Skip to content

Ad Disclosure

Phillies

Take a Look at This Fake Phillies Team That’ll Be in an Upcoming Tom Hanks Movie

Matt Schultz

By Matt Schultz

Published:

Author and actor Tom Hanks in conversation with Maureen Dowd during the Rancho Mirage Writers Festival opening event at the Annenberg Center in Rancho Mirage on Tuesday, January 29, 2019. Tomhanksrmwritersfest3123
Reuters Connect via IMAGN Images

Destiny Lugardo from Phillies Nation found a real gem on Facebook and shared it to X on Thursday:

Whoa. Look at those Phillies. They look just like real Phillies. How about that.

A little bit of Googling has taught me that these guys are extras in an upcoming movie titled The Comebackers, which is due out next summer. The film is an adaptation of a short story by Dave Eggers that first ran in The Atlantic back in 2023, and tells the tale of “a pitching coach whose life is upended when his major league pitcher is hit in the head by a line drive on the mound, changing everything.” It’s the second collaboration between Tom Hanks and director Marielle Heller after 2019’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, that Mr. Rogers movie that made no cultural impact and wasn’t seen or talked about by anyone I know.

Apparently Eggers’ short story is about a coach on the Giants, but the San Francisco club was subbed out for the New York Mets. I don’t know why. But whatever the reason, it’s probably a good thing. If the film were about the Giants, you gotta imagine we’d be less likely to get these fake Phillies, and that’s really where my interest in this movie begins and ends. It’s interesting to see these fake Phils. Take a good look at these guys:

Looks real as hell. This is good stuff. Look at the attention to detail here:

This looks like a dugout to me. This looks like the stuff you’d see in a dugout. A helmet slightly askew. One duffle bag. Some of kind of purse there or something. I buy this. This is good.

The only thing I don’t buy in the image is this guy:

This is not what MLB players look like. This guy is 90 pounds. Now, it’s possible he’s playing a batboy in the movie, but I don’t know. I feel like he’s too old/tall to be a batboy. Batboys are more child-sized/exude childlike wonder. This man has no childlike qualities at all. He’s just an in-between-sized man, which feels incorrect for a real MLB dugout. They should have consulted Crossing Broad about this. We could have nipped this in the bud. Next time.

But aside from that one misstep, I think these movie guys did a great job with this set, and the photo yielded some pretty good tweets:

Well done, everybody. A good lesson here is that we should check Facebook more often for interesting pictures. I will do this.

Matt Schultz
Matt Schultz

Matt Schultz is a comedy and sports writer from Philadelphia. He’s written extensively for ClickHole, The Onion, and Conan O’Brien’s Team Coco. His work has been featured in Vulture, Deadspin, The A.V. Club, Paste Magazine, and other publications. Much of his sports journalism can be found on college basketball websites that don’t exist anymore (PhilaHoops Heads rise up…) email: M.Schultz@sportradar.com