NEW YORK – The closing years of the last millennium were a special time for pitchers at Yankee Stadium. On those hallowed grounds, David Wells set down 27 consecutive Minnesota Twins on a May afternoon in 1998, David Cone repeated the feat the following year against the Montreal Expos, and Dave Eiland also put the finishing touches on a perfect game against the Yankees.
Wait, you don’t remember that last one? That’s because Hollywood made it happen in the 1999 film “For Love of the Game,” starring Kevin Costner as an aging Detroit Tigers pitcher attempting to “push the sun back up in the sky and give us one more day of summer,” as broadcaster Vin Scully intoned late in his ‘broadcast.’
The spoken lines belonged to Costner’s Billy Chapel, along with the pained grimaces as he stalked around the same mound where Wells and Cone made history. But the fastballs zipping across home plate were provided by Eiland, then an active Major League pitcher with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays who would go on to become a pitching coach with several teams, including the Yankees.
“I just had to throw the ball over the plate, which is glorified catch,” Eiland said. “I always kept myself in shape year-round anyway, so it wasn’t a big deal. You’re talking seven, eight, maybe a dozen pitches a day.”
It sounds simple, but Eiland soon learned it would take hours to capture that action.
“You see Costner going through his delivery, winding up and throwing it, but then they show the ball crossing home plate and the catcher catching it. That was me,” Eiland said. “It’s Hollywood, so unlike baseball, they can piece things together with do-overs. The taxing part was 12-to-15-hour days, getting there at seven in the morning and being there until nine or 10 at night.”
As Eiland recalls, production on the film had hit a snag when Costner’s right shoulder began barking; the winces that Costner, then 44, exhibited on camera were not a result of his acting abilities.
The shoot already involved several real-life big leaguers, including Mike Buddie, Ricky Ledee, Scott Pose and Donzell McDonald, and umpires Jerry Crawford, Richie Garcia and Rick Reed. They needed a right-handed pitcher who could pass for Costner in wide-angle shots.
Someone from that group suggested Eiland, who had spent the ’98 season – ironically enough – with the Triple-A Durham Bulls, a team that Costner, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins made famous in “Bull Durham” a decade prior.
“This is back in ’98 and it’s Halloween day. My daughters were younger then, so I was getting them ready to go trick-or-treating,” Eiland said. “My phone rang, and it was one of the assistant directors. They asked me if I had any interest in coming up there. I said, ‘Sure, why not?’ So I was on a plane the next day and up there at the Waldorf-Astoria for three weeks as Costner’s body double, or pitching double, I should say.”
Arriving on set in the Bronx, Eiland received a trim to match Costner’s sharp crewcut, then wore makeup to replicate Costner’s skin tone. The production dressed Eiland in a road-gray Tigers uniform with ‘CHAPEL 14’ across the back; hardly the preferred wardrobe for someone still employed by a different American League franchise, but hey, that’s show biz.
A plot point in the movie is that Chapel has returned from a career-threatening injury, so Eiland needed to sport an ugly scar on his right hand. A close-up scene in the film shows Chapel rotating a baseball behind his back; Eiland says that’s him.
“We were standing around, and the director [Sam Raimi] was like, ‘What do pitchers do when they’re on the mound?’” Eiland said. “I said, ‘Some guys have the ball behind their back, and they’re spinning the ball in their hand as they get the sign from the catcher.’ So they said, ‘Do that!’”
“They put that in the movie, the hand with the ball spinning. That’s my hand. But what’s funny about that is, that only happens when a pitcher is out of the stretch. He threw a perfect game, so nobody was on base. But unless you’re really paying attention, you won’t pick up on that.”
With so much downtime, Eiland said he made regular trips to the Yankee Stadium weight room and struck up conversations with some of the actors.
He and Costner were side-by-side in the makeup chair every morning, and Eiland said he also chatted with Kelly Preston (Costner’s love interest), John C. Reilly (who played the Tigers’ catcher) and J.K. Simmons (who played Detroit’s manager).
When “For Love of the Game” was released in September 1999, Eiland did not attend the premiere; he was active on the Devil Rays’ pitching staff. Eiland said he saw the movie months later and was surprised that the Costner/Preston romance took up about half of the screen time.
“It was more of a love story than I expected, because I was only involved with the Yankee Stadium parts,” Eiland said. “But you’re watching it, and you’re saying, ‘Oh, I remember when they shot this scene.’”
Eiland, who now serves as the head of baseball for the athlete advisory firm Grand Central Sports Management, said that he still receives residual checks from the movie every few months. They’re usually made out for about $50 or $60.
“For me, it was the experience. It was fun,” Eiland said. “It was interesting to see how they make a movie, because I had no idea about the lighting and all that. Unlike baseball, if you screw something up, you get to do it over and over until you get it right. Now I know why it takes so long to shoot a movie.”
Senior Reporter Bryan Hoch has covered the Yankees for MLB.com since 2007.
