Fast Pitch

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

"Why don't you just fire me?" asks Al Percolo (Albert Brooks), the downtrodden but game talent hunter in The Scout. "I thought of that," snaps the meanest general manager in baseball history (Lane Smith), "but I like this better." Al is talking about his scouting assignment so deep in the Mexican bush leagues that they play in the rain because it makes sliding easier. There he discovers Steve Nebraska (Brendan Fraser), a phenom with a fast ball so potent it knocks over the catcher and the umpire. Steve is in dire need of an understanding father figure -- especially after he gets a $55 million contract with the Yanks.

What Steve has instead is awful, desperate Al (Brooks is, of course, a peerless portrayer of all the great American falsities -- piety, humility and the good cheer with which we habitually mask desperation). Steve also has his own violent innocence, which tests the limits of Al's smarminess hilariously. The script, by Brooks, Andrew Bergman and Monica Johnson, draws a specific parallel between Steve and another primitive creature imported to amuse jaded New Yorkers -- King Kong -- and it is a measure of director Michael Ritchie's deftness that he gets the right kind of laughs from the device. Ritchie avoids the kind of sentiment that so often encrusts tall sporting tales, and even gets a funny performance out of baseball's very own Kong, Yankee boss George Steinbrenner. The Scout is the best comedy-fantasy about baseball ever made, which goes to show that if Hollywood keeps trying, eventually someone will get it right.