When I first got For Love of the Game in the mail, I played the first and last cues before going out for dinner. I was absolutely blown away. The former is a beautiful, if a little low-key, piece of Americana; and the last, a rapturous choral-and-orchestral piece that sounds like it could come from a biblical epic. It's an amazing cue, easily the best Basil Poledouris has written for years and years.

However, when I got back from dinner, I got time to listen to the rest of the score. Oh dear. There's nothing wrong with it in any way - in fact, it's really quite pleasant - but unfortunately, it all follows all the usual "low-key sentimental drama" clichés and offers absolutely nothing new at all.

Perhaps it's a baseball thing. Here in Britain, the only people who play baseball are the ones who are too fat and slow to play football or rugby at school, and even then it's not called baseball, but rounders. We all find it amusing that there is a "world series" for baseball when only one country actually plays it competitively! But maybe that's for another forum.

Poledouris is a very talented composer who rarely gets the chance to shine and show what he can really do because of the films he scores; one would have thought that For Love of the Game would offer him an ideal chance to "do a Field of Dreams", but much though he seems to be trying to sound like Rudy much of the time, it just doesn't have the individual flair of either of those two scores to allow it to attain the same status.

The addition of guitars gives the score a certain edge, though it has to be said that something like "Tuttle Knockdown" (???) sounds more like Trevor Rabin than Basil Poledouris. The best cues are definitely the ones where the orchestra swells, but unfortunately this happens all too infrequently. The disc's only 33 minutes long, and maybe 25% of this is classic stuff that makes me recommend it; but the other 75% can be heard (sometimes in better form) in countless other places. Some of this stuff is really lovely and it makes for very pleasant listening; it's just not exactly earth-shattering (apart from the last cue).

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