At a distance, the game of baseball doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. The rules and dimensions of the diamond seem peculiar and arbitrary, and describing it to a person with no knowledge of how the game is played is surprisingly difficult. And yet as America’s Pastime we know it to be a game of symmetry. It’s equal parts driven by science and mathematics as it is sheer magic.
In the documentary “Fastball,” director Jonathan Hock (known for several ESPN “30 for 30” docs) melds those two worlds, those two schools of thought, into a movie focused on one particular pitch and the way in which it has changed the game.
Geeks from MIT talk alongside baseball greats, both Hall of Famers and present day All-Stars. The film dives into the detailed mechanics that show how the human eye registers a tiny object moving at 100 mph, but also allows for some baseball history and nostalgia to seep in courtesy of narration by Kevin Costner. “Fastball” is nerdy no matter how much spin you put on it.
The reason to make a documentary about the fastball is because there’s actually a few unanswered mysteries regarding it, something that would seem unheard of today in a world of Moneyball analytics. The first question: why has no one been able to hurl a pitch significantly faster than 100 mph? Jesse Owens smashed world records in the Olympics in the ‘40s, but now kids in high school can run his times. In baseball, balls have been batted farther and harder, and yet Walter Johnson and Bob Feller back in the day were throwing heat similar to some of the top pitchers of today. Why hasn’t this one skill progressed due to human evolution?
Second, who really is the fastest? The movie profiles several pitching legends, including Johnson, Feller, Nolan Ryan, Sandy Kofax and current Cubs phenom Aroldis Chapman. But in exploring their histories, including some amusing looks at contraptions designed to test Feller’s speed, it shows that it’s hard to pinpoint who really clocked the fastest one. Tools for measurement have changed, and just as you can’t know who would win a fight between Ali and Floyd Mayweather, history has swallowed up similar arguments in baseball.
“Fastball” is at its best when it steps away from the history lessons that have become familiar lore for a lot of obsessive fans and instead examines why the fastball is so impossibly hard to hit. One physicist draws a few lines on a chalk board explaining why a ball moving so quickly appears to rise as it’s coming toward you, and he successfully makes Bryce Harper look ridiculous for discounting the science.
A few interesting questions still go unanswered here: what would it mean to get hit by a pitch moving that quickly, or what does throwing at such high speeds do to the body such that so many pitchers have had season or career ending Tommy John surgeries? But “Fastball” is a pleasant nostalgia trip and often educational film that doesn’t need the medical twist to be substantive.
3 stars