“I hadn’t kept score with a scorecard in a baseball game since I was a little kid,” admits director R.J. Cutler. The filmmaker says that keeping score while having an eye on the game was one factor that made directing Fight for Glory: 2024 World Series a lot of fun. The three-part documentary, which streams on AppleTV+ starting March 28 just as the new season steps up to bat, chronicles the white-knuckler showdown between the New York Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Fight for Glory makes the case that the 2024 series epitomizes America’s game. Cutler provides extensive eyes around the stadium, the field, the dugout, and the lives of the players to create an immersive portrait that will have audiences hooked even if they’ve seen the games before. The doc provides an intimate glimpse into the life of Dodgers’ MVP Freddie Freeman as a terrible ankle sprain in Game One puts him out of commission. An urgent health scare with Freeman’s three-year-old son then makes him put family first and it seems uncertain whether he’ll return to the field at all that season. His emotional arc rallies the fans in a World Series where the stakes are already sky high.
“You see how much baseball means in good times, and you see how much it can unite people in challenging times,” says Cutler.
POV spoke with Cutler ahead of Fight for Glory: 2024 World Series’ debut.
POV: Pat Mullen
RC: R.J. Cutler
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
POV: So, are you coming to this project as a Dodgers fan or a Yankees fan?
RC: I’m coming as a baseball fan, although as Roger Angell once said, “baseball might not be a matter of life or death,” but for him, the Red Sox were. For me, it’s the New York Mets. But I am coming to this as someone who appreciates the beauty of the game, the drama of the game, the emotion, the characters, the landscape for storytelling, and the way that this World Series really rose to the occasion on all those terms.
POV: What sets this series apart from other years?
RC: The World Series is always a clash of titans. It’s always two champions. Then American League champion and the National League champion going at it in an epic confrontation. But this year [2024], you have so many factors going. For one, there’s the enormous history. For decades, they were playing for the soul of New York City because the Dodgers were based in Brooklyn and the Yankees were based in the Bronx. The Yankees kept on beating up on the Dodgers, and then finally the Dodgers won and turned it around, but in the Jackie Robinson era. It took forever. They were known as Dem Bums because Dem Bums could never beat the Yankees. Then the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, and since then, the World Series has been the East Coast versus West Coast.
There’s that history and that’s tremendous, but there’s also the makeup of the current teams. You have the best player in the American League, Aaron Judge, and the best player in the National League, Shohei Ohtani, going up against each other. Both of these lineups are as expensive as any lineup is in Major League Baseball. Then there are the games themselves. It is a four to one series that the Dodgers win, but every one of the games could have gone either way. That’s the humbling nature of baseball: Even the greatest players go through slumps. There’s nothing you can do about it and you got to find your way out of it. So there’s nothing but drama. There’s nothing but emotion. There’s incredible characters, there’s incredible history, and that’s what makes for good storytelling and good filmmaking.
POV: Recently you’ve had films and projects where you have followed one person like Elton John or Billie Eilish. How does it work in terms of scope when you have one person versus a collective? How do you decide from the outset what to follow?
RC: The degree of difficulty on this project is incredibly high. I had an amazing team of producers and shooters and sound people. We were all on our toes operating at our highest level because you don’t know until two days before the World Series who’s playing in the World Series. A week before that, the eight teams could be in, then it gets reduced to four teams, then it gets reduced to two teams. But that’s eight teams only two weeks before you’re shooting. Every team has 25 guys on it, plus the sports writers and their management, and there’s so many people around and their families. You’re positioning yourself so that, at the last moment when you find out what two teams are going to be in the World Series, you can pounce, but you’ve got to, of course, pounce with a certain delicate touch because you’re earning trust, you’re asking people like the Freeman family to let you film with them while Freddie’s going through this horrible injury and playing in the World Series. There’s not a lot of room for error is what it is.
Then you’ve got to cut it really quickly, which we’re not used to doing. For films like Billie Eilish or Martha, we spent well over a year editing each of those films. Here, we wanted to make sure we turned it around in time for the start of the baseball season, so we really had only about 10 weeks or so.
POV: Freddie Freeman has such a compelling story in the first episode where he injures his ankle, and then has to step away from the Series due to his son’s illness. How much did you get to see that wasn’t necessarily reported in the mainstream news at the time?
