The late-night/early-morning spot for Cubs fans asks if Rule 5 pick Gage Workman makes the Opening Day roster.
It’s Monday evening here at BCB After Dark: the coolest club for night owls, early risers, new parents and Cubs fans abroad. Please come on in. We’ve been expecting you. There’s no cover charge this evening. We still have a few tables available. Bring your own beverage.
BCB After Dark is the place for you to talk baseball, music, movies, or anything else you need to get off your chest, as long as it is within the rules of the site. The late-nighters are encouraged to get the party started, but everyone else is invited to join in as you wake up the next morning and into the afternoon.
Last week, I asked which new Cubs acquisition would have the biggest impact in 2025, other than Kyle Tucker or Ryan Pressley? The vote wasn’t close as 38 percent of you picked starter Matthew Boyd. Carson Kelly was in second with 22 percent and Justin Turner was third with 16 percent.
Now it’s time for the music and the movies. Those of you who skip that can do so now. You won’t hurt my feelings.
Tonight we have a performance from the Brandon Sanders Quintet from 2019. Sanders is a great story as he’s someone who has been a professional social worker for decades and who just played jazz drums on the side until he got his big break and his first recording contract at age 52. Here he’s with Giveton Gelin on trumpet, Erena Terakubo on alto sax, Keith Brown on piano and David Wong on bass.
Right after we finished our Alfred Hitchcock tournament here, I dove into Body Double (1984), director Brian De Palma’s attempt to make an X-rated (NC-17 in today’s parlance) Hitchcock thriller. The film borrows heavily from Rear Window and Vertigo and even casts Tippi Hedren’s daughter (Melanie Griffith) as the female lead. Part-homage, part-satire (of both Hitchcock and Hollywood), Body Double doesn’t quite live up to the heights of those two classics. It does, however, mostly work on its own merit, providing an erotic suspense thriller that’s a maybe a step or two above similar films made in that era.
Craig Wasson plays Jake, a down-on-his-luck actor who got fired from a B-movie vampire flick because of his extreme . . (drumroll) claustrophobia. You see, instead of vertigo, De Palma’s hero has claustrophobia. Totally different. Anyway, Jake is also looking for a new place to live because he caught his girlfriend cheating on him and well, it was her apartment. Gregg Henry plays Sam, who is an actor leaving town for a job with a repertory company in Seattle and he needs someone to move in to the place he’s subletting while the owner is in Europe. The place just happens to be the Chemosphere House in Los Angeles, which is a really cool piece of modernist architecture. It also evokes Phillip Vandamme’s fictional house by Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest.
The Hitchcock parallels continue from there. Sam has a telescope set up in the house to look down at the other houses in the Hollywood Hills and shows him that at exactly the same time each night, a woman (Deborah Shelton) does a nude, erotic dance in the window that he can watch in the telescope. Like James Stewart in Rear Window, Jake gets obsessed with watching this woman in the window. (Although Miss Torso never danced naked while touching herself.) In a scene straight out of Vertigo, Jake ends up following the woman, whose name is Gloria, around Los Angeles. While at the beach, Gloria gets her purse snatched. Jake tries to play the hero and runs after the thief, but is overcome with his claustrophobia when the purse snatcher runs into a tunnel. And yes, De Palma frames the opening to the tunnel in exactly the same manner Hitchcock framed the steps at the mission in Vertigo as Jimmy Stewart looks down.
That night, instead of seeing an erotic dance in his telescope, Jake sees a murder. So again, just like in Rear Window. In th, Jake becomes convinced that a porn star named Holly Body (Griffith) is the key to solving the murder. That carries Jake into the world of porn.
Oh, and Frankie Goes to Hollywood does a music video for “Relax” on a porn set in the middle of the film. Hitchcock never did that.
There are a lot of good twists and turns in Body Double that keep the suspense going. You may figure out the culprit long before Jake does, but the how kept me guessing at least.
So you’ve got voyeurism from Rear Window and a phobia from Vertigo. As you can probably tell from the title of Body Double, there’s a running theme of duplication that’s also borrowed from Vertigo. Gloria and Holly may not be played by the same actress like Madeleine and Judy in Vertigo, but there is a similar parallelism in their stories.
Another parallelism in Body Double is the connection between the world of legitimate Hollywood filmmaking and that of the porn industry. De Palma is certainly taking his shots at the studios in Body Double, holding up the porn world as a mirror to the filmmaking world that De Palma is in. De Palma even originally wanted a real porn actress to play Holly, but Columbia Pictures rejected that. There’s only so far the studios are willing to put up with parodying themselves.
Body Double does highlight one issue that I pointed out with Hitchcock films like Rear Window and Vertigo, and that was the need for stars. Jimmy Stewart’s character in both those films does some incredibly morally-objectionable things, but because he’s Jimmy Stewart, the audience has a natural inclination to let it slide because he’s a good guy. Craig Wasson, to say the least, does not have that kind of screen credit. Nevertheless, he’s solid as playing the Hitchcockian “everyman” and I don’t think the part of a struggling, down-on-his-luck actor was much of a stretch for Wasson. And at least when he rises to the occasion later in the film, you can at least root for Jake.
