Long Gone is a 1987 baseball film by HBO that is based on Paul Hemphill's 1979 book of the same name. The television film was directed by Martin Davidson and starred William Petersen, Virginia Madsen, and Dermot Mulroney. Historic McKechnie Field, located in Bradenton, Florida, was the location for many of the film's scenes. Outside North America, the film was released as Stogies. Plot The Tampico Stogies are a last-place baseball team based in Tampico, Florida. The team competes in the lowest-level (Class D) professional Gulf Coast league during the summer of 1957. The team is unaffiliated with a major league franchise; so, it must sign and pay all of its own players without any financial support outside of the team's owners. The Stogies are owned by a pair of 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 Petersen), a hard-drinking, hard-playing, and hard-loving man's man of an indeterminate age nearing 40. Signed out of high school by the St. Louis Cardinals, Cantrell was a onetime rookie standout in the organization, coming up in the same group as Stan Musial, but he never made it to the big leagues because of a war injury he sustained in World War II during the Battle of Guadalcanal. At 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), botching the lyrics of the Star-Spangled Banner, but still wowing the crowd in her skimpy skin-tight outfit. What Cantrell initially intends to be a one-night stand soon develops into a semi-serious relationship. Cantrell signs a slick-fielding but light-hitting second baseman named Jamie Weeks (Dermot Mulroney), fresh out of high school. Weeks soon falls for a virginal and church-going local girl, Esther Wrenn (Katy Boyer), who is looking to escape Tampico. Cantrell also signs a power-hitting, strong-armed catcher, Joe Brown (Larry Riley), who is African American. Because this is the Deep South during the 1950s, to keep local bigots and Ku Klux Klan off his back, Cantrell lies that Brown is a Venezuelan named José Luis Brown who can't speak any English. With the addition of these new players, the Stogies go on a red-hot