Fascinating ‘Fastball’ to Kick Off Film Festival

Maybe it’s appropriate that the 10th Annual Baseball Film Festival begins with a Fastball. In this case, however, instead of a 100 mph heater it’s an 87-minute documentary on the sport’s most revered and compelling pitch.

This year’s Festival, which runs from Sept. 25-27, features 12 films in all, ranging in subject matter from the recent travails of New York Mets pitching star Matt Harvey to the earthquake interrupted 1989 World Series to the fascinating life of former big league catcher Moe Berg. But the honor of the Opening Night film belongs to the Kevin Costner-narrated Fastball, which explores the history of the national pastime’s foundational pitch and determines, once and for all, who threw the fastest pitch of all time.

“I’m really excited about having Fastball at this year’s Baseball Film Festival. We showed The Lost Son of Havana there in 2009 and it was great,” said Jonathan Hock, the writer and director of Fastball, during a recent telephone interview. “You get very few opportunities to show your film to a perfect audience, so this is a really great thing for a filmmaker to be able to share a film with an audience that will really get everything that you tried to put into it.”

Fastball, which is scheduled for a 7 p.m. start inside the Bullpen Theater on Sept. 25, not only features the perspective of such legendary Hall of Fame flamethrowers as Nolan Ryan, Bob Gibson and Goose Gossage, along with current practitioners Justin Verlander, Aroldis Chapman, Craig Kimbrel and David Price, but also highlights the thoughts from a panel of hitters that includes George Brett, Al Kaline, Joe Morgan, Johnny Bench and the late Tony Gwynn. Along the way, you also hear from Derek Jeter, Andrew McCutchen, Bryce Harper, Brandon Phillips and Steve Dalkowski.

Fastball is based on the original idea of Thomas Tull, the head of Legendary Pictures, a board member of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum and one of the film’s producers.

“Thomas Tull called me and I went out to meet him in Los Angeles and we just started talking about baseball and it took just a couple of minutes to realize that we really had a very powerful connection over the game. So I knew this was a guy I wanted to make a film with about baseball,” Hock said. “And what he said was he felt this was a golden age of the fastball and what’s really exciting for him is the comparing of eras. He said we’ll get professors from Carnegie Mellon and we’re going to figure it out and say who threw the fastest of all time.”

Today’s modern recording devices report Cincinnati pitcher Aroldis Chapman’s fastball to Tony Gwynn, Jr. in the eighth inning of a Sept. 25, 2010, game between the Reds and Padres registered 105.1 mph, the highest ever. But over the years such stalwart figures as Walter Johnson, Bob Feller and Ryan have also staked a claim as the sport’s fastest.

“But beyond that we’ll figure out a way to use the fastball as a point of entry to tell the story of the magic of baseball,” Hock said. “That was the very first thing Thomas said to me when he asked me to do the film, that he wanted it to be the film that parents and children take out to watch every spring to get fired up for the season, to rekindle those fires for the game. He really always wanted this to be a film that spoke to people who love the game like he does.”

Besides a sneak preview screening during the 2015 Hall of Fame Induction Weekend and appearing at a few other festivals around the country, Fastball’s appearance at this year’s Baseball Film Festival will be one its earliest public viewings. A national release is tentatively scheduled for Spring 2016.

Hock, a nine-time Emmy Award-winning producer, director, writer and editor, has directed multiple award-winning documentaries for ESPN's “30 for 30” series, including The Best That Never Was (2010), Unguarded (2011), Survive and Advance (2013) and Of Miracles and Men (2015).

“I think the key to any great sports film is finding the humanity that exists in the ballplayers and use that to tell their story. You don’t need to do a game recap,” Hock said. “It’s about the thing that is very hard to define without seeing it play out, which is the struggle between two humans at their limit.

“And the thing that separates baseball from all the other sports is the idea of limits. The geometry of baseball is essentially limitless and every other game is confined,” he added. “As one of the scientists from Carnegie Mellon describes, the fastest a human being can throw against the fastest a human being can react to it, at 60 feet 6 inches, baseball pits these two people performing at the very edge of human potential in a limitless geometry. So anything is possible at any given moment in baseball. That’s why when a guy takes the mound and he’s got that lightning in his arm it’s unlike anything that any other sport has. It’s the infinite matched with the ultimate human performance that gives baseball what no other sport can match.”