We're putting the spotlight on The Old Ball Game — Jared Engel's live-scored baseball silent films, coming to the Rochester Fringe Festival at the George Eastman Museum's Dryden Theater on September 26 (11am and 1pm).

Check out the episode on Just Can't Not wherever you get your podcasts or on Lunchador.org!

https://player.captivate.fm/episode/dcb9dc3d-75d9-40df-a90b-866e439dbafb/

I chatted with Jared — a Brooklyn musician/filmmaker originally from Brighton — about how the show works: we take vintage baseball film clips (and Jared's own new silent shorts) and compose and perform original music live, basically turning the movie into a one-night-only concert-plus-movie soundtrack. Jared walks us through the origin story — during the pandemic he and other musicians formed a sandlot team called Fumble (formerly unemployed musicians), and that communal, nostalgic baseball vibe morphed into making performances and eventually actual silent films. We get the whole hilarious historical anecdote behind Day of the Catch — the 1915 Greenwich grapefruit-drop prank that reads like perfect slapstick and maybe even birthed the nickname "Grapefruit League" — and hear how that became a 16-minute film he scored in a frenzy. He also teases a newer piece, The Mascot Race, and shares how these projects let him perform in fresh ways (also: yes, we once scored a screening on a Jumbotron before a Mets game — because why not?). Tickets are $15 at rochesterfringe.com and you can peek at more project details at theoldballgame.net, so if you like live music, baseball nostalgia, and goofy physical comedy, come hang with us — I promise we’ll bring the soundtrack and the puns, you bring the peanuts.

Mentioned in this episode:

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Well, that music means it's time for another episode of Just Can't Not.

This is part of our previews for the Rochester Fringe Festival, the ESL Rochester Fringe Festival, happening from September 15th to the 26th in scenic downtown Rochester, New York.

Go to rochesterfringe.com to get your tickets for all the events that you can possibly go to.

And you want to get to as many as you can.

And now, here's a guest guest.

Why don't you introduce yourself?

Hello, everyone.

My name is Jared Engel.

I'm a musician and a filmmaker from Brooklyn, New York, but originally from Brighton.

Yeah, Brighton High School.

Yeah.

So right around the corner and you are doing a show called the Old Ball Game, Live Scored Baseball, Silent Films, which is being held at the historic George Eastman Museum at the Dryden Theater.

Both shows are happening on September 26th, Saturday the 26th, at 11 o' clock and 1 o'.

Clock.

Tickets are $15 at rochesterfringe.com so, Jared, why don't you tell me about the whole concept behind this show?

Sure.

One thing.

11Am and 1pm are those shows.

I don't know if they're 1am shows,.

But that's a good point.

Good point.

Yeah.

This show has evolved over the last several years kind of in a way that no one could have predicted.

Can I give you the origin story of all of this?

Okay, so.

Well, I grew up playing baseball in the Little League, Right.

In Brighton.

And I stopped playing baseball when I was about 15 years old, and I'm now 45.

And myself and a group of musicians decided that it would be a great idea to start playing baseball with all of our free time, which was something I hadn't done or most of us hadn't done in, I guess, in my case, over 20 years.

So we formed a musicians Baseball club.

Yeah, it's kind of.

Yeah, we didn't think too much of it.

But the next year when we, you know, the pandemic kind of stopped being as intense and we all kind of weren't unemployed anymore.

So we had to update the name and we gave ourselves the first word of Formerly.

So Formerly Unemployed Musicians Baseball League, which gave us the acronym of fumble, which also felt appropriate.

Absolutely.

Give it.

I mean, I don't want to sell ourselves too short, actually, you know, we're actually pretty Good.

There's.

We're.

We're in what's kind of called the sandlot baseball movement, which is a bit of a nationwide movement of adults who are playing baseball for nostalgia reasons and also for.

I mean, most importantly, for fun.

It's not too.

It's kind of in contrast to, like, a men's league sort of thing.

You know, it's not.

It's.

It's more for fun.

It's very inclusive of all skills and genders.

And so that's what Fumble is.

Fumble is a sandlot baseball team of predominantly musicians here in Brooklyn, and I happen to run it.

I'm the commissioner of Fumble.

Very nice.

And for the first three or four years, that's all we did.

Once a week we would play baseball, which is plenty and was very satisfying.

And we still are playing baseball once a week.

I realized for the last six or seven years, whenever the weather's warm enough, I play baseball every single week, which is kind of awesome.

It's.

