Race for the Record(1998)

A baseball loving community unites to make its MLB dream come true and hits a home run with the 1993 arrival of Colorado Rockies.

In a time when America was on the brink of modernization, Carson "Skeeter" Bigbee emerged from rural Oregon to become an embodiment of national transformation. Born to working parents in 1895, Bigbee’s life as a multi-sport athlete, a baseball star with the Pittsburgh Pirates, a World War I enlistee, and a World Series hero, intersected with America's Progressive Era, the electrification of society, the First World War, and the onset of the Great Depression. His story, from hitting the decisive run in the 1925 World Series to managing in the American Girls Professional Baseball League, is a poignant reflection of ambition, patriotism, and the resilient spirit of an ever-changing nation in the early 20th Century.

"When baseball star Curt Flood rejected a trade in 1969, he challenged America’s pastime and helped spark a revolution that rippled beyond the game" (The New York Times)..

"On the Fourth of July, Sikhs in Fresno came together to host the California city’s annual minor league baseball game and fireworks show to create awareness about their religion and demonstrate their love for America" (Vice News).

In this short film, two starstruck movie fans hire a tour guide and see a plethora of Hollywood stars.

The Toronto Blue Jays — the defending champions — sleek, corporate, efficient — featuring an offensive arsenal that hit a collective 0.311 in the six-game series. The Philadelphia Phillies — a last-to-first success story — with their long hair, beards, and blue-collar work ethic — a softball team in pinstripes. This was a World Series that won't soon be forgotten. A six-game slugfest that sent pitchers scurrying to the showers. The heroes were named Dykstra, Molitor, Schilling and Alomar. The games were unforgettable. The sheer drama of Game Four — with its runs, hits, and duration — all records. The surgical precision of Curt Schilling's shutout in Game Five. And Joe Carter's incredible three-run blast to win Game Six — just the second time in history a home run has ended a World Series.

Since Little League Baseball was founded in 1939, about 40 million kids have played the sport. The list includes future Hall of Famers like Carl Yastrzemski, Tom Seaver and Nolan Ryan, and hundreds of other future Major Leaguers. But of all the kids who ever played Little League, the best of the best was a boy you’ve probably never heard of: Art “Pinky” Deras. In the summer of 1959, he led the team from Hamtramck, Mich., to the Little League World Series title, and in the process, he put together a Little League season the likes of which we might never see again. His amazing story comes to life in “The Legend of Pinky Deras: The Greatest Little-Leaguer There Ever Was,” a new film from Blue Hammer Films. Pinky received a ton of national publicity back in 1959, but then he fell off the map. In the half-century since he lit the Little League world on fire, there have been no films about him, no magazine stories, not even a single newspaper article.

Montreal Expos star catcher Gary Carter visits Japan to learn about the customs and traditions of baseball in the Far East. He also encounters other "foreign" baseball players he once played with in the MLB.

An investigation into the downfall of the Montreal Expos, Canada's first Major League Baseball team — and who was ultimately responsible.

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.

"It started with batting average, home runs and RBIs. Then sabermetrics came along and introduced a new set of results-driven statistics. But results only tell half the story, and the new revolution in baseball analytics goes one step deeper to measure the actual physicality of the players – exit velocity off the bat, spin rate on a pitcher's curveball, efficiency of an outfielder's route to a fly ball, and a ton more. "FUTURE OF THE GAME is a new series exploring the cutting edge in sports technology, co-produced with our pals at VICE's tech channel Motherboard. In this inaugural episode we meet the architects of MLB Statcast, a new initiative using the same technology that tracks debris during the launch of space shuttles to change the way we watch baseball on TV and give overlooked talent a second change to stick in the Major Leagues" (Vice Sports).

A look back at Miggy's illustrious career.