At first, former Chattanooga Lookouts pitcher Andy Paul was too tall and too old to land a role as a ballplayer in “42,” but then he kept throwing strikes in the tryouts.
Paul said he asked film stunt coordinator Allan Graf “if I had to get somebody out or if I just needed to throw strikes.”
“He said I needed to throw strikes and let somebody hit it, so I told him to turn over my baseball card and look on the back,” Paul said. “I had no trouble giving up hits.”
Through his pitching skills (or lack thereof), the 41-year-old Paul, who is in medical device sales and occasionally serves as the official scorer at Lookouts games, landed a part in the film as a pitcher with the Montreal Royals, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ minor league team that Jackie Robinson played on for a season before joining the big-league club.
In the movie, Paul throws a pitch in a spring-training game that’s hit between first and second base, where Robinson (played by Chadwick Boseman) makes a diving catch and doubles a runner off first.