It's a beautiful thing.

Right.

Like, we all.

It's something you.

Like you mentioned sometimes it's something it's easy to lose is just going out and playing.

You know, it's.

It's hard for me as somebody who can be very overbooked with life and everything else is.

Yeah.

It's hard to, like in beautiful weather, it's sometimes hard to even remember, just go take a walk, just to go engage with nature or do something else.

Which is part of the reason why I, like, for me, like, having my outlet for that is curling.

Right.

I'm a curler.

I play once a week during the winter, and I'll go practice on Sundays.

Right.

And maybe play a little competitively here and there.

But having that constant during a certain time of year, you know, is.

Is a kind of thing that's hard to overvalue in many ways.

Like, hey, this is there, and I have to show up because I'm there for others.

I'm there for my team.

I'm there for this group.

I'm here for this whole thing.

I mean, absolutely.

And I.

Yeah.

I mean, not only were we coming out of, you know, being completely isolated in our apartments, but also the.

The.

The.

You know, I hadn't played baseball, as I said, in 20 some odd years.

And, you know, I think for me and for probably all of us, a big part of it is feeling like a kid again.

Yeah.

And I didn't know that baseball was something that was missing in my life actually.

But now looking back on it, I think it really was not just, I mean, I love, I love to play sports.

I, but I hadn't really been doing that.

I've been a professional musician kind of nose to the grindstone for the last 23 years and I hadn't really found this hobby that also is a communal sort of thing like a team sport is, until the pandemic.

So I think there are several good things that happened in the pandemic.

And for me, getting starting this baseball team and rekindling my love of baseball was the big one.

How are your hamstrings feeling?

Pretty decent at this point?

Yeah, I mean, I think everyone in the first season kind of does the obligatory running to first and pulling their hamstring.

That's, that's a pretty common one.

Yeah, I've, I, I don't, I think I probably did that the first season.

I've had my other fair share of injuries, some, some more major than that.

Yeah.

But this, you know, knock on wood, this season's been going well and I've, I've been getting into pitching.

I'm, we're obviously getting sidetracked here.

No, it's all right.

But my curveball, we had a game the other day and my curveball was really breaking.

Nice.

I've got my two seam fastball.

You know, it's, it's, we're, we're and clear we're playing baseball, not softball.

That's a big part of the sandlot baseball movement, you know, I think, and there's no shade to softball, but you know, it wouldn't be the same nostalgic experience, I don't think, if I were to be playing softball because I played baseball growing up as a kid.

So I mean, that's part of this whole thing too is you're looking at, you know, baseball is fundamentally one of the more nostalgic sports.

You know, it has so much rich history in, you know, in America.

Right.

It's one of the fundamentally American sports in many ways like this, this activity has been pervasive in the US for geez, well, over 120 years.

When you're looking at now creating this experience for somebody to engage with baseball and film, how did this whole thing come up for you?

Yeah.

So I know it's kind of, like I said, it's a crazy winding story, but there was for the first three or four years of this Musicians Baseball Club, which we also called the Musicians Baseball Club of Brooklyn.

Kind of a little more of a technical name.

Three or four years of that, just playing.

We were just playing baseball and then one day we were like, well, we're all musicians.

Why don't we start putting on shows as the baseball team?

Which was also kind of a very cool idea because we're musicians who are coming from various different disciplines.

Like there's modern jazz musicians, there's bluegrass musicians, there's traditional jazz musicians, there's rock musicians.

So these are people that we've lived in the same city for over a decade and we had never met, even though we're all musicians.

So baseball kind of brought us together and we said, let's put on a show.

So a friend of one of my teammates booked the show at a venue here in Brooklyn called the Jalopy Theater.

And then after he booked the show, we were like, okay, great.

What is our show gonna be though?

It's a great first thought when you already have a show booked.

What are we gonna do?

It often works that way.

You create the deadline and then hopefully you make yourself figure out the rest.

And what we figured out was, well, why don't we take silent films from 100 years ago and find the silent films that have baseball scenes in them and isolate those baseball scenes, compose our own original scores to those scenes, and then we'll live score those silent film clips at the show, which we did, which was very cool.

And we still do that.

That's part of the old Ball Game still the show that is coming to the Dryden Theater.

So we have a Buster Keaton clip.

There's some very obscure, you know, 100 or 110 year old baseball clips that we live score with our own original scores.

But.

But in that same moment when we had that idea of like finding the historical silent films, I suggested that wouldn't it be cool if we made our own original silent film?

