Red Sox prospect's family shares connection to Redford's iconic baseball movie

When you ask baseball fans what their favorite baseball movie is the popular answers are “The Sandlot”, “Bull Durham”, “Field of Dreams”, or even “Moneyball.” But every now and then someone will claim the movie “The Natural” as their favorite piece of Baseball cinema. One of those people is Paul Brannon. Paul is the father of Sea Dogs catcher/infielder Brooks Brannon.

The two of them have a very special connection to the 1984 film “The Natural” starring Robert Redford. In the film, Redford plays Roy Hobbs, a former teenage pitching prodigy that has his dreams of a professional career turned upside down after he was shot by a woman on his way to a tryout in Chicago. Fast forward 15 years later and Hobbs is now big-time power hitter armed with a very special bat he named “Wonderboy.”

The wooden bat featured a lightning bolt with the name of the bat out to the side. Legend has it that Hobbs carved the bat himself from a tree that had been struck by lightning. It has been estimated that Hobbs cranked around 45 homers in the movie, and while Brooks or Paul never put up 45 homers in a season, they still were able to show off the power that each of them possess.

The story of the connection they share to the movie starts back in 1989. Paul Brannon had just launched his 20^th home run of the season to shatter the single-season home run record in the state of North Carolina. Before that season had started, however, Paul’s father had given him a very special gift: a golden chain lightning bolt necklace with the lightning bolt in the shape of the design on Hobbs’ bat, “Wonderboy.” During that season in 1989, on top of smashing the home run record, Paul also led Kings Mountain High School to their first N.C. High School Athletic Association State Title. Lightning had struck once with a once-in-a-lifetime moment for the Brannon family…or so they thought.

33 years later, lightning struck again for the Brannon family. Right before his senior season, Brooks’s grandfather gave him the same golden chain lightning bolt necklace with the same details as his father’s. That season for Randleman High School, Brooks blasted 20 home runs to tie his father’s record. In addition, he also led Randleman High School to back-to-back state titles.

“It was just awesome. I think it’s pretty dadgum cool,” Brannon exclaimed excitedly. “His favorite movie was the natural, so whenever my grandpa gave him a necklace that was like that, he broke the home run record in the state of North Carolina when he hit 20 home runs, and then my grandpa gifted me one and I tied the record with 20 my senior year…ever since then I have always worn it.”

When a record of that caliber is set and can withstand the tests of time, that is something truly special and normally, a record holder doesn’t wish to see it be broken or tied, but Brooks’s father couldn’t be happier to share the record with his own son.

“As a dad, if anyone was going to break a record, why wouldn’t you want it to be your son?” Paul Brannon said over a zoom interview with High School OT Sports reporter Kyle Morton back in 2022. “A lot of people told me ah you wanted him to tie it, well every time he hit one in the air this weekend…I was standing up, hoping it would go out of the park.”

Even though Brooks didn’t break the record, he thinks that the tie is more meaningful in the long run.

“We joked that it was my grandma making the wind blow to keep me from breaking it so that we could be tied,” Brannon explained. “But I think it’s almost cooler to tie it, to know that both of our names are side by side in the record books.”

Brannon spent the majority of the 2024 season off the field, rehabbing from knee surgery, but has come back with a vengeance in 2025. The power-hitting backstop hit .270 in 55 games with High-A Greenville while adding eight doubles, two triples, and five home runs along with 31 RBI before being promoted to Double-A Portland back on June 23. Now all he wants to do is to help the Sea Dogs thrive.