Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 957: The Man Who Makes Pitch (Almost!) Perfect

Episode Date: September 23, 2016

Ben and Sam talk to Mike Fisher, the baseball coordinator of Moneyball and the new Fox series Pitch, about how he makes baseball look realistic on screen (and what he might have missed).

All the small things, true care, truth brings. I'll take one lift, your ride, best trip. Always, I know, you'll be at my show. Watching, waiting, commiserating. Hello and welcome to episode 957 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, presented by our Patreon supporters and the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Joined, this is the last time I guess I'll get to say this, by Sam Miller of Baseball Perspectives.

Hello, Sam. Hello. Do you normally say that I'm at Baseball Prospectus? Yes. Yes, I do. All right. Well, yes. Hello. That part will change.

We are talking to a guest today. Many of you saw the premiere of Pitch last night on Fox, and we're going to talk about that, but we're going to get into a slightly larger discussion about the way that baseball is portrayed on screen. Many times over the years that we've been doing the show, we've talked about some shoddy depiction of baseball in media of some sort. And we've said, just call us. Why don't people ask us to just check over the baseball scenes before they put them out in the world? And the reason that they don't call us is because they call our guest instead today, Mike Fisher, who is the baseball coordinator on pitch. He did the same job for Moneyball. He's

been a basketball coordinator, a football coordinator. He is constantly coordinating. Mike, thanks for coming on. Hey, thanks for having me. It's great to be on. Yeah. So I've been wanting to talk to someone who does your job for quite some time. So I would gather from what I've read that you kind of made this into a job, that you were just the guy on set who knew a lot about sports and you kind of did this informally for a while and then you turned it into a career. Is that more or less how it happened? Well, I mean, that's kind of I tell everybody, you know, they say, how did you get your job? Or how did you get your career going? I just say it's a series of poor decisions. But no, I just got involved a long time ago. When I first moved out here, I got involved with a movie called Everybody's All American.

I was a quarterback in that, the thing with Dennis Quaid and John Goodman. And we shot that down in Louisiana at LSU. So it kind of got me going, got me in the Screen Actors Guild. And that was 29 years ago. And so I've been plugging away ever since. So I've been very, I've been very fortunate. And so can we just boil down the job description to you, make sure that the baseball looks like baseball, the football looks like football, the basketball looks like basketball.

Can you go into a little bit more detail and tell us what's involved? It's really a process. You know, it all starts with a script. And then you've got to see how many... Like, say, for a movie like Remember the Titans that I did, we had a lot of actors that were in that. And I think depending on what genre you're doing, whether you're doing football, basketball, or baseball, it really changes the dynamics of my job. But it really starts with the script. How many actors are athletes in it? So like in Titans, for example, there was a bunch. So I'm evolved a little bit. I might not

have really any say so over the star of the movie. But there's a collaborative process and the whole casting of the actors. I love it when we get an actor that has some athletic ability uh like we have in pitch with with with kylie or just i'm just using uh titans as an example our quarterback for people that remember that movie our quarterback was really good but some of the other guys weren't as good so it's bad and it's coming up with a budget. It's coming up with, you know, how are we going to rehearse this? You know, what's the best way to shoot it? I mean, it's 50 different things, but it's really, it's just a process. So it's really, I tell people, it's no different really than a stunt coordinator

that's, you know, planning a bunch of car chases or, you know, it's kind of a stunt-related thing. But it's a process. That's kind of a long-winded answer. So I think it's more, the easy part is when you get to set and, okay, does this look real? That's kind of the easy part. It's leading up to that. That's the tricky part.

And football is certainly the most difficult because of all the hits and potential injuries and stuff like that. This is sort of rephrasing the question, but would you look at the script before anybody has been cast and talk to them about the script? Would you be in the room when they're casting or are you only there when it's on set? in the room when they're casting or are you only there when it's on set? I'm curious, I guess a simpler way of asking this is how many different times would you be involved in consulting on a certain project and like how much time does it take? You know what, I'm, of course, you know, every project, if it's a really hardcore sports project or something, you know, where there's a lot of sports elements, like a big sports element. I'm pretty involved from the very beginning, you know.

