- published: 14 Feb 2012
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Long Gone is a 1987 baseball film by HBO based on Paul Hemphill's 1979 book of the same name. The made-for-television film was directed by Martin Davidson and starred William Petersen, Virginia Madsen and Dermot Mulroney. Outside North America, the movie was known as and titled, Stogies.
The Tampico Stogies are a last-placed baseball team based in Tampico, Florida. The team competes in the lowest-level (Class D), but professional Gulf Coast league, during the summer of 1957. It is unclear if the team is affiliated with a major league franchise. The Stogies are owned by corrupt and scheming local Tampico businessmen, Hale Buchman (Henry Gibson) and his son, Hale Buchman Jr. (Teller). They refer to themselves as sports moguls, despite the team being heavily mortgaged.
Their star player and manager is an aging Cecil 'Stud' Cantrell (William Peterson), who is a typical hard drinking, hard playing and hard loving man’s man. Signed out of High School by the St Louis Cardinals, Cantrell was a onetime rookie standout in the organization, but he never made it to the big league because of a war injury he sustained in World War II during the Battle of Guadalcanal. At the beginning of a game against the Crestview Cats in Alabama, Cantrell meets a beautiful young woman just voted Miss Strawberry Blossom of 1957, Dixie Lee Boxx (Virginia Madsen). What Cantrell initially intends to be a one night stand with her, soon develops into a semi-serious relationship.