Taglines: Some men are born with a gift, and some are born to discover it.
Talent for the Game movie storyline. Virgil Sweet (Edward James Olmos) is a veteran baseball scout for the California Angels. He is in danger of losing his life’s work because the Angels’ new owner, Gil Lawrence (Terry Kinney), is unhappy with the farm system and threatening to eliminate the team’s scouts.
Virgil hasn’t discovered a great young prospect for quite a while. One day, when the car that he and girlfriend Bobbie (Lorraine Bracco), who also is employed by the team, are driving breaks down on a rural road, Virgil happens upon a country boy named Sammy Bodeen (Corbett) who has a pitching arm worthy of the major leagues.
Greeted back in Anaheim with considerable skepticism, Virgil arranges a tryout for Sammy. The boy is wild at first and Virgil’s great find appears to be a big joke. Once he calms down, however, Sammy proves to have everything it takes to make it big.
Team management, desperate for a new star, immediately begins to overplay the arrival of Sammy with wildly overblown hype. A public-relations blitz promotes the boy as baseball’s next great star, even though he has yet to throw a pitch in a big-league game. By the time Sammy takes the mound for his first Angels game, expectations are so high that he cannot possibly live up to them.
Talent for the Game is a 1991 film about a baseball scout, directed by Robert M. Young. It starred Edward James Olmos and Lorraine Bracco, in her first film after Goodfellas, with Terry Kinney, Jamey Sheridan, and Jeff Corbett as co-stars. Scenes were filmed on the Palouse in the small town of Genesee, Idaho, between Lewiston and Moscow, and nearby Garfield, Washington. Other scenes were shot in northern Idaho at Kellogg.
Talent for the Game (1991)
Directed by: Robert M. Young
Starring: Edward James Olmos, Lorraine Bracco, John E. Coleman, Jeff Corbett, Jamey Sheridan, Terry Kinney, Thomas Ryan, Janet Carroll, Daniel A. Haro
Screenplay by: David Himmelstein, Thomas Michael Donnelly, Larry Ferguson
Production Design by: Jeffrey Howard
Cinematography by: Curtis Clark
Film Editing by: Arthur Coburn
Costume Design by: Erica Edell Phillips
Set Decoration by: Thomas L. Roysden, John Sweeney
Art Direction by: Keith Brian Burns
Music by: David Newman
Distributed by: Paramount Pictures
Release Date: April 26, 1991
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