There's a couple projects now that are, you know, talking about potentially getting greenlit, and they talk to me, you know. I talk to the director, you know, before he's even taken the job. I talk to the producers when they're, you know, interviewing directors or I get my input on what would be the best approach to that because shooting sports because of the stadium element is very expensive. So, you know, how can we minimize the days in a stadium? You know, like on pitch, you know, one of the great things about it

is that we get to go to Petco Park or we get to go to Dodger Stadium. But that's expensive, you know. So I'm involved from, you know, if it's just like one scene in a movie, you know, it's a little high school football scene or something, then maybe not so much, not involved so much like I did. Ninja Turtles 2, we shot that at Madison Square Garden. So that was just a week of shooting. So I wasn't involved in the whole movie process with Ninja Turtles.

But, you know, movies like Moneyball or something, I'm certainly more involved from the very beginning. Four months, three or four months easily. And you sort of maybe have answered my next question when you mentioned the Ninja Turtles. three or four months easily. And you sort of maybe have answered my next question when you mentioned the Ninja Turtles, but we sometimes talk about, well, for instance, we, Ben wrote a long piece about the TV show Elementary, which spent about, I don't know, four minutes of one episode with TV in the background, baseball on TV in the background. And Full House did one episode at AT&T Park.

And we'll sometimes talk about even a commercial. We talked about a commercial for like an energy drink. How common is it to have somebody like you involved or on the set if it's not explicitly a sports movie or a sports project? Basically, you know, on a TV show, if something's really background, you know, then they've gotten, they've gotten just extras perhaps from central casting or something, and they probably don't have any in the budget. They don't have the money for a technical advisor or something like that. So I would imagine in those instances, there's probably not anyone. There's just a first AD or second AD out there kind of winging it.

And is there a lot of competition in the coordinator community? Are there a few kind of go-to people who have this job and you compete for the cushy contracts? Yeah, in the movie world, I have some competition. There's a couple other gentlemen that are always in the mix. competition. There's a couple other gentlemen that are always in the mix. Commercially, you know, I've probably worked on, you know, 85% of all the big Nike spots for the last 15 years. So I do all the Nikes, the Gatorades and so forth. So I don't have, I'm pretty kind of much the dominant guy in the commercial world, but there is some competition in the movies. You know,

I don't get them all, unfortunately, but I was very fortunate to get Pitch so that's the only one we care about right now so I'm very happy to be doing TV this is my first opportunity to be on a series full time so it's been very exciting and do you find that it is is there much tension between what you recommend as far as making it realistic and the director or the screenwriter or the producer whose loyalty is more to the story than to the sport and say, well, we just want to have that guy hitting 480. We don't care if that's unrealistic.

It makes our point better. Well, that's a great question. Ultimately, when it's all said and done, the producers have hired the director and, you know, it's his baby. It's, you know, he's the quarterback out there. And so ultimately it's his decision to make. So all I can do is say, hey, this is what I suggest. This is what would happen. You know, this is more realistic. And if he wants to take some creative license, you know, that's certainly his prerogative to do that. Now, fortunately, on a show like Pitch, the writers have done a really good job. I mean, so there's not a whole lot. I mean, I know there's a little creative license on the pilot, but for the most part, they've done a really good job.

But it's a great question because a lot of times you get the script, and, man, it is just some of them are not very well written, and it's just outrageous. The director, he's from Chile, and he's never been to a football game or a basketball game or a baseball game. So you get some pretty crazy stuff. But at the end of the day, I would say most times that everybody is on the same page and that they want it to be as realistic as possible. And they usually defer to me. And I can say, you know, give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down. It just depends

project to project. Not every project is the same. So before we get into detail about last night's episode, what are the most common mistakes you see in baseball specifically, but could be any sport? What are the common mistakes you see and maybe any memorable ones you've seen that were particularly funny or egregious that might come to mind? Here's the real challenge is that when you have a movie or a commercial, but particularly a movie, how many actors do you have on your baseball team or on your basketball team or on your football team? And A, do those actors have any athletic ability whatsoever? So, I mean, you can get some actors that have a little bit of athletic ability, and then you can get some that are absolutely terrible. Now, in football, we put a helmet on the guy and we get a double.

Basketball and baseball, it's much trickier because unless you're an incredibly wide shot, you know, and the player's the size of an ant, you realize that you recognize them. So the really egregious things that you see is when you've got an actor, you know, catching a ball at third base or pitching or whatever that has zero athletic ability. It's, you know, we always have football camp or baseball camp or basketball camp but the truth is is that if you can't play no two or three week basketball camp or baseball camp is going to turn you into you know into you know mike trout or bryce harper these days it's just not going to happen so the things that you see and you just turn your head and you go, wow, that was bad, it's usually because the actor's really bad.

