"I like to hold it in my hand because I know that somewhere, you're doing the same thing". -- Jane Aubrey, holding the baseball that Billy Chapel tossed into her hands on the day they first met quite some time before.

"He loved only two things in life. My mother and baseball."-- Billy Chapel about his father

I am a baseball fan.

Baseball is indeed America's pastime. Americans have been fascinated with the game and its players since Abner Doubleday first created the game so many love so much. In this, Kevin Costner's third baseball movie he is again playing an aging baseball player approaching the end of his career. But unlike Bull Durham where Costner's Crash Davis was at the bottom of the baseball food-chain, a career minor-leaguer whose major league experience was just as they say in baseball, a "cup of coffee", in For Love of the Game Costner is Billy Chapel, a 40 year old all-star pitcher for the Detroit Tigers.

In the film, as in real life, the Tigers are out of the hunt for post-season action. But they do have a role to play in determining whether it will be the Yankees or the Red Sox who go to the playoffs. The Tigers are playing the Yankees in New York, on the next to last day of the regular season. The Bronx Bombers clinch their playoff spot with a win over the hapless tigers.

Chapel is looking forward to arriving in New York, not because he's been told he will be starting the game tomorrow, but because it will be a chance to see Jane Aubrey. Played by Kelly Preston, Jane doesn't show for the romantic dinner that Billy has arranged in his suite at the Waldorf. Instead she appears the next morning, only after Billy has been awakened from a drunken stupor by his catcher (John C. Reilly) and then told by his long-time friend, mentor and boss, Tiger's owner (Brian Cox) that the team is being sold and that the new owners first order of business will be to trade Billy to San Francisco. Jane tells Billy that it is over between them, and leaves him standing in Central Park, near a baseball diamond.

From here we end up out on the mound, as Vin Scully describes it "the loneliest spot in the world", where Billy begins facing the Yankees. Throughout the game, we are shown how he and Jane first met and how their relationship grew and foundered. This is where the meat and potatotes of this film are to be found. The baseball sequences are good, and having Vin Scully, arguably the finest play-by-play voice of this or any era, calling the action of the game is a stroke of genius. But where the real story is to be found is in the love between Billy and Jane.

That's where the quotes above come in. Jane's passion, admiration and love of Billy is clear, once she gets over her fear that he will disappear when he discovers that she has a child Heather (Jena Malone). But as we see in several sequences Billy's first love is still baseball. The question, the key question of this whole movie, is whether or not he will come to the realization that he loves Jane as much or more than the game.

It is an interesting and worthwhile question to explore. The adulation, adoration and admiration that baseball players receive from fans of the game is a powerful thing. But for Billy it's more than that. He is a throwback to another era, a time when players played more for the love of the game than just the money.

Sam Raimi, whose awesome direction of A Simple Plan wowed me before does a great job of mixing the heart-wrenching moments of Billy and Jane's ups and downs with the tension of the drama unfolding in Yankee Stadium, where Chapel may well be on his way to pitching a perfect game, one of baseball's truest rarities and most difficult feats. Costner was born to play aging athletes, and while he is fine in other roles (his Garret in Message in a Bottle was an excellent representation of the novel's character brought to the big screen), his recent film choices make this seem like an even better performance that it is. Kelly Preston is perfect (no pun intended) as the woman struggling to love a man who won't fully return the love back to her.

I said it before. I am a baseball fan. It biases my review of this movie. It may not be for those who aren't fans of the game.