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Like SILVERADO, I vividly remember seeing the LP for this film in the shops - before seeing the film - but passing on it due to a lack of knowledge about the composer or the music at the time.
Also like SILVERADO, about 5 minutes into watching the film in the cinema, my body was tingling as I was anticipating leaving the cinema and heading straight to the record shop to grab a copy and fall in love!
I remember the early scene where the Whammer Strikes Out (by the side of a train) and just thinking WTF is going on here!! My ears were wiggin' out.
Then Knock The Cover Off The Ball!!! Jeez Louise!!
By the end sequence, with the slow-mo, the fireworks and that glorious music...tears rolling down my cheeks (it was the music your honour, I swear)..I WAS SOLD FOR LIFE!
And what a finely balanced album. The orchestral fireworks nicely contrasted by the soft and source cues. Plus a Chariots Of Fire-style synth rendition of the main theme.
Every time my missus hears the End Title, she says 'that sounds like Cocoon' (she's quite partial to some Horner) and I have to counter with 'NO, Cocoon sounds like The Natural' 
Great film! Great score! Deserved an Oscar but when have THEY ever got it right (okay, a few times, but their 'pahs' outnumber their 'wahs'). Did it even get nominated?
Anyway. I wanna hear your love for this score (and film).
Shout It Out!
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Nominated, but lost to A Passage To India.
The movie was already good enough, but the score elevates it to legendary status. Just perfect music.
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Based on Bernard Malamud's first novel, an ambitious attempt to compare a ballplayer's life and his team's (the New York Knights) quest for the pennant to the Arthurian quest for the Holy Grail ("Wonder Boy" = Excalibur), the movie differs from the novel mainly in its drastically different ending. In the original novel, Hobbs "pays for his sins" with his life -- the reopening of the old wound he suffered in his youth at the hands of the creepy obsessed-fan character played by Barbara Hershey actually kills him shortly after the climactic game at the end.
Malamud always said he liked the movie's ending. He understood and appreciated the different needs of the different media, and perhaps also appreciated the film's great success. I've always hoped for more great films from Levinson. This early effort seemed to show such great promise. "Avalon" came close, but I think he owes us at least one more deeply personal masterpiece.
Newman's score is one of the film's great junctures, where the folksy "Americana" of the film's style effectively meets and combines with the original novel's thunderously supernatural/mythological ambitions. Newman eventually got his Oscar, but he really earned it in '84, with "The Natural" IMHO.
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One of my all-time-favorites as well. Perfecto.
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For some strange reason this is listed in the iTunes store as a "Kids" movie. 
