When values seemed a little more clear-cut

A special alchemy seems to take place when actor Matthew Modine and director John Kent Harrison team for a nostalgic project.

In 1997, the pair worked together on a CBS movie called “What the Deaf Man Heard,” and that sweetly goofy Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation became the highest-rated movie of the 1997-98 season.

Fans of “Deaf Man” are likely to cheer the latest Modine-Harrison collaboration, “The Winning Season,” an uplifting baseball fantasy premiering Sunday on TNT.

“It’s the kind of relationship I’ve been hoping to have my whole career,” Modine says of Harrison. “Like James Stewart in the old [Frank] Capra movies, or certainly Robert De Niro with [Martin] Scorsese. Tom Hanks seems to have the same kind of relationship with Robert Zemeckis, who did both ‘Forrest Gump’ and ‘Cast Away.’

“You just hope and pray that you’ll get joined at the hip to someone as talented as John is, and become kind of their muse -- oh, man, that sounds horrible, doesn’t it? ‘Muse.’ ” Modine laughs.

Adapted from Dan Gutman’s popular children’s novel “Honus & Me: A Baseball Card Adventure,” the cable movie stars Modine as baseball legend Honus Wagner and Kristin Davis (“Sex and the City”) as the upper-crust young woman who loves him. Their romance plays out against the backdrop of the 1909 World Series.

The story opens in the present day, as 12-year-old Joe Stoshack (Mark Rendell) finds an extremely rare Honus Wagner baseball card while cleaning out an elderly neighbor’s garage. Joe knows the card could put an end to his family’s financial woes, but his elderly neighbor could use the money just as much.

Fretting over his moral dilemma, Joe is startled to find himself thrust back in time. He lands in 1909 as a young man (now played by Shawn Hatosy), where he is befriended by the Flying Dutchman, as Wagner is known, and his fiancee, Mandy. The three have a profound effect on one another’s lives, particularly as Honus teaches Joe that sometimes telling right from wrong isn’t all that complicated.

Modine admits that he found it refreshing to revisit a world in which Americans seemed to have a more solid sense of identity and responsibility.

“If you go back and read literature from that period, it wasn’t this Freudian world where everyone thinks about and analyzes everything, usually to justify what they did or blame someone else,” Modine says.

“I would rather live in that world of accountability. I don’t like our modern world of deception and lies and half-truths, and ‘it’s not my fault,’ especially not when you’re a grown-up. You have to put that stuff to the side and say, ‘Yeah. I made a mistake.’ ”

When “The Winning Season” producers came to Modine, he already was sold on doing a baseball movie, mainly because he regrets having turned down similar projects earlier in his career.

“When I made ‘Baby, It’s You’ for John Sayles, he wanted me to do ‘Eight Men Out’ [1988] for him as well, but I only wanted to play ‘Shoeless Joe,’ ” Modine recalls. “The other characters didn’t interest me, so I passed. And years later, I became friends with D.B. Sweeney while working on ‘Memphis Belle,’ and he told me about how much fun they all had had making ‘Eight Men Out.’ Man, I was kicking myself, because I let my ego get in the way of having a great time.

“I passed on a couple of other baseball movies -- I don’t want to tell you the titles -- but when this one came along, it was so good, how could I say no?”

Harrison gives his star high marks for the way he helped bring his TV teammates -- many of them professional athletes -- into the spirit of the games re-created here. An added challenge was the “green screen” computer-generated effects that played a large part in those scenes.

“We had to re-create three World Series games in two stadiums that don’t exist,” Harrison points out. “That’s a challenge. I didn’t want people to say, ‘Wow, look at those visual effects of the stadiums.’ I don’t want them to notice the stadiums. They’re just part of the storytelling.

“Fortunately, Matthew was fantastic at really bringing the team together. They rehearsed, practiced and played ball every day.”

Off the field, the TV movie had to rely on the screenwriter’s imagination to keep the plot moving, even apart from the obvious fantasy elements surrounding the fiction- al character of Joe Stoshack.

“I believe Kristin’s character was mostly fabricated, because we just don’t know that much about Honus Wagner’s private life. If you can find out anything, you’ll have had better luck than I did, and I really tried,” Modine says. “There was no dirt on him at all, which I think is why he is so loved today. He was just a good, good guy. Whether he was playing for you or against you, people loved him.”

John Crook writes for Tribune Media Services.

“The Winning Season” will be shown on TNT from 8 to 10 p.m. Sunday. The network has rated the movie TV-PG, L (may not be suitable for young children, with an advisory for coarse language).

Cover photograph by Gregory Heisler.