But, you know, they're not getting paid to play baseball. They're getting paid to act. So that's why I like to get involved early in the casting process. Like, for example, Moneyball, you know, the director was Bennett Miller. And everyone that you saw in Moneyball, all the players, even the scouts, everybody you saw was real, was legit, with the exception of Chris Pratt, who played Haddafield.

And I can say this about Chris. Chris was athletic to start with, and Chris put in a lot of work. I had him in the batting cages at USC for like two months before we ever filmed Moneyball. But in that particular case, the director, it was so important, the realism, that everybody was real. Every extra, every single person. You know, I must have saw a thousand people for that movie.

And so I think that's one reason Moneyball, a lot of people liked that. And they said, man, hey, that seemed really real. It's because everybody was real, even the scouts. So I like it when, you know, when we get as much talent as possible up front. Yeah, Moneyball, I think, is the gold standard. And you look at movies where, I mean, you really see when people try to film pitchers, how, like, what a huge gap there is between a major league pitcher and just a normal athletic adult male because it really is hard to convincingly deliver a pitch uh and um so

one of the things that um i think this is the first time i've seen it and by the way we're i i just want to say that like generally speaking i thought hitch was really great at this i i thought like especially narratively the i think her career arc showed a lot of understanding of player development uh and the rhythm of a baseball career uh and i i just thought there were so many notes that hit just right was that um what is the background of the writers and and or showrunner that might have informed that? You know, like Rick Singer, Kevin Falls, Dan Fogelman, all those guys. You know, those guys are pretty baseball savvy.

So I think you've got, for pitch, you've got the perfect combination. You know, you've got excellent writers and producers that understand the basics of baseball, have a good understanding of it. They're fans of the game. And in our case, you know, with Kylie, Kylie is just, you know, I can't stress the first time I saw Kylie throw, I was like, oh, my gosh, this is fantastic. We hit a home run. This girl's very athletic.

I mean, you know, she's pretty, she's funny, she's sweet, and she's very athletic. She's got the whole package. If Kylie, no matter what was written, if Kylie just didn't have an athletic bone in her body, I think everybody would just be like, oh, this is

awful. Kylie's very athletic, and Kylie's worked very hard at it. I think think that that's, you know, her plus the riders, you know, gives, has a chance to make pitch special. Yeah, she was, she was very convincing. Her repertoire, as it was described, was very convincing. I thought that really everybody in the clubhouse looked like baseball players. Like, they didn't just look like athletes. They actually looked like they had baseball player dimensions, which I thought was really good. And one thing about pitch that I don't think I've ever seen, maybe I have, maybe you'll tell me that I have, but I don't think

I've ever seen a CGI ball in order to solve the problem of how do you make a realistic looking pitch? Is that new? Is that new for this show? Is that that relatively new and does it make your job you know much easier well we call them magic balls you know we used some visual effects you know like the home run and money ball that had a field hits that's a visual effect shot but no i think i think they've done a great job with it i think you know what the truth is i mean you know kylie's not going to throw a 90 mile an hour fastball in life. So I think there's instances where we need to help her. You know, there's scenes, you know, like a scene where she's batting. You certainly don't want to take a chance.

Even though I have a real pitcher throwing to her, you just can't ever take a chance of her getting hit or something. But visual effects, I thought they did a great job. And, you know, I'm looking for it, and I know when it comes up. So I think the fact that you bought it last night watching the show, I think that's a testament that they did a great job. So I'm glad to hear that you thought it was pretty realistic. And does the cooperation with Fox and with Major League Baseball make your job much easier?

I mean, if you had to make this look like a real Major League Baseball game and broadcast and you didn't have Ken Rosenthal and Joe Buck and John Smoltz and, you know, the actual on-screen graphics, I imagine that makes this a little more convincing at the very least. Well, I think the two things that make my job really easy is, A, you mentioned the clubhouse and the other Padres. All those guys, all her teammates are real players. We had real tryouts for the show. So everybody that's one of our core Padres, they're all players. They all played at least college baseball. A couple of them got drafted. So they're all legit guys.

The fact that, you know, for me as a fan, when I watch a movie, and if they're trying to be a pro baseball team, but I think if we were the San Diego Dolphins or something, if we didn't have MLBs, if we didn't have the real uniform and the real stadium and we were faking everything, you know, for me as a fan or a spectator of a show, that would take me right out of it. So the fact that we do have MLB's cooperation, we do have the real stadium, we do have the real uniform, we've got the Fox camera views, we've got the real announcers, to me, that is just, it's a must. And I think that's really, if we didn't have all

those pieces, then we wouldn't have the show that we have. So I think it's critical that we have all that. So, all right. So we are extremely pedantic when it comes to this stuff. That is why we notice it. It's why we're having you on right now. So forgive me, but I am now going to pick apart a few things I saw. Mainly, not because I want to shame the show.

