Alexander: ‘Fight For Glory’ revisits Dodgers’ 2024 World Series run
They definitely don’t make the official World Series movie the way they used to.
At the beginning, some 82 years ago, it took the form of what might now be considered a newsreel, and the reason it was created during World War II was so that the troops overseas could see what was happening back home.
“The United States government approached Major League Baseball and said, ‘Look, our troops overseas want to see the World Series,’” director R.J. Cutler said in an interview last week. “But, you know, there was no DirecTV then, and so Major League Baseball produced a film that told the story of the World Series and the government, the military, showed it to their troops.”
That was in 1943. All these decades later, baseball still produces the story of the Fall Classic in video form. For years it would debut in mid-winter, usually in the winning team’s hometown.
Now, the official video record of the World Series is a three-part documentary on a streaming service. “Fight For Glory: The 2024 World Series” debuted on Apple TV+ this past week, right around Opening Day.
Cutler – an Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning filmmaker whose previous credits include “Martha” (as in Stewart), “Elton John: Never Too Late.” “Billie Eilish: The World’s A Little Blurry,” and “The War Room,” featuring veteran political operative James Carville – helmed this production. The process of winnowing hundreds of hours of footage into three episodes, and doing so by Opening Day, meant “working ’round the clock, through the holidays, seven days a week,” Cutler said.
It was a labor of love. Imagine Documentaries, part of the production company founded by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, called Cutler about the arrangement they had made with MLB, and he said yes before the call ended.
“I’m a lifelong New York Mets fan,” he said. “I love the game … I’ve always wanted to tell stories about baseball, and this is that film. Here we are. And we hope we’ll get to do it again and again and again.”
One of the fan bases intimately involved in the 2024 World Series agrees with that viewpoint, anyway. But this all-access look at the Dodgers’ five-game victory over the New York Yankees is just as entertaining, maybe more so, even when you know the result.
Part I is titled “A Game For The Ages,” focused on the events leading up to Freddie Freeman’s historic walk-off grand slam to end Game 1 as well as the back story involving not only Freeman but wife Chelsea and their children.
The decision to have a camera crew hang around with the family the afternoon of Game 1 as they prepare to head for the ballpark could be considered successful guesswork. But for a project this massive involving an equally massive event, lots of footage is shot and only some of it is used.
The project had access to each of the domestic broadcasts of the series, including the Fox TV feed with Joe Davis and John Smoltz, and sound from the ESPN radio feed and the Dodgers’ and Yankees’ local broadcasts. (One of the highlights there: Yankees broadcaster Suzyn Waldman, during Game 1 at Dodger Stadium, exclaiming, “This is the loudest place I’ve ever been in my life.”)
Cutler and his editors also had access to MLB footage and social media material from both teams. And he had eight of his own crews shooting footage.
“We didn’t have angles that other people didn’t have,” he said. “We just were filming it differently. The lenses were different. The things that we were looking for (were different).”
Additionally, Cutler and his crew did 25 post-Series interviews with Dodgers personnel and 15 with those from the Yankees. And there were some bluntly honest observations in particular by Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, who said in one voiceover in reference to the Yankees’ defensive play: “We just felt they didn’t finish some plays.”
The planning process began weeks in advance when the filmmakers developed relationships with front office and media people around the possible participants, as well as studying the ballparks for potential camera angles. But Cutler said they avoided players and coaches during that runup for one good reason:
“They’re baseball people,” he said. “They’re superstitious.” In other words, why risk being a jinx?
Cutler and his people showed up at the National League and American League Championship Series to familiarize themselves with the teams and vice versa. Two days before the World Series begins, he says, “that’s when we show up full force and hope that we get some good fortune.
“And in this year’s World Series, we got a lot of good fortune.”
Exhibit A: The beginning of the first episode followed Chelsea Freeman and the rest of the family preparing to head for Dodger Stadium for Game 1, Freddie having departed for the ballpark hours before.
That back story turned out to be the perfect lead-in to Freeman’s historic walk-off grand slam in the 10th inning off Nestor Cortes, which won Game 1 for the Dodgers and might have turned the entire series on its ear.
Part 2, “Pressure Is A Privilege,” encompassed Games 2 and 3, and Mookie Betts’ wife Brianna and mother Diana Benedict were prominently featured at the start of that episode. The final two games were the subjects of Part 3, “Sleeping Giants.” (Considering the team that won, maybe they could have settled on a different title.)
But the idea is to not only bring back memories of the World Series but to tell some of the stories that those of us with tighter deadlines (and less access) couldn’t get to.
Among the ways they did so: The umpires wore microphones. That brought us Dodger reliever Ben Casparius’ charming conversation with an umpire while having his glove and hands checked at the end of an inning.
It also brought us Giancarlo Stanton’s less charming reaction when he was hit by a Daniel Hudson pitch in the third inning of Game 4, only to be told first base umpire Chad Fairchild ruled he had swung at the pitch. Plate umpire Doug Eddings told Stanton: “Stay in the game because you can’t argue that. He’s already said you swung. Don’t (complain) … it’s not gonna change anything.” Stanton followed with a brief NSFW response but, indeed, stayed in the game.
And here’s an indication that this production was powerful, even though we all knew the outcome: I was tempted to go back and consult my scorebook a few times to refresh my memory, but I decided instead to just let the dramatic tension build. And it did.
“A lot of it is like the famous James Carville line from my first film, ‘The War Room’,” Cutler said. “‘The harder I work, the luckier I get,’ is what he said. And I think (of) my team of producers and shooters and sound folks, everybody who is out there doing everything that we could based on relationships that we had built over the course of the summer, in partnership with our friends in Major League Baseball. We worked really, really hard, and we were in all the right positions to get all the right stories.”
Dodger fan, if you can’t resist skipping ahead to the really good part, the fateful top of the fifth of Game 5 begins 34:20 into the third installment. That inning never gets old … unless you’re a Yankee fan.
And no matter your loyalties, if you’re of a certain age it’s worth it to stay tuned through the credits at the end of Part 3 just to hear, one more time, the old theme from “This Week In Baseball”, “Gathering Crowds.”
jalexander@scng.com