Bill Lee

Birth : 1946-12-28, Burbank, California, USA

History

Bill "The Spaceman" Lee, the left handed pitcher for the Boston Red Sox and Montreal Expos, was one of the most colorful players in major league baseball history. With the Red Sox from 1969 through 1978, and with the Montreal Expos from 1979 until he retired in 1982, Lee won 16 or more games four times, including three straight 17 win seasons from 1973 to 1975. He was part of the Red Sox team that played what many believe is the best World Series ever, against the Cincinnatti Reds in 1975.

Profile

Movies

Spaceman

Beer League player

Story of former major league baseball pitcher Bill 'Spaceman' Lee following his release by the Montreal Expos.

Spyball

Narrator

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt once told the head of the Office of Strategic Services (precursor to the CIA), “Give my regards to the catcher.” The catcher was Moe Berg, who spent 15 seasons in the majors before taking up espionage for the government. Spyball tells the extraordinary story of Berg, a linguist/Ivy-educated lawyer/.243 lifetime hitter whom manager Casey Stengel called “the strangest man to ever play the game of baseball.” Berg walked in eclectic circles, counting Babe Ruth, Albert Einstein, and the Marx Brothers among his friends, but it was his service to his country that truly distinguished him. His surreptitious filming of Tokyo during a 1934 baseball tour helped develop strategies for the eventual bombing of the city during World War II, and his cloak-and-dagger mind games involving a German scientist helped prove that the Nazis were failing in their attempts to develop an atomic bomb.

Spaceman: A Baseball Odyssey

Self

A documentary about former Major League Baseball player, Bill "The Spaceman" Lee. Lee was the ultimate gonzo player, a brilliant left handed pitcher who defied every manager or front office executive who tried to control him. The fans loved him and so did sportswriters who delighted in asking the usual baseball questions, only to get philosophical responses involving the relationship between existentialism and the curveball or the effects of karma on a pitcher's rotator cuff.

Gift of the Game

Self

Acclaimed Florida novelist Randy Wayne White travels to Cuba with former pitchers Bill "Spaceman" Lee (Boston Red Sox) and Jon Warden (Detroit Tigers), and a band of baseball enthusiasts to find and revive the children's baseball league founded by American writer Ernest Hemingway in the days before Fidel Castro came to power.