On Robert Redford and the enduring power of ‘The Natural,’ a timeless baseball fairy tale

(Top photo of Robert Redford in “The Natural”: 

Film Publicity Archive / United Archives via Getty Images)

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6636356/2025/09/17/robert-redford-roy-hobbs-the-natural/

By Tyler Kepner
Sept. 17, 2025

LOS ANGELES — Two retired ballplayers, left-handed hitters with hundreds of career home runs, stood by the batting cage at Dodger Stadium on Tuesday when a visitor mentioned a name: Roy Hobbs. Both replied with the same five words.

“The Natural,” Raúl Ibañez and Chase Utley said. “My favorite movie.”

Ibañez was 12 when Robert Redford, who died on Tuesday, starred as Hobbs, the best there ever was. In high school, Ibañez said, he would watch “The Natural” before every game. He went on to play 19 years in the majors, teaming with Utley for a while on the Philadelphia Phillies.

Both played the game hard, with an understated grace. If either ever launched a ball into the lights, setting off an electrical explosion, they’d have put down their heads and trotted through the falling sparks.

“It was different back then,” Utley said. “More businesslike than it is now.”

“His swing was good, too,” Ibañez said.

“That bat he had?” Utley exclaimed. “The Wonder Boy? Oh!”

Ibañez continued, explaining why the film moved him so profoundly as a teenager in Miami, why he used it to immerse himself in the magic of the sport.

“It was about a guy who loved baseball and it got taken from him, and he only had one year to do it,” Ibañez said. “It was this deep appreciation for the opportunity. Overcame the hardship of his dad passing away, he lost his lady, he messed around with the other woman, who turned out to be a psycho.”

“There was some darkness to it,” Utley said.

“And then he becomes the hero,” Ibañez said. “He wouldn’t sell out the team. He wouldn’t sell out Pop. He wouldn’t sell out anybody, because he had to do the right thing.”

Utley has two boys now, not yet high school age but old enough, he thinks, to be enthralled by a baseball fable set in 1939 and released in 1984. Fairy tales are timeless.

“I’m gonna go home tonight and have my kids watch it,” Utley said.

“The Natural” is not a kids movie, not like “Little Big League” or “The Sandlot.” It belongs more to the lineage of “Bull Durham” or “Field of Dreams,” “Eight Men Out” or “A League Of Their Own.” All of those baseball films — and more, like “Major League” — followed Redford’s lead, arriving at theaters in the decade after “The Natural”.

It was the success of “The Natural,” which grossed $48 million against a $28 million budget, that revived the genre. The care and precision of a royal Hollywood figure was critical.

“They kept being told baseball movies are box office poison,” said Rick Cerrone, the editor-in-chief of Baseball Digest, who served as a consultant for the film while working in the commissioner’s office.

“The last one that made any money was probably ‘Pride of the Yankees,’ and that was 40 years before. So the edict from Robert Redford was, ‘We’re not screwing around here. We’ve got to get this right.’ And it created the golden era of baseball movies.”

Mike Tollin, a filmmaker with decades of acclaimed sports features, said most fans seem to fall into one of two camps: Are you a “Field of Dreams” fan or a “Bull Durham” fan? That is, a romantic or a realist? To Tollin, “The Natural” transcends both.

The film is a masterclass of filmmaking, he said, citing director Barry Levinson, cinematographer Caleb Deschanel and screenwriter Roger Towne, who adapted the Bernard Malamud novel. However, so much of its power, Tollin said, came from Redford’s credibility as an athlete on screen.

“Let’s go back to the ’50s and remember ‘Fear Strikes Out,’ shall we, with Tony Perkins and Karl Malden?” Tollin said. “That’s one end of the spectrum, and this is the other end. You see him throwing the ball in the cornfields with ease and grace. And then the swing, it’s sort of a natural left-handed uppercut, it was believable.

“And the performance was so understated, right? You let Caleb make beautiful pictures, so you didn’t have to overdo it. Look at the way he addressed the attempts at bribery. There’s the specter of the Black Sox scandal, and now here he is in a piece of fiction, going the other way and upholding the honor of baseball, the integrity of the game. You fall in love with him and then your heart goes out to him for what’s happening off the field. It was heroic, and he earns it.”