Like I said, I think the show did a great job. But I'm curious to know the process of how or why things still slip through that literally one person in the world might notice, but that person is me. Okay. All right, so in the first inning, she walks the first batter, and then she throws a wild pitch, and the guy on first goes all the way to third. And then later in the inning, she throws a wild pitch and the guy on first goes all the way to third and then later in the inning she throws another wild pitch and the runner scores from third and the announcer

says third wild pitch of the inning and of course that couldn't happen because the runner went from first to third on the first wild pitch and went home on the second so do you have any insight into why third wild pitch would slip through? Is it a thing where maybe the script is changing as you go, where maybe in the editing process? You must have DVR'd this thing and ran it back a few times. I think it's getting right there. I'm telling you, this is why we get so annoyed.

I only watched it one time but I watch very closely okay well no I'm good well okay my response to that would be a that there was that the announcers a lot of that stuff was filmed before we did some of the action and the script script changing with

the edit to speed up the game and speed up the ending so that's probably if we had shot the changing with the edit to speed up the game and speed up the inning. So that's probably, if we had shot the dialogue with the actors or the announcers afterwards, we probably would have got that right. But that's an editing thing. Or, you know, there was a wild pitch. It went to the backstop. It hit a pole, ricocheted back to the catcher so fast that the guy did not have time to run him.

So we got, I'm going to blame it on editing, the script, there could have been a time cut. We actually saw every pitch up to that point, I believe. So I'm not letting you off that easily. But I did, I assumed it was, I mean, I assume that you're editing, not you, but the show is, there's like a ton of things that go into putting a show together. And they're, in a sense, they're all being edited, quote unquote, edited independently of each other so that you can have the package ready to go. And I would imagine it's very difficult to make sure that it all lines up perfectly. perfectly and if you make a slight tweak you don't think that a slight tweak uh in you know maybe editing one one shot would affect you know joe buck's dialogue and and that seems like it'd be

really easy to slip through i thought you were going to get on me about the guy going making it from first all the way to third on a wild pitch and i was going to say that he was off and running yeah such a good jump and that when the catcher went back there, he picked up the ball, but he slipped and he dropped it the first time. But we cut around that. You didn't see that. Yeah, I thought about that as well when it happened. But to me, that's a judgment call. And I wouldn't let you off that easily on that either because we had the announcers as our soundtrack and they would have said he was

off and running and so i wouldn't give you that but uh i'm fine i'm fine with the runner going from first to third on a wild pitch in fact it frustrates me that more major leaguers don't go first to third on wild pitch okay second one second one is that when she leaves with one out in the top of the seventh she is she has gone six and a third innings. In her first outing, of course, she did not get an out. So we know that she has six and a third innings in her career for the season. And in the background on the scoreboard, her ERA reads 5.14. It is impossible to have a 5.14 ERA. I went through all the iterations of which runs could be earned or unearned, but it doesn't matter whether it's 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. There is no ERA possible with six and a third innings that is 5.14. So, again, nobody noticed that.

I promise you're fine. Your job is safe. But how does it happen? Who is responsible? Mainly my question is, who is responsible for the background scoreboard in the production of a TV show? Well, that's going to be, you know, obviously that was done later and that was done in post. And I remember we had a conversation about the ERA. So I thought we got that right. I don't, it's been so long ago. I mean, we did the pilot back in February or something.

I don't remember. I'm going to blame that on someone, but I don't know. The scoreboard was done afterwards in post-production, but there was a conversation about that. But, wow, that's good. That's good. Sometimes you just got to tip your cap. You just got to say, well, that's good.

And then the last one is not uh is not a mistake but i'm curious about the process of it the managers uh got a whiteboard in his office and i spent a long time staring at that whiteboard and trying to figure out what it could possibly be like what he is diagramming what the words mean and so i'm just curious where the whiteboard comes from who is responsible for for the whiteboard, I guess, in a scene like that? Okay. Well, that's, you know what? Now that's one that I did catch also.

