My wife and I caught the premier of Knuckleball! at IFC on Friday, with the filmmakers in attendance answering questions before the show. We wanted to see it because the two gals who made this also made the outstanding documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, which we absolutely loved. Although I really liked both of them, and I loved their work on Joan Rivers, I feel they kind of blew their opportunity with this particular topic.

The main problems with this film were, first, there are way too many extreme slow-motion scenes of guys pitching, guys striking out, guys hitting home runs, spinless balls floating through the air, and so on. It gets really boring. In general, the pacing of the film is rather poor, which was surprising after their fabulous pacing of Joan Rivers. Second, they featured way too many obnoxious sports announcer-types doing their grating, vacuous on-air banter. It’s highly irritating, and you walk away form the film feeling like you just watched a whole lot of ESPN. They would have been better off finding two or three baseball historians and just doing low-key interviews with them about knuckleballers. Lastly and most problematically, the documentary just didn’t have a lot of interesting content about its topic. It felt very repetitive and a bit superficial.

Personally, I think the whole thing would have worked better as a documentary about R.A. Dickey. In fact, I felt Knuckleball! was a little uncertain if it wanted to be a film about knuckleball pitchers or a film about Dickey himself, and it wound up doing neither justice. Dickey is an interesting and engaging guy who had a cool story of getting to the big leagues. He also seemed to be the only knuckleballer featured in the film who actually embraced the film’s quasi-philosophical attitude toward the pitch itself. Wakefield and the other knucklers come across as colossal bores. I would rather have heard Dickey’s story in its entirety, and let the knuckleball act as a framing metaphor of the film, instead of its literal focus.

I guess my expectations were too high for this film. Perhaps most baseball fans will enjoy Knuckleball! for what it is, but I left rather disappointed.