The first prophet of baseball appeared in 1975 in the film masterpiece, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Ken Kesey, the author of the book of the same title, owns the glory of having created the character who in the film reaches dimensions that make him the world’s first perpetual baseball player. His hero, Randall Patrick McMurphy, gets loose from handcuffs and in a mental hospital in the state of Oregon, where most of the action takes place, walks on a new moon. A west coast cowboy without a horse sounds the soul of a new and dangerous California in a tragedy that is, in the film version, the equal in power to anything in ancient Greek tragedy. Since the Civil War, the Europeanized minds of most American writers and artists who tried to revive the American soul only dug more holes or planted the ground with foreign seed. When Randall P. McMurphy gets loose from his handcuffs, the soul of America pounded into the ground at Gettysburg, which baseball preserved in a muted and disguised form, rises again fresh and true and shows the world how to walk tall on a new deadly ground. McMurphy leaves one location, a prison, wins a base in a different place, a mental hospital, struggles there against an organized group of enemies trying to pacify him, tries to escape and fails, but by his out allows a friend, a member of his team, to escape. The art of the film imitates the art of baseball. A tragic hero lives out a destiny routinely possible in any baseball game.
When the guards delivering McMurphy from the prison to the mental hospital release him, he gets a new chance to step up to the plate. The new life he can create for himself will be full of risks because although his new environment has a measure of freedom, it will be the unrelenting mission of the group of enemies all around him, the women nurses and the men guards, to shut him up and turn him to stone. The confrontation with the pitcher takes the form, near the beginning of the film, of an interview with the head of the hospital, a psychiatrist. He is an intelligent, scientific humanist who, if he does not yet know all the laws of human behavior, at least is certain that all human behavior must obey laws. His business is to decide who is sane and who is insane, who is worthy to play the rigged game and who is not worthy. Like every pitcher he hates the sudden spontaneity of a base hit and his science is devoted to eliminating all home runs from the universe. McMurphy wants to get by him and be admitted to the mental hospital because life among the mentally ill seems a paradise after the handcuffs and the prison he has just left. To get on base in the psychiatrist’s prison seems at the worst an easy intermediary trip to full freedom. Like all ball players, McMurphy is sure that the only way back home is to first get on base. He has more than enough wit to handle the psychiatrist’s curves and he does earn a base in the cuckoo’s nest where he will be observed to decide if he is normal.
He is, but his normalcy borders on madness because he has an innocent and fierce wind in the soul that blows where it will. He has enough discipline and reason to set his sails and steer his ship, but he obeys no law except the imperative to be born again with each new tug of the universe on his mast. He is a new Christ admitted to an evil world for a new crucifixion. He is insane because his humanity violates the rules of the rigged game. He is judged a social misfit because he will not sit down and quietly obey his enemies like a vegetable. He has the stiff, self-reliant hardness of a Ty Cobb. He is ready to steal any base in any ball game at any time against any team. Yet he is a new cowboy, not the old sort, usually on a horse above the ground with the glamour and god-like detachment of the sun. The old cowboys got off their horses mostly to punish now and then a few wild western men who disobeyed the law. Randall McMurphy is against any law that cannot prove on the spot its necessity by showing a man some new possibility for life. Like Achelous, the Greek river God, who turned himself from a man back to a river in order to squirt away from the grip of Hercules during a wrestling contest, McMurphy is a new cowboy because he has his eye on not just what is possible. He is not just ready to steal bases. The law allows that. He is ready to try to go all the way home at any moment. His boldness will send him off and running from first base for the plate on just a base hit like Enos Slaughter who scored from first base on a base hit to win the 1946 World Series. He is as innocent as Jesus, as self-reliant as Ty Cobb, and as bold as Enos Slaughter. He is too dangerous to be let out of the mental hospital. He has to be specialized, one way or another, so that he learns to live only according to predetermined models of behavior. Experts in the necessary laws of behavior must operate on him. He must be forced to stand passively touching a base and not be allowed to run freely around the bases.
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