It Happens Every Spring

Nicolaus Mills: It Happens Every Spring

THIS YEAR marks the sixtieth anniversary of one of the funniest baseball movies of all time, It Happens Every Spring. But it’s hard to imagine TV stations re-showing the 1949 film, which made its New York debut at the Roxy along with a stage bill that featured the Andrews Sisters. The recent steroid problems of Manny Ramirez and Alex Rodriguez, among others, have guaranteed that It Happens Every Spring will not be seen with the lightheartedness it requires.

The film tells the story of a mild-mannered, college chemistry professor who accidentally discovers that a compound he is working on repels wood after a baseball flies through his laboratory window and destroys his experiment. The professor (Ray Milland) wonders what would happen if he rubbed the compound on a baseball and threw it at a batter, and much to his delight, he finds the treated ball jumps over a bat. Anxious to get enough money to marry his fiancée (the beautiful Jean Peters), he takes a temporary leave of absence from college teaching and embarks on a pitching career.

The professor is not much of an athlete, and what makes It Happens Every Spring especially funny is watching the batters the professor faces swing and miss at pitches they are sure they can hit. The result is the baseball equivalent of the Disney’s Flubber. We are shown an invention that makes us giddy with the magic it can do. It Happens Every Spring even comes with a happy ending. The professor (who has a limited supply of his anti-wood compound because he doesn’t know how to reproduce it) is forced to retire from baseball when he breaks his pitching hand catching a line drive hit from a pitch he threw after he ran out of his compound.

Was it naïve of audiences who saw It Happens Every Spring in 1949 not to be troubled by the ethical questions the film raises? In hindsight, the answers seems yes. After all, the professor is successful by virtue of trickery that plays fast and loose with the rules of the game. But at a time when baseball was dominated by the likes of Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, and Bob Feller, it was impossible in the late forties to imagine the game could be threatened by work done in the laboratory. Baseball’s stars were men who had just spent their prime years fighting World War II. Their integrity was beyond question.

All of which brings us back to the present. In the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, it would be a relief to have baseball as an escape we could rely on. The irony, as It Happens Every Spring shows, is that the only way baseball can be a true escape is for it to be better than our day-to-day world. What we ask of the players we root for, usually without considering the burden it places on them at a very young age, is that they be superior to most of us when it comes to the ethics of getting ahead.

Nicolaus Mills, a professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College, is author of Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower. From the 1949 film (wikimedia commons).