And I was kind of emboldened to do that because I knew that on our team there were actual filmmakers as well as musicians.

It's kind of.

There are various artists of various stripes in Fumble.

And so I said, let's make a silent film of our own.

And everyone agreed that was a great idea.

And I don't think anyone really thought that I was going to really try to follow through with that idea.

And I actually didn't either.

It's a 16 minute silent film that we shot in the middle in a matter of about a month and a half and edited in about a month or less than a month.

And then I composed the entire score for it in about a week and a half.

And we premiered it like from start to finish.

It took about two and a half months, which is kind of insane, but it actually came out.

I don't want to make it sound like it's not good.

It came out very, came out very good.

It's being screened in a UK film festival next month.

Oh, how cool is that?

That's awesome.

Yeah.

And if you want, I can tell you a little bit of the story, please do, of Dave the Catch.

Dave.

It seems to be true.

They had several names, but this is when they're the Brooklyn Robbins.

They were down in Florida for spring training, which I think was something of a new concept back then.

And they had an idea that they wanted to set a record of catching a ball that had been dropped from the furthest height.

Of course, obviously.

And there was a female stunt pilot in Florida at this time named Ruth Law.

I mean, this is the dawn of aviation and there's already a female stunt pilot, which is also remarkable in and of itself.

Yeah, but, but so she, they, they get her to go up and there's various accounts, some say that Casey Stengel, who was a young outfielder on the Robins at this time, went up in the plane with her and you know, of course the assignment was to drop a baseball and the manager was going to catch it.

And somehow, whether it was they ran out of baseballs or maybe this was just a prank, it was probably someone was playing a prank from the get go.

Instead of dropping a baseball, they dropped a grapefruit.

And the grapefruit, the manager caught the grapefruit and of course it exploded on impact.

He didn't have time to realize it wasn't a grapefruit while it was descending in the sky.

And he thought that his hand had just been pulverized and he was covered in his own blood.

And I mean, my friend is telling me this story in New Orleans and I'm like, in my mind, I'm just like, wait a minute.

Yeah, this is the film.

This is it.

Absolutely.

I mean, translates so well to especially silent film.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, that's like as slapstick as you can possibly get.

Totally.

And then one funny detail is that to this day, spring training in Florida, the de facto league is known as the Grapefruit League.

And they say that it's because of this episode that it got the name the Grapefruit League, which nobody knows that now.

I've made a habit.

At least I hope it's a reoccurring thing.

This past spring training, we went down to Florida and we toured around and screened the film and in Florida.

And also screened it on a Jumbotron before a Mets game, actually.

How cool is that?

While sitting on the dugout with our instruments and microphones and live scoring it.

Because that's part of all this.

In.

In a crazy way, I realized I've gone into filmmaking almost only because I. I want to have something to perform.

I want to have something to present.

Live music.

Yeah.

And I'm not exactly like a front.

Like, I'm not like a lead singer, but I can.

I can live score my own films and that's compelling enough for a show.

So before we.

You know what I'm doing?

I gotta play music.

But, you know, I'm making a silent film because, I mean, talking movies are just.

It's just so.

It's so modern.

Like, I can't.

It's the most Brooklyn thing that somebody said in a long time.

I think the word you're looking for is hipster.

Oh, yeah, it's okay, I'll say it.

Like, you're wearing a very specific outfit.

And I'm like, oh, this is like wildly perfectly stereotypical, but also like, so phenomenally exactly you as a person.

Right.

And that's.

That's when creativity is.

Is honest and earnest.

Right.

Is, oh, I just want to perform these great things.

And yeah, oh, we're going to make this.

Because this aids in what we're doing.

And I think that's where fringe and these kind of events.

Right.

Where you get to perform it in front of, you know, a live baseball, you know, at a stadium, like, how cool is that?

And then you get to engage with a fringe audience.

And I think where a lot of these shows end up is honesty and earnestness and genuine care and passion about a subject and then being able to create this awesome experience for people to do.

So.

I'm kind of wondering from a music side, you mentioned that, hey, you're not a frontman.

This isn't what you do.

Where do you live in the music world?

What kind of music do you typically, you know, perform?

Yeah, I've made a career of playing.

I'm primarily an upright bass player and also a four string banjo player.

And I also specialized in bluegrass.

So nowadays I spend a lot of time on the road with a bluegrass banjo player named Tony Trischka who's, you know, I think it's fair to call him a living legend.

