The excuses are ample: socializing, office birthday parties, child-rearing, resentment at being told by the government to trim down, even a cruddy Red Sox season.
Helgeland and the production designer, Richard Hoover, re-create the shabbiness and the discomforts of pre-television baseball before the big money poured in the cruddy, dun-colored dressing rooms and the scrappy fields.
In nations where merely qualifying for the World Cup is tantamount to winning the Super Bowl, the game is often played on cruddy fields under tropical heat in front of crowds nasty enough to get inside the U.S. team's collective head.