Was Jake Taylor a Terrible Person?

April 7th marks the anniversary of the release of my favorite baseball movie, Major League.  I watch it a few times a year and I love it.  And trust me when I tell you, what I am about to write doesn’t make me love the movie any less.  It simply casts Jake Taylor in a different light.  I’m still rooting for them to win and I know you will continue to as well, but we need to examine if Jake is a terrible person.

We’re gonna roll right past the fact that he felt the need to berate Dorn about missing grounders, but not about his infidelities.  And we’re gonna forget that when the pitcher he’s mentoring (who happens to be his roommate and also happens to be an ex-convict) is super depressed and is going out drinking, Jake didn’t feel the need to keep an eye on that.  We’ll chalk that up to bad decision making.  What I want to focus on is the Lynn situation.

Restaurant Encounter

While out with two of his teammates, Jake notices his girlfriend from a few years back at another table having dinner with a person who she is pretty obviously in a relationship with.  He says “That’s my wife” which leads to some funny comments from both Willie and Rick.  He then decides to go with the old “the call is coming from inside the house” trick, which women love.  All in order to try to get her phone number.  The scene is great and it’s a comedy, so you go with it.  But imagine this in a real life situation.  You’re at a dinner with people from work.  You’ve worked with a guy for 2-3 months and he’s never mentioned a wife or wore a wedding ring.  Then he looks over and claims a woman is his wife, backtracks and says, well we used to date years ago.  After that he decides he’s going to play a prank on her and demands her phone number.  I’m pretty sure you’d never hang out with that psychopath again.

Library Encounter

So apparently, he got a fake number in the previous encounter.  Therefore he did what any reasonable person would do in this situation, he showed up at her job to confront her about it.  There is nothing that says I am a stable person that just wants to be your friend like showing up at the other person’s job and getting into an argument with them.  Also during this argument, there is a laundry list of shit that lays out why Jake was such a horrible boyfriend.

The Books

One of the things he does to get back into Lynn’s good graces is he reads the books that he promised for years he would.  But does he?  Does he really?  I’m pretty sure they show him with comic book versions of these books.  This is George Costanza level.  If you did that in high school, you’d fail your ass off.

Tom’s Place

This scene is just weird in general.  I mean, Jake goes from street level directly into this dude’s apartment without so much as even a knock.  I know Cleveland has almost 0 crime, but this seems like a major security flaw of Tom’s housing.  Also, this is right after Lynn left work and yet there are a bunch of well dressed people drinking in her living room.  Not to mention, there are 3 couples there and one couple is much older and there is no explanation of that.  But all that aside, after all the previous stuff above, Jake decided the right move was to follow Lynn home after work.  This is restraining order style stuff.  Then he gives that monologue about the girl he had picked out, which ends with him basically saying “Tom, I’d really love to get back to boning your fiance”.  A class move indeed.

Lynn’s Place

Jake sees Lynn at a game, so he knows that he has to race out of the park and follow her home, again.  But there is a problem, his car is on the other side of the park.  He runs up and asks the security guard for a car.  Now, this seems kind of crazy on the surface, but the security guard doesn’t even flinch.  Maybe it’s just bad acting, but it seems to me like Jake has made this request before and the guard reacts accordingly.  Then he tells Jake to take the bullpen cart.  How many times has Jake been cruising around Cleveland in the bullpen cart.  Actually, I think this is awesome, but I digress.  So now he follows Lynn home and once again, he just walks into the house.  But this time, he turns a corner and they hook up.

In the end, Lynn shows up at the play-in game and has no wedding ring on.  This leads me to this conclusion: Lynn is actually the terrible person and Jake is simply a master tactician who not only knew to bunt in the ninth or knew that Ricky Vaughn could strike out Clu Haywood with 3 straight fastballs, but he also knew that all the ridiculous shit above was the way to Lynn’s heart.

-Chorizy-E