An actor discovers what it’s like to join one of the most infamous teams in baseball.
By Matt Jennings
Alex Cranmer ’99 hops lightly on the balls of his feet in the infield dirt several paces to the left of the third-base bag. He’s in a fielder’s stance—bent at the waist, leaning ever so slightly toward home plate, a baseball-gloved left hand at the ready to snag a hard, white ball that could come rocketing his way at more than 100 miles an hour—and his eyes burn a hole in the batter standing a little more than 90 feet away.
The pitch.
A rip from the right-handed batter.
Contact.
The ball arcs toward center field, and Cranmer relaxes, stands up straight, and takes a few steps toward the shortstop, who’s standing about 40 feet to his left. He’s still walking and talking—he may as well be strolling down Fifth Avenue—when CRACK.
A line drive screams past him, inches from his face.
“Stop, stop, stop, stop.”
A trainer is running onto the field. Cranmer is ok, shaken, but ok. But all the action on the diamond has come to a screeching halt. Infielders, outfielders, the batters waiting to hit—all gape in the direction of third base. Cranmer is being pulled. “Off the field,” the trainer bellows.
Several months later, Cranmer settles into his seat on the loge level—third-base side, naturally—of Yankee Stadium, a Miller Light in one hand, a hot dog in the other. Sporting a Yankees hat and a Lou Gehrig road jersey hanging untucked over his blue jeans, Cranmer looks out over the field where the Yankees are about to take on the Boston Red Sox and chuckles at the memory of trying to play the hot corner.
“That could have been it,” he says. “My season over before it really began. It was not a shining Graig Nettles moment.”
This summer, Cranmer is portraying the former New York Yankee third baseman in The Bronx Is Burning, an eight-part ESPN miniseries that chronicles the team’s drive for a World Series title during the turbulent summer of 1977. That year, the serial killer “Son of Sam” terrorized New York, record heat waves led to citywide blackouts and widespread looting, and a bitter mayoral race divided the populace. In the Bronx, the Yankees faced turmoil of their own. Team owner George Steinbrenner (Oliver Platt) was demanding a championship, fiery manager Billy Martin (John Turturro) was demanding control, and superstar Reggie Jackson (Daniel Sunjata) had just donned pinstripes and was demanding attention.
“It was wild,” Cranmer says, taking a pull from his beer. He swallows, gazes out at the field as the 2007 Yankees take their positions, and says it again only a little more softly. “It was wild.”
It’s unclear whether he’s talking about the story or capturing the saga on film. Or both.
Growing up in New Jersey, Cranmer was a casual Yankees fan, but says he was more interested in playing sports than watching. As a kid, he swam and played baseball and soccer, but would get cabin fever in the winter—“I was pretty hyper,” he admits—so when he was eight years old, his parents began taking him to a nearby ski resort every weekend, leaving him there for the day in the hope that, if nothing else, he’d be tired by day’s end. Within two years, he had developed into the top ski racer in New Jersey and was invited to compete in the Junior Olympics. “I thought I was pretty good—until then,” he says. At the juniors, he finished last in every event he entered. Still, he was hooked, and in eighth grade he matriculated at Burke Mountain Academy, a boarding school in East Burke, Vermont, that develops some of the best skiers in the United States. After excelling at Burke—both athletically and academically—he joined the British national ski team (his father is a British citizen) and competed on the world circuit for two years before enrolling at Middlebury in 1995.
That fall, a group of immensely talented skiers had arrived at the College, and for the first time in his skiing career, Cranmer felt his motivation waning. Most of his teammates were living in another dorm, and after two years of nothing but skiing, the slopes had lost their appeal. Still, he was a competitive person, and as the carnival season got underway, he convinced himself that he was ready to go. Then at the Middlebury Carnival he wiped out coming through the first gate of the giant slalom and ripped his shoulder from his socket. He had surgery soon thereafter and never skied competitively again.
That spring, he took an acting class and was subsequently cast in both the spring and following fall productions. He would go on to a prolific acting career at Middlebury (he was cast as the lead in a number of productions) and after graduating in 1999, he decided to make acting his life’s work.
“Guys who grew up in theater might have had a harder adjustment,” Cranmer says of his role as Nettles. “Being an athlete certainly helped me in the role.”
Though the actors played little baseball during the four months of filming—the producers decided that archival footage of actual events would better serve the film—it was essential that Cranmer and his cast mates not only look the part of 1970s ballplayers, but also feel the part as well. So along with the sideburns and long hair, uniforms and spikes, came two weeks of baseball camp before shooting commenced in Mystic, Connecticut, last Labor Day. (Much of the movie was filmed at Senator Thomas J. Dodd Memorial Stadium, a minor league park in Mystic. The background of Yankee Stadium was added digitally.)
Each actor had a position coach and stunt double (Cranmer’s was Jeffrey Maier, the Wesleyan baseball standout and Yankee fan best known for controversially snagging a home run ball away from an opposing outfielder during a playoff game in 1997) and spent a fortnight learning how to hit, field, throw, and run the bases like a professional. They also learned how to hang out.
“The best part of camp was hanging out with Munson,
Piniella, Dent, Rivers, Reggie,” and here he means the actors who played the former Yankee greats. “And this is where growing up around ski racing really helped me. There’s a similar
mentality among ski racers and ballplayers. You work really hard, but there’s also a lot of down time, a good social life.”
During this time, camaraderie among the actors actually got a little too good, at least where it concerned Daniel Sunjata, the actor playing Reggie Jackson. Because a good portion of the narrative tension of the story revolves around Jackson’s signing with the Yankees and his inability to get along with his teammates and manager, the producers decided that once filming began, Sunjata would be housed in a different hotel than the other actors. So every night, while Cranmer hung out and played cards with the actors who portrayed Munson and Piniella (Nettles’s best friends on the team), Sunjata was left to stew in his hotel room. “One night he asked us if he could come over and play,” Cranmer recalls. “We said, no. That may sound harsh—I love Daniel as an actor and a person—but for that role, it was essential.”
Cranmer laughs. “We were in ‘Page Six’ (the New York Post’s notorious gossip column) two or three times about having a tumultuous set. It was the ultimate in life imitating art imitating life. But that’s what it was like to be on the Yankees then. So that turmoil served us well.”
It ultimately served the Yankees well, as well. The Bronx Bombers won the World Series that year. And the next year, too—a fact that’s not lost on Cranmer, who wouldn’t mind returning for a sequel. “We’re all aware that another dramatic season followed, and most of us were on that team.
“Putting on the uniform, walking around in the spikes, running out of the dugout onto a ball field. There’s nothing better.”