And that was one of those where it was just, you know, the people that come in and dress the set, you know, the, the designers, I have no idea what that is on that board. There's a couple other things you missed, but I'm not going to tell you what they are. But that, I have no idea. I don't know if that's like Beijing subway system or things. I have no idea what that is on that board. I thought the manager might be installing a hot tub at his home and he was designing the platform. Yeah, an irrigation system in his front yard, a PCP pipe.

I have no idea. But we did catch that. As we say in this business, that ship had sailed. That ship had sailed. I thought you were going to get on me about her having a bunch of conversations with people before the game. I thought that's where you were going to go. I did think that it was sort of odd

that she was meeting the general manager of the organization that she'd been in for five years for the first time. But I mean, you have to, like that's an example of what I was talking about where, you know, your loyalty is probably first to the drama and you need to have that introduction to set up both characters. And it makes perfect sense if

you're writing, you know, a script, a novel, whatever, that you would want that interaction where they meet there. And so I was able to get past it. The ERA is a much, much, much, much smaller thing, but also there's no upside to having an ERA that jumps out at somebody, right? At one person. One person, yeah. No, that was a good, you know, but there was, like, when she talked to some of the, we had a couple scenes where she talked to a couple fans before the game, in her uniform right before the game started.

So some of that stuff we got rid of because it was just like, okay, that would never happen. But for the most part, for the most part, your keen eye has, you know, picked up a couple things. But for the most part, I thought we did a pretty good job. And I think going forward we'll be even better. But at the end of the day, you know, you're never going to get everything exactly perfect.

It just won't happen. So you just try to get it 99% right. And it's a very collaborative process with hundreds of people involved, post-production, visual effects, props, set dressing. There was a couple extras that snuck into a couple shots last night that made me blink or that shouldn't have been there,

that didn't look like ballplayers. But for the most part, I thought we did a pretty good job. Yeah, I do too. I would congratulate you. I thought that it definitely sets a standard that most shows don't come close to, in my opinion. Do you get a, like a final review, like a final cut of the show at some late date where you can just take one look at it after it's all been edited together and this is the final

version just in case there's some glaring thing you could still find? Yeah, I mean, it's just like the, the, the, the whiteboard thing. Like we caught that, but you know, you know, we're not going to reshoot that scene over that. You know what I mean? Like we caught that, you know, so yeah, but on some of that stuff, it's just, you know, like I said, the ship sailed or it'd be too expensive to go back and fix it or, you know, it's just, but yeah, we get it.

But sometimes even, you know, after the fact, you can't do anything because it's too expensive to fix it. All right. Well, we have been wanting to have this kind of conversation for a long time. We will be watching and enjoying the show. If you want to come back on after every episode so we can point out everything we spotted, you're welcome to make this a recurring spot.

We would love that. Oh, hey guys, it was a lot of fun. So yeah. Well, yeah. Hey,

thank you for making, you know, Hey, you know, you guys like that, you know, make us raise our game or, you know,

we gotta, you know, we gotta bring our a game every week. So, but no, Hey, thanks for having me on. And anytime you guys want to chat, just let me know.

All right. And if you are in charge of a baseball show or a sports show of some sort, don't make the mistakes that other showrunners have made. Go look up Mike Fisher. You can find information about him and contact him at MikeFisherOnline.com. Mike, thanks again. Great talking to you. Thanks, guys.

All right. That will do it for today. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Five listeners who have done so already. James Stunden, Mark Fenster, Scott Rosen, Dale Schneider, and Andrew Taylor. Thank you. You can buy our book,

The Only Rule Is It Has To Work, our wild experiment building a new kind of baseball team. Go to the website at theonlyruleisithastowork.com for more information. Please leave us a review on Amazon and Goodreads if you like it. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectivelywild. And you can rate and review and subscribe

to the show on iTunes. You can get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription to the Play Index by going to baseballreference.com and using the coupon code BP. And you can contact me and Sam via email at podcastatbaseballperspectives.com or by messaging us through Patreon.

If you want to listen to another podcast about pitch, Michael Bauman and I talked to the showrunner as well as the two women who played for the Stompers about their impressions of the pitch on Tuesday's episode of the Ringer MLB show. And we also did a fun one that's up today. We talked to Dan Heron about Madison Bumgarner and Unwritten Rules. And we talked to Dodgers broadcaster Joe Davis about Vin Scully. So have a nice weekend. Sam and I will talk to you next week.

You can't hide. You can't hide. You can't hide. You can't hide. You can't hide. You can't hide You can't hide You can't hide It's not that hard, Scott. Tell him, Wash.

It's incredibly hard. Hey, anything worth doing is. And we're going to teach you.