So that's quite an honor for me to get to go and travel around with him.

And I've been playing with him for probably 12 or 13 years now.

It's gotta be a fantastic audience that goes to see somebody like that as well.

Because a lot of the people that go into that, like really care about that genre of music.

Mm.

Yeah.

And I mean, and you know, I learn a lot.

Like I said, I'm not exactly a frontman, but I've learned a lot from being accompanying Tony.

I mean, I've accompanied many, many people over the years.

But.

But Tony's a very charming person and a very inspiring individual.

He's very warm and heartfelt and the audience certainly, you know, responds to that in a way that I am really just happy to get to see every time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't know.

And then I play.

I've been playing in various trad jazz bands here in New York and in.

I mean it's, it's.

I've had a long career, honestly at this point, 23 years is kind of, kind of a lengthy getting.

It's medium length at least.

Yeah.

With the hope of doing a lot more.

Yeah.

And.

And now I'm not sure.

I don't really know where this is going, this project.

Yeah.

But all I know is that people are more responsive to this.

I mean, you know, I don't really have.

Now, I think one thing that's important for an artist to have, especially if they're trying to promote themselves or book themselves, is a compelling story to go along with who they are.

And because of the story that I've been kind of outlining here on the podcast, I think now all of a sudden I do without trying to create one, but, you know, I was trying to play baseball, and now all of a sudden I'm a filmmaker.

And by the way, we're.

I'm taking a break right now.

We're in the final stages of my second film, which will also be part of the show on the.

In Rochester.

Oh, that's awesome.

Yeah.

And this one.

It's this one in contrast to Day of the Catch.

So this one's called the mascot race.

This has been kind of dominating my life for the last 10 months.

This one has been quite a struggle, honestly, but I'm getting pretty excited about it.

It's coming out great.

It just took a lot of doing.

So what was part of the process that was surprising to you that ended up being that challenges, obviously, are part of any creative project, but what was it about that was surprisingly challenging?

Well, a lot of it had to do with the.

The way, you know, I kind of had my work cut out for me after I wrote the script, because this one is about three musicians who are racing through New York City on.

In various modes of transportation, trying to get to their gig.

One, they.

They're.

The.

The premise is they were rehearsing in their apartment, and once they said, okay, we got to get to the gig.

We're going to be late for sound check.

And one says, okay, let's ride our bikes.

The other one says, why would.

Why would we do that?

Let's just take the subway.

The other says, why would we do that?

Let's split a cab.

Which this is a very, very common conversation.

Yeah, absolutely.

Amongst New York City.

Every.

Every time you're going anywhere, it's like, okay, how are we going to get there?

So.

So I wrote.

And then, of course, all three of them encounter unexpected, you know, stumbling blocks on their.

On their journey, which is also very common in New York City.

So this is the script that I wrote and which meant that we had to have certain people in certain locations on when the conditions were right and when I.

Originally, I thought we were going to be able to make this all in the winter.

And then I'm going to assume it was the same in Rochester.

This winter was just insanely cold.

There was about a three week stretch where it was, you know, just too cold to be trying to make a movie outside.

Yeah, absolutely.

So that stifled us.

And then, you know, and then, then there was a problem of getting the momentum going again.

But it's.

We got there and actually I'm, I'm very proud of myself because it took just this incredible perseverance to really get this one to the finish line.

And it's a week from tomorrow is the premiere.

You know, that's so cool.

I rented a barge on the Brooklyn waterfront because why not?

It's been so crazy thus far.

Just keep making it crazy.

That's awesome, man.

It's super exciting.

I'm really glad that you're able to dive in and really go down this route of different kind of creative expression.

What a great experience that you have to work through with so many different angles now.

It's just.

I love to hear it.

Thank you.

Thanks a lot.

So, yeah, so let's get the plugs out again.

So the shows are on September 26, Saturday at 11am and 1pm at the Dryden Theater, the George Eastman museum.

Tickets are [email protected].

Is there anywhere else you want people to follow you, Jared?

Sure.

Well, you can find us on www.theoldball game.net.

That's the page for this project.

And you know that's it's not going to get more convenient than coming to see us in Rochester on September 26th.

Absolutely.

Well, Jared, thank you so much for joining the podcast.

Make sure if you want to check out other shows on the Lunchadore Podcast network, go to lunchadore.org and we'll see you out on the fringe.

Thanks, Chris.

This has been a presentation of the Lunchador Podcast Network.

It.