Bill Lee

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

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.

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.

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.