Bacall, Baseball, and an Extraordinary Bit of Detective Work

When the legendary Lauren Bacall passed away last week at the age of 89, a gratifying number of the obituaries and personal recollections that sprang up in the wake of her death referenced a single, star-making moment — “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve?” from her first film, To Have and Have Not.

This scene:

It’s not easy to tear one’s eyes away from Bacall, is it? So I understand completely if you missed the baseball Easter Egg. Don’t be ashamed; I’d never noticed it, either. Even Tom Shieber (Senior Curator at the Baseball Hall of Fame and writer of the criminally-under-appreciated and too-rarely-updated Baseball Researcher blog) failed to notice it for years, and he a) loves To Have and Have Not, and b) is as keen-eyed a baseball historian as there is. So we’re in good company.

My first reaction to Marty’s posting was embarrassment. How did I miss this? I love this movie. I own this movie. I’ve seen this movie countless times. I’ve long been interested in ties between baseball and classic movies. (See my blog posting on a baseball mystery in “The Maltese Falcon.”) How did this baseball picture elude me?

Go read the whole thing. It’s fantastic fun. And poke around the blog while you’re at it, because this is just a single timely instance of its excellence. And once you’re done with that? Maybe AMAZON($) or YOUTUBE($) for the whole film. (And a fervent HT to Slate’s “Brow Beat” blog for that video.)