Good Field, Good Hit

By Richard Stengel

A new NBC series, Bay City Blues, looks like an all-star

The number of TV shows that have revolved around the summer game can be counted on the fingers of a catcher's mitt: Ball Four and The Bad News Bears. Both lasted less than a season, giving credence to the network adage that sports only play on the field, never on the sound stage.

That received wisdom may now be on the way out: one rookie series appears to have the goods to make it in the majors. Bay City Blues, which premieres Oct. 25 on NBC, is a weekly hourlong show about the fortunes of a minor-league baseball club called the Bay City Bluebirds. Kisses and bases are stolen; suitors and batters strike out; umpires and spouses cry foul. Created by Steven Bochco and Jeffrey Lewis (Hill Street Blues), it is a wry, | funny, poignant and surprisingly grownup show about men who play a boys' game.

At Bluebird Stadium, the scoreboard does not zap, crackle and pop; an unseen hand changes the goose eggs each inning. No Astro-Turf here; cows graze on the infield in anticipation of Farm Night, when the ballplayers have a hand at milking them. The team is a collection of youths on the way up and burned-out cases on the way down. There is the hot prospect (Patrick Cassidy) who is a terror in the outfield and a bed wetter at home. And the hick pitcher (Barry Tubbs) who appears to get height sickness when he climbs the pitcher's mound. And Rocky, the brawny third baseman (Ken Olin), a con man in pinstripes who hankers to croon the national anthem to a salsa beat. And an aging slugger (Bernie Casey) awarded a "previously owned" pimpmobile on his appreciation day. And, of course, the curmudgeonly owner, played by Pat Corley, the scowling coroner from Hill Street, who describes his team as "a bunch of guys who ain't worth squat." For lagniappe, there is the team mascot, the Bluebird of Happiness (Marco Rodriguez), in the guise of a bargain-basement Big Bird.

The chief of this crew is Michael Nouri, the soulful and streetwise Pygmalion of Flashdance. Nouri plays the wise and slightly mournful manager to understated perfection. His assistant, the underhanded pitching coach (Dennis Franz, another Hill Street veteran), teaches his charges the subtler aspects of the game: "Your spitball isn't named exactly right. You could use your Vaseline, your oils, your earwax, or what I think is primo, the gooey white kind of spit that conies after drinking a lotta milk." Later, when an umpire spies a foreign substance on the ball, the freshly instructed young pitcher (Perry Lang) is not only humiliated but disarmed. When he returns home after the game, he discovers his wife in a compromising squeeze play with the cable TV installer. Shocked and dumbfounded, he screams at her, "Is he at least gonna give you free cable?"

Bay City Blues follows the successful formula of its predecessor, but the show does more than replace nightsticks with Louisville Sluggers. The series features a repertory company brimming with quirky and distinctive characters, simultaneously strong and vulnerable. Each episode has multiple, intersecting plot lines, tight camera shots, overlapping dialogue `a la Robert Altman movies (or locker rooms), private lives spilling over into public, and a concern with such human-size issues as embarrassment, anxiety, loyalty and how to hit a hanging curve. Knowledge of baseball lore is useful, not essential.

The idea for the show popped into Bochco's head last July while he was watching an oldtimers game at Dodger Stadium. Eventually a meeting was arranged with Grant Tinker, the chairman of NBC, and other executives at the office of MTM Enterprises, the production company where Bochco works and that Tinker created. Bochco brought along a shopping bag full of major-league baseballs. The executives played with the idea and the baseballs. One hour later, Bochco left the room with a commitment for 13 shows. First on their agenda: the. construction of a full-scale $500,000 stadium in Sun Valley, Calif., with just the right rinky-dink look.

Casting the show was trickier. The partners gave double auditions: the first to see if the prospects could act, the second to see if they could throw. No one had to have Pete Rose's stats. Notes Lewis: "The team is probably at the level of a decent-to-good high school squad."

Luckily, Nouri does not have to swing a bat. When Bochco and Lewis first approached him about the part, he said, "Look, guys, I know nothing about baseball. Is that the game with touchdowns?"

Even so, the acting and the action seem authentic: almost all the players have triple-A moves. The show features 16 regulars, twice the number that Hill Street started with and two more than that show has today.

Although the viewer must assimilate a great deal of information, notes Bochco, the "ensemble cast gives the audience a chance to get to know a lot of different characters and plug into a lot of different stories."

According to the producer, the current advertising-agency wisdom about a sports series is that women will never watch it. Bochco, who had boyish dreams of being a ball player, admits that "baseball is essentially a man's fantasy, not a woman's." Accordingly, he has been careful to treat the unfulfilled longings of some of the players' wives as much as those of their husbands. Sharon Stone and Michele Greene play high-spirited but long-suffering companions who must put up with lingering slumps and Baseball Annies. The only weak character is a wealthy banker's wife, played by the luminous Kelly Harmon. Her role needs more reason for being around than simply to give the audience someone to stare at.

Despite an occasional lapse, the Bay City Bluebirds are minor-leaguers in name only; this backwater is a microcosm of major-league concerns and emotions.

When the skipper of the team strolls over to the local college and eavesdrops on a lecture, the teacher is reading aloud from Melville. " 'Passion,' " she says, " 'and passion at its profoundest, is not a thing demanding a palatial stage whereon to play its part . . .' " Judging from the early episodes of Bay City Blues, all it needs is a locker room .

-- By Richard Stengel.

Reported by Denise Worrell/Los Angeles

With reporting by Denise Worrell This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.