RC: As you learn in episode two, there were things that were known about Freddie off the record in terms of the degree of his injury that came out afterwards. He was really in bad shape, but the opportunity to film with him and his family, to tell the story about his son, the fact that he has this incredible and the debilitating injury that nobody really should come back from—and he not only comes back, he comes back in this unbelievable way, this historic way with the first walk-off Grand Slam in World Series’ history. Sometimes life is so extraordinary that you thank the heavens and you’re happy that you were there to be able to tell the story. And then he wins the MVP! He doesn’t just hit that Grand Slam. He then has one of the greatest offensive World Series in baseball history. Hs whole family, Chelsea and his cousin, his aunt, everybody was so his dad, everybody was so welcoming. It was just an honour, really, to be there. We didn’t know what was going to happen, but sometimes a little good fortune not so bad.
POV: How many eyes do you have on the ground during the game itself to ensure you’re getting vantage points other than the ones people see on TV?
RC: We have our eight crews, but then there are all the FOX cameras, the Major League Baseball cameras—there are 40 or more feeds of material that we have that we ultimately have to work with. Sometimes there’s players’ cameras. Our friend Lon Rosen, who’s with the Dodgers [as executive vice president and chief marketing officer] was kind enough to film Freddie getting his ankle worked on. He also did some other filming with an iPhone. We gave iPhones out to players and other people so that they would have them. You got to be as resourceful as you can. You don’t ever want to impact the game. You have to find that sweet spot in terms of access.
POV: What about making the Series fresh for people who watched it in 2024?
RC: We’re the only people who are there to tell the story with some perspective. That creates a lot of opportunity and you have to figure out how to best take advantage of that. There are the interviews afterwards, which are delicate. The Dodgers were ready to talk. The Dodgers wanted to talk all day long about that. But the Yankees, you have to be empathetic to the fact that they would want to talk the next week, the next month. It was November. You got to give them some opportunity to heal and be with their families and get over it. And then it’s holiday time, so you don’t really want to be asking the Yankees to talk until January. We’re already deep into the edit, so you’ve got to factor that in. But this is a project in which our collective experience allowed us to adapt and recognize the unique nature of what it means to come into a situation like this and be shooting a character driven vérité.
POV: In terms of the unpredictability, too, the series can go any number of games, but if a team wins in Game Five, you might’ve been planning stories that go to Game Seven. What happens when that vérité action stops and you then have to pivot and reconsider storylines?
RC: The story of Game Five is that the Yankees are dominating. The story is they woke the sleeping giant, right? Dave Roberts used weaker pitchers in Game Four, saving them for Game Five. But it was a big mistake because the Yankees came out and scored five runs in the first few innings, and the Dodgers were done for, and now they were letting that sleeping giant lumber around and feel its oats. That was the story until Aaron Judge dropped the ball. Then the story changed.
We’re sitting in a control room, [executive producers] Justin [Yungfleisch] and Mark Blatty, and Trevor Smith, another executive producer, looking at 60 screens and listening to all these different audio feeds and telling each other the story as it’s coming out in front of us while our crews are out there capturing all this footage. You have to be in the moment. But that’s the beauty.
POV: Baseball gets a lot of love as America’s sport, so why do you think baseball itself plays such a role in American identity? How does this particular series speak to that sentiment?
RC: One of the driving themes of the film is how we confront failure and overcome failure, because baseball is a game of failure. Even the greatest players in history only succeed between 30 and 40% of the time. Look at Aaron Judge and what he had to deal with.
But another theme is family and family history. These teams are like families, and we see that, but we also see the richness of family history: The way that, for instance, Freddie Freeman and his dad were able to confront the death of his mother when Freddie was 10 years old by playing baseball. You understand the role that baseball plays.
But you also see the great tradition of the game. You see that it is a truly American sport, even as it is a global World Series. It had players from Japan, Latin America, and from around the world in this World Series. Different cultures shared a harmonious landscape. All of those things make it, uniquely American, but more something that part of the fabric of people’s lives. And that’s what it was for me.
I was a seven-year-old kid who ran out onto the field in 1969 with my dad when the Mets clinched first place in the Eastern Division, and we tore up the sod and brought it home and planted it. And you never forget that. And it’s why I still root for the Mets, no matter. I was ride or die with the Mets from that moment on. Everybody’s got a story like that.