Griffith wasn’t yet the A-list star that she would become later in the eighties and the early nineties. In fact, this film was one of the movies that started her on that path. (Then The Bonfire of the Vanities and Shining Through happened and it all came crashing down.) But there wasn’t a need for a likeable star to play Holly because other than her profession, Holly is a likeable and admirable person. She also has that winning combination of “tough-as-nails” and “vulnerable” that would make Griffith so good in Something Wild and Working Girl. And Jake and Holly make an unlikely couple as Jake tries to solve a murder.
Erotic thrillers were a big thing in the eighties and obviously, the subject matter means that Body Double isn’t a film for everyone. At times, you’ll also shake your head at the shamelessness that De Palma borrows from Hitchcock. (You may say “theft,” but I say “homage.”) It’s not perfect and there are things to criticize, but overall De Palma did a pretty good job in taking the Hitchcockian genre into the 1980s.
Here’s Siskel and Ebert reviewing the film. Roger liked it. Gene didn’t. I think Gene is just being a prude. The video quality is poor here, but many you out there are probably nostalgic for the days of watching Siskel and Ebert every week. I am.
Welcome back to everyone who skips the music and movies.
One of the bigger stories this Spring Training is infielder Gage Workman, a Rule 5 pick from Detroit. It’s very early is Spring Training, but Workman has looked good in the early going, today’s 0 for 4 with two strikeouts notwithstanding. He showed good opposite-field power with this home run against the Dodgers [Video]
And he showed some good defense at third base on this slow bouncer. [Video]
The Cubs took Workman in the Rule 5 draft because of his left-handed power and defense at short and third. The downsides on Workman is that he’s never played about Double-A, he can’t hit left-handers and he strikes out a ton. Although it should be said on those last two points, much of that was when he was switch hitting and trying to hit left-handers as a right-handed batter. He gave up switch-hitting midway through the 2023 season and since then, he’s struck out less and hit a little better against left-handed pitching. To be clear, he still strikes out too much and he still struggles against southpaws, but it’s not as bad as it was when he was switch-hitting.
As a Rule 5 pick, Workman has to stay in the majors all season or be returned to the Tigers. He can spend half the season on the injured list and a lot of Rule 5 picks are often discovered to have season-ending injuries around mid-season, but Workman does have to stay on the active roster for at least 81 games. Then they could send him down to Iowa in 2026.
There have been suggestions that the Cubs offer the Tigers something in trade for Workman so that they can keep him and send him down to the minors. That might be possible, but there are two problems with that. First, before the Tigers could do that, every other team would have to pass on him. Any other team could claim Workman, subject to the same Rule 5 roster rules that apply to the Cubs. If Workman looked good enough that the Cubs wanted to keep him, then other teams might want him too. Often such moves are done right at the end of Spring Training when most teams’ 40-man rosters are set, but there is still the possibility that some other team claims him.
The other issue is that the Tigers have no incentive to trade Workman back to the Cubs. The Cubs would have to make it worth the Tigers while to trade him to the Cubs and the Cubs would have to offer a prospect of better value to Workman to complete the deal.
The final spot on the roster could come down to Workman versus Vidal Bruján. Bruján has the advantage of having major-league experience and the ability to play the outfield, including center. However, Bruján is also out of minor-league options so he also has to stay on the major league roster or be designated for assignment. The difference there is that there is no limit for the amount of time Bruján can spend on the IL. However, Bruján isn’t someone who needs more time to develop in the minor leagues like Workman might. The Cubs got him to be a utility player this year, not to develop for 2026 and beyond.
It’s probably too early to ask whether Workman or Bruján should make the Opening Day roster. That might be a better question in a few weeks and I may ask it then. But tonight I’m just asking for your predictions. Based on what you’ve seen and read of Workman so far, do you think he’s staying with the Cubs?
For our purposes here, we’re considering March 27 in Arizona to be Opening Day. The Cubs will have an expanded roster for their trip to Japan, so they probably won’t have to make a final decision on Workman for that trip. They’ll be able to take him along and send him back to the Tigers later if they want.
I’ll also give you the option of voting for “The Tigers will trade Workman to the Cubs and he’ll go down to Iowa,” even if I think that option is unlikely. It’s not impossible, and maybe you think it’s more likely than I think it is.
Of course, there’s always the option that Workman makes the Opening Day roster and he gets returned to the Tigers later on. But we’re not going to consider that tonight. If Workman is on the team against the D-Backs on the 27th, the Cubs intend to at least try to keep him for the entire season.
Thank you for stopping by this evening. We’re always glad to see a friendly face. Get home safely. Stay warm out there. Recycle any cans and bottles. Tip your waitstaff. And join us again tomorrow for more BCB After Dark.