Rappaport had to beg rock radio to play? A record that stands outside Bruce’s oeuvre? Sure, fans know it, but the general public doesn’t know the songs… Which are dark, anything but upbeat like with Queen and Elton. Who thought this was a good idea?

The Bob Dylan movie “A Complete Unknown,” grossed $140.5 million on a budget somewhere between $50 and $70 million. But the Dylan movie had a hook, a story, an arc, the run-up to Newport. Furthermore, the film got good reviews!

And Springsteen is still alive, recording and touring… How is anybody going to portray him believably? As for Dylan…he’s such an enigma, no one knows who he really is other than himself. And Springsteen was all over MTV, unlike Dylan, we know Springsteen, why do we need this movie?

Starring the guy from “The Bear”?

Jeremy Allen White is good in that show, but the only people who believed he could carry this Springsteen film are those involved in making it.

And it will be forgotten soon, after it leaves theatres after lousy grosses, it’s not going to hurt the Boss, BUT WHY DID WE NEED THIS?

But even worse is the hype. We had to endure all the stories, they went on ad infinitum, you’d think it was Elvis come back from the dead.

Meanwhile, “KPop Demon Hunters” launches on Netflix and becomes a phenomenon.

Ted Sarandos just said:

“‘We believe that “KPop Demon Hunters” worked because it was first released on Netflix,’ Sarandos said. ‘We had something that people fell in love with … but not in a huge way on the first day or even the first weekend.'”

This is why Netflix is eating the studios’ lunch. You make a lot of product, you don’t know what will be successful, and you don’t bother to hype it in advance and it sinks or swims on the service. And if it starts to catch fire, the barrier to entry is incredibly low, there are nearly a hundred million U.S. homes with Netflix subscriptions, so if you hear about something, you can just fire the app right up and check it out, AT NO ADDITIONAL COST!

Who is going to pay $20 to go see “Deliver Me from Nowhere” in the theatre… Hard core Boss fans, and that’s it.

The public is not stupid, they check the buzz before they lay down their money, they don’t want to get ripped-off, in time or cash. By the day of launch you know if a film is alive or a turkey…

Meanwhile, a turkey can succeed on Netflix. I mean if you’re not paying, why not check out a Springsteen biopic? Think of all the mediocre stuff you’ve sat through on the flat screen!

But by time the Springsteen film hits streaming… You can’t raise buzz twice. You get one shot. And now this film is dead in the water.

Spend less and make more. Why waste all this cash on such a risky project? It’s the Emperor’s New Clothes, it’s a circle jerk.

Even the music business has flipped. Now albums releases are often surprises, the hype doesn’t begin until the record hits Spotify, or close thereto. Meanwhile, today’s acts make much more music than the acts of the seventies and eighties, they can put out three albums a year! And they know a hit is nice, but they’re playing to their hard core fan base, who are keeping them alive. For all the hype about the new Swift album, did you listen to it? You don’t have to for her to make bank! She’s got fans laying down cash for over thirty vinyl variants!

We can discuss the brewing backlash, but that’s not my point, my point is today EVERYTHING is niche, and don’t waste our time promoting broadly that which is not. It’s not the pre-internet era, with squibs in “Time” magazine ahead of release date, never mind Thursday night commercials on network television, which the target audience no longer watches, may not even have access to!

But the film business keeps doing it the same way, only they’re making fewer movies and hoping for moonshots.

They don’t want singles and doubles, the opportunity cost is too high. This is what is killing the major labels… If it doesn’t have a chance of going nuclear, of the act becoming a superstar, they don’t even sign you. Meanwhile, indie market share keeps growing… Then again, the majors are buying up all the indie distributors…which is why there’s a kerfuffle over the Downtown acquisition.

You’ve got to adjust. And you must realize you can burn the audience out by banging their heads with hype over and over again for a mediocre product that does not deserve it.

Once again, in the information age, we know INSTANTLY whether something is good or bad…that’s a feature, not a bug…even though the movie industry hates it, because they can no longer pull the wool over our eyes with bad product.

So stop making musical biopics. Unless they’re cheap.

And they’re items that should go straight to streaming anyway.

As for those involved…

They won’t admit this project was flawed in conception and not great in result, they’ll blame the failure on the audience, or the exhibitors, anybody but themselves.

Whoever greenlit this picture should be fired.

We can question whether there is even a future for theatrical distribution, but one thing is for sure, it won’t be propped up by junk like this. Hell, Netflix put “KPop Demon Hunters” on streaming and THEN took it to theatres!

This is baby boomer thinking. The same people who insist we must go to the theatre to see a flick. The same people who said the MP3 didn’t sound good enough…it did for the majority of the public, which is rejecting higher resolution music, seeing it as unnecessary, not buying the DACs to hear it, and a film on the giant television sets of today…is oftentimes a much better experience than the theatre… Forget that it’s not overpriced, no one is texting or talking, the floors are not sticky, the popcorn is not expensive and you can pause the movie to go to the bathroom. Case closed!

Steve Jobs was famous for excising past technology and forcing the public into the new. He went all USB when Windows machines were cluttered with legacy ports…

You’ve got to live in the present, you’ve got to adjust for changed conditions, you must pivot, or be forgotten… Just like all the acts who used to get paid by the labels to make music… The big budget days are never coming back, but oldsters keep complaining that the new paradigm is not fair, while they refuse to post on social media and monetize in new ways.

Once again, we had to wait this long to find out this picture is substandard?

I want to make someone pay. The somnambulant entertainment press, which repeats what the studios say, rubber stamping these films just like Congress goes along with Trump.

There is always a day of reckoning. And for the Springsteen flick, it came today.

It’s NOWHERE!