Sharp-eyed viewers of Showtime....
….have mentioned that I am in the final half-hour of the 2005 cinematic masterpiece “Beer League,” where I play the championship game ump. The money I made for the three days finally got me even with SAG, which I had to join in 1989 when I did a stand-up documentary for PBS called “The World of Jewish Humor.” Got paid $500 for the documentary and it cost me $1000 to join SAG. Everyone said a SAG card was gold, but for me, all it turned out to be was $75 a year for the next 15 years. But when my friend Frank Sebastiano (former Letterman writer turned writer/director) asked me to be in his movie, I was current and ready to go, like Felix when Oscar gets the radio sports show (“You want to see a union card? I’ll show you a union card!”)
The first day of the shoot it was, no shit, 103 degrees and because the camera faced home plate the entire day, I was the only cast member in every shot for eight hours. I had a beard then, and was in the first year of my limp. They had a wardrobe girl whose entire job was to remind me to take off my glasses before the camera rolled. The next two days were mericifully milder and I was out there maybe three hours each day.
I contributed two lines to the script, which Frank and Artie Lange never stopped thanking me for. One was the crack from Johnny at the beginning of the big rally, (“Unfair. It’s like pitching to a healthy Lou Gehrig….”) and the other, which still makes Artie Lange laugh, was his Bob Shepherd impression when he comes up to the plate for the second time: “Now pitching for Maganelli, Number One, Needledick…Number One….Needledick.” I’ve never been more proud.
One last beyond serendipitous event. It was a low budget film ($1 million), so they had to cut corners everywhere. They got a bunch of old softball bats out of a prop house, and the first day, I saw this paint-chipped, thin-handled Louisville Slugger Big Orange. I grabbed it and looked at the handle. Sure enough, pieces of blue tennis adhesive grip tape still wrapped the bottom. That was MY bat from 1984-1989, my prime years of ringering in Central Park. They must have given all that stuff away when the Catch a Rising Star team disbanded. As College Boy would say, “Some guys just live right….”
