Fear Strikes Out (Paramount) rolls Frank Merriwell and Sigmund Freud into a ball and then lines it out for a solid hit. The film is based on the widely read autobiography of Jim Piersall. the fleet-footed outfielder of the Boston Red Sox, who suffered an emotional collapse five years ago which almost ended his career before it began. Unlikely as it may look from the bleachers, Piersall suffered from what has been called the Laius complex.* Piersall's father (Karl Malden), according to the script, was a wild ball hawk whose wings were clipped by family responsibilities, and who determined to live out his own lost life in the person of his son (Anthony Perkins). In psychological effect, the father murdered the son, and reanimated the boy's body with his own soul, in particular with his own pathological appetite for acclaim.
Almost before little Jim learned to walk, father taught him to play ball. Every day after school he made the boy run. slide, throw, catch until his hands hung dead on his wrists. "We're going for the big leagues, boy," he would mutter fiercely, and the child would nod fiercely in agreement. At 17 Jim was a spectacular outfielder whose all-round talents won the state championship for his high-school team; but his father was never satisfied. "How'd I do, dad?" Jim asked anxiously after playing a prodigious game. And father implacably replied, "Not bad, son. But you weren't on your toes all the time, and you know it." Jim nodded dully, and the minute his father was not looking he gobbled a fistful of aspirin. Funny how those headaches would come on all of a sudden.
Jim never told anyone about his headaches, not even when they became chronic—a round-the-clock ring of obsessive fathers hurling baseball, baseball, baseball at his head. He certainly did not dare to tell his father. The only time Jim ever really interfered with father's ambitions—he sprained an ankle in a skating fall—the old man had a heart attack. After that, since mother Piersall was an invalid too, Jim was the sole support of his family; and as the pressure to make good got stronger, the headaches got worse.
At 17 Jim was signed by the Red Sox, farmed out to Scranton. He was tremendous as a rookie, batting third in the league. "Well," said father Piersall, "that isn't first." So next year, stoked with aspirin and desperation, Jim burned up the base lines and copped the batting title. At 21 he was called up to the Red Sox. It was the big test. Could he pass it? The dread of failing—failing to live up to his father's demands—threw him into a manic panic. One day in midseason, as the picture tells the story, Jim Piersall went berserk on the ball field and woke up in a straitjacket.
From there out the movie's scenes explain, without too much professional slang and yet without talking down to the cheap seats, how Jim came to see the irony of the words he once hurled in anger at his psychiatrist (Adam Williams): "Listen! If it hadn't been for [my father] standing behind me and pushing me and driving me, I wouldn't be where I am today!"