Markusen: Baseball players turned actors: horrors!
From SABR member Bruce Markusen at The Hardball Times on October 16, 2019:
It’s that time of year again. As we approach the festive day of Halloween, I feel compelled to search for connections between our great game and the genre of horror—the genre most associated with this time of year. In the past, we’ve explored the story of Boris Karloff, dressed up in full Frankenstein regalia, playing in a charity baseball game. We’ve looked at reports of hauntings at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, a locale once investigated by the SyFy Network TV show, Ghost Hunters. And we’ve even examined the darker side of horror with a study of the infamous 1950s comic strip, “Foul Play,” about a midnight baseball game connected to murder and revenge. That controversial comic strip played a role in the establishment of a comic code, which essentially ended mainstream horror comics for the next 15 years.
So what about baseball players who have become actors and have appeared in horror films? Is there anything to find there? Notably, Hall of Famer Wade Boggs has dabbled in acting, once appearing in a hokey made-for-SyFy film from 2011 called Swamp Shark, which is literally a movie about a shark that has made its way into a swampy backwoods river. Boggs plays “Deputy Stanley,” who at one point tells another character, “I played a little ball myself.” Indeed he did.
Read the full article here: https://tht.fangraphs.com/a-baseball-player-turned-actor-horrors/
- Related link: Get your copy of SABR’s From Spring Training to Screen Test: Baseball Players Turned Actors
Originally published: October 16, 2019. Last Updated: October 16, 2019.