Ronald Reagan Depicts Hall of Famer’s Comeback in ‘The Winning Team,’ with Doris Day

The troubled life of a baseball legend is depicted in this 1952 film.

by Rich Watson
 

Few major league pitchers were as dominant as Grover Cleveland Alexander. During the 1910s and 20s, when professional baseball was still new, he set records left and right that stand today: 373 wins, the all-time National League co-leader; 28 wins in his rookie season, a modern rookie record; 90 shutouts, a NL record; a three-time winner of the pitching Triple Crown (wins, ERA, strikeouts), and a World Series championship.

Alexander (AKA “Old Pete”) achieved all this despite suffering epileptic seizures stemming from a freak playing accident, which also led to bouts of alcoholism.

In 1952, his career was chronicled in a movie: The Winning Team, with Ronald Reagan and Doris Day.

Please note: I’m not interested in discussing Reagan’s political career. For this post, I’m only concerned with him as an actor.

The players on ‘The Winning Team’

Reagan (as Alexander) was mostly known for war movies and Westerns. He may have the distinction of uttering the most famous line in American sports cinema. When his character lay dying in the football movie Knute Rockne: All American, he implores his teammates to “win just one for the Gipper.”

Day, of course, was a superstar singer and a successful actress. After Team, her biggest films were still to come: Calamity Jane, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Pajama Game, Pillow Talk. She played Alexander’s wife Aimee.

Team was directed by Lewis Seiler from a screenplay by Ted Sherdeman, Seeleg Lester and Merwin Gerard. It was Reagan and Day’s second film together after Storm Warning the previous year. (Reagan also made an uncredited cameo in It’s a Great Feeling.)

Alexander’s beginnings and the accident 

The movie starts with Alexander’s time as a telephone lineman in Nebraska who pitches on a semi-pro team. Aimee would rather he set aside baseball so they can get married and start a farm.

He gains a rep as a phenom, but in one game Alex gets beaned on the head while running the base paths. He gets double vision, which puts his tryout with the Phillies in jeopardy. Eventually it goes away, but it’s only a harbinger of things to come.

Phillies career and wartime

Alex is signed by the Phillies and the movie fast-forwards through his time with the club, setting records and dominating the National League. One doesn’t get a sense of his baseball accomplishments until after the fact.

I thought this was unfortunate. The filmmakers seemed more eager to get to the dramatic highlights of Alex’s life, which is understandable, but the Major League Baseball elements felt a bit shortchanged, given his record-setting achievements.

While fighting in World War 1, a shell exploded near him. His seizures began afterwards, which also led to his alcoholism. It wasn’t clear that Alex had a drinking problem at first; he seemed justifiably upset more than anything. Again, it doesn’t become apparent until after the fact.

Aimee’s role

In the movie’s narrative, Aimee (a redhead in real life, unlike the blonde Day) has to be convinced baseball is a legitimate career choice for Alex. Once she sees how lost he is after the baserunning accident and how thrilled he is to recover his vision, she’s all in. And because this is Doris Day, she gets to sing a song at one point—a Christmas song, no less.

This scene feels lifted from a different film altogether—Day’s character isn’t known for her singing and she doesn’t sing anything else—but I suppose if one has Doris Day in a movie, no matter what kind, one has to expect this sort of thing.

As Alex becomes a star, we see Aimee become more comfortable with the game, watching it from her perch in the stands, interacting with other fans and cheering Alex onward. There’s a nice ballpark scene with Aimee and the wife of Alex’s favorite catcher, Bill Killefer, who initiates Aimee into baseball.

Alexander’s decline

Alex gets traded to the Cubs in 1917 (the movie doesn’t bother explaining why, but in reality it was because the Phillies believed he’d be drafted into the war), where his seizures get worse, as does his drinking. The Cubs cut him.

This is where the narrative cheats. In Team, we see, as part of Alex’s low period, he chooses not to tell Aimee how bad his condition has gotten and instead he leaves her, wandering around, joining a barnstorming religious baseball team and ending up as part of a flea circus sideshow, discussing his career and answering general baseball questions.

These things happened, but not until much later in Alex’s life, after his playing career ended, both his time with a barnstorming team and his period within a flea circus. He and Aimee divorced and remarried, but he was unable to straighten himself out until MLB, through his third team, the Cardinals, gave him a pension. His election to the Hall of Fame in 1938 also helped him in his recovery.

The Cardinals and the World Series

In Team, Aimee eventually uncovers him, and through the intervention of friend and fellow ballplayer Rogers Hornsby, Alex gets a position with the Cardinals, the team Hornsby manages, in 1926. Again, though we do see the two players cross paths in the film, I didn’t get the impression Alex and Hornsby were close enough friends that Hornsby would help him to this extent.

Alex pitches well enough for the Cardinals to make the World Series, against the Yankees. He wins two games in the series and appears in relief in the seventh game as Aimee rushes to Yankee Stadium to witness Alex enter the game. She makes it just in time for Alex to see her in the crowd. He strikes out Babe Ruth to clinch the Cardinal victory (though in real life it was Tony Lazzeri).

Bottom line

Overall, Team is kinda meh; certainly not as good as a movie like Pride of the Yankees, also about a ballplayer fighting a debilitating physical condition. Reagan looks convincing enough as a professional ballplayer from the early 20th century, though nothing about his performance really stands out. Day is Day; she wasn’t challenged as an actress here but she’s pleasant enough to watch. One learns the important elements in Alexander’s life and career but one should not by any means consider this film the final word.

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Have you seen The Winning Team?