On August 16, 1920, Cleveland shortstop, Ray Chapman was struck in the head by a pitch from the Yankees’ Carl Mays. Twelve hours later, he died from the injury. Chapman (thankfully) remains the only player in Major League Baseball history to die from an injury sustained while playing. This dramatized documentary uses that event as a framing device for the long-running rivalry between the two clubs, marking this as a sort of inciting incident.
The film opens and closes with commentary about Chapman and how he is still revered among baseball fans in Cleveland. However, Chapman’s tragic story is a relatively short one, so it is working extra hard to carry the narrative of being the start of the Cleveland-Yankees “rivalry”.