The original novel is a tragedy: Hobbs takes the bribe from the corrupt team owner and strikes out to end the game. The film is the complete opposite, but it uses the medium to create a breathtaking scene that could never be expressed as vividly on paper.

Four years later, Kirk Gibson of the Los Angeles Dodgers channeled the hobbled hero with his walk-off home run to open the 1988 World Series. When he arrived here the next day, a coach had taped over the nameplate in Gibson’s locker and written “Roy Hobbs”.

Last fall, when Freddie Freeman walked off the New York Yankees in another World Series opener, Fox’s Joe Davis connected the moments: “Gibby, meet Freddie!” Davis was not thinking of “The Natural” – it was released before he was born – but managed to link the present to the mythical past.

“It was the same thread that they used in ’88, and that was the injured star,” Davis said on Tuesday. “That’s what we’d been seeing throughout the postseason, because we had the Dodgers’ whole run. We had seen Freddie limp around all month, kind of wondering each day: ‘Hey, when’s he going to have his Kirk Gibson moment?’ And like a movie, it ends up being Game 1 of the World Series. It was like, ‘No way. That script would get thrown out, it was so unbelievable.’”

With “The Natural,” a compelling script was not enough. Finding a believable venue would be tricky because the fictional New York Knights were portrayed as a team in the actual National League. Using another team’s era-appropriate ballpark — say, Wrigley Field — would ring false.

It was Cerrone who suggested Buffalo’s War Memorial Stadium, which was nearly half a century old and would be demolished by the end of the decade. As luck would have it, the field was situated near an old armory where Tri-Star Pictures constructed most of the movie’s sets. For convenience and authenticity, it was an inspired choice.

Yet Redford also had to convincingly portray not just an aging slugger, but also a much younger pitcher who could hop off a train and strike out “The Whammer” in an early scene. He was 47 years old during filming, ancient by baseball standards; Don Drysdale, a classmate at Van Nuys High, had finished his Hall of Fame career in 1969.

Redford had attended the University of Colorado to play baseball, so he was athletic enough. However, he needed to learn how players moved in the era before he was born.

“He said, ‘I don’t know that old-time windup,’” Cerrone said. “I said, ‘Well, I don’t think I could find you someone from the ’20s,’ but he wasn’t that specific; he just said ‘old-time windup.’ I had met this guy, Frank ‘Spec’ Shea, at an old-timer’s game, and somehow I had his number.”

Shea had pitched eight years in the majors, starring for the Yankees as a rookie in the 1947 World Series. He also lived near Redford in Connecticut, making them a perfect match.

The lessons must have worked: the film ends not with a swing, but with Redford playing catch. It’s one of the most indelible images of a majestic career.

“When I talked to Frank Shea after the movie came out, I said, ‘What did you think of Redford?’ ” Cerrone said. “He goes, ‘Well, I can’t speak about his acting. But as a pitcher, he definitely pulled it off.’ ”

He pitched, he hit, he enchanted. That was the character, and that was Redford. Thinking about “The Natural” today, Tollin said, he was reminded of a book called “A Sense of Where You Are,” by John McPhee, about Bill Bradley as a college basketball star at Princeton.

“He would do drills with his right hand and his left hand, hook shots with his eyes closed, and you develop a sense of where you are,” Tollin said. “So what you’re talking about is, really, a sense of who you are, and I think that’s where that understated performance comes from. You have this inner confidence, you have a clear sense of your identity, and so you navigate through the world with this light touch, but somehow people gravitate to you. It’s magnetic.

“And it’s hard to imagine anybody else in that film, right? He was Roy Hobbs.”

SEP 20, 2025
Connections: Sports Edition

Tyler Kepner is a Senior Writer for The Athletic covering MLB. He previously worked for The New York Times, covering the Mets (2000-2001) and Yankees (2002-2009) and serving as national baseball columnist from 2010 to 2023. A Vanderbilt University graduate, he has covered the Angels for the Riverside (Calif.) Press-Enterprise and Mariners for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and began his career with a homemade baseball magazine in his native Philadelphia in the early 1990s. Tyler is the author of the best-selling “K: A History of Baseball In Ten Pitches” (2019) and “The Grandest Stage: A History of The World Series” (2022).Follow Tyler on Twitter @TylerKepner

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