Poker Face Recap: Bad Bet

I am not a baseball person. I get it, in theory — it just doesn’t do anything for me personally. With that in mind, I approached this baseball-centric episode of Poker Face with some trepidation. I didn’t consent to having sports injected into my weekly howcatchem mystery! Thankfully, you don’t really have to care about baseball to appreciate “Hometown Hero,” which is less about the game itself and more about baseball as metaphor for the passage of time. (This year’s Eephus earned praise for a similar thematic approach.) As an acid-induced hallucination of canned-cheese inventor Hiram Lubinski tells Charlie, “Baseball is not just a pastime; it is the passing of time.” Even if the profundity of that message is dampened by sobriety, it still hits.

Before we get to Charlie and her accidental trip, however, we meet the titular hometown hero, Russ “Rocket” Waddell, played by Simon Rex, a once-great pitcher who has since lost his fastball and doomed the Montgomery Cheesemongers to a devastating losing streak. (I have to believe someone involved in Poker Face is a fan of Red Rocket, in which Rex plays a similarly washed-up character. The name feels like a deliberate nod.) Devoted fans still show up at Velvety Canned Cheese Park to watch these minor leaguers play, but there’s little hope of a comeback. In fact, as ballpark owner Lucille (Carol Kane) lets slip, Russ is soon to be out of a job. Manager Skip Dooley (Gil Birmingham) makes it official: The GM has decided to let Russ go, and he’ll have one more starting game left before his forced retirement.

At drinks with four of his teammates, Russ takes his firing reasonably well, if only because he knows it’s the right decision. His career prospects are grim, though, and he needs the income. Aided by the arrival of a fan who bet on the Cheesemongers losing, Russ gets an idea. Since Vegas odds of the team losing their next five games are 22:1, pooling their resources and betting a parlay on losing all five games could earn them a massive payout. They can’t beat time, Russ acknowledges, but they can profit from their own mediocrity. Surprisingly, his teammates go for it, putting in their life savings (never a good idea!) for an eventual $3.1 million payday, split between the five of them. Everything is going according to plan until the fifth game. It’s supposed to be Russ’s final starting game, but he’s replaced at the last minute by a new arrival, Felix Domingo (Brandon Perea), who has real skills and the idealism of someone who’s just been promoted into the minor leagues. He certainly doesn’t endear himself to Russ when he tells the former star pitcher that he thought Russ was going to be the next Roger Clemens, with an implicit “what happened?” hanging over the conversation. “Time gets us all,” says Russ, hitting that theme hard.

Wanting to leave nothing to chance, Goose (Ruffin Prentiss) spikes Felix’s gum with LSD, but the sabotage backfires when the drugs turn him into an even better pitcher. (That’s a nod to Dock Ellis’s no-hitter while on acid, which gets referenced here.) It looks like the Cheesemongers might actually win, but the high-stakes betters pull it together in the ninth inning to throw the game, making the team the biggest losers in minor-league history, and winning Russ and his accomplices enough money to never think about baseball again. They’re not yet in the clear, though, as Goose has forgotten to ditch the evidence of the tainted gum. When Russ goes to retrieve it, he runs into Felix at the pitching machine. He’s caught on to the plan, thanks in part to Carl (Jacob Lynn) being dumb enough to take notes on dividing the winnings in Felix’s notebook. Felix wants the whole $3.1 million or he’ll rat out Russ and the rest of them. “Time gets us all, but you had all the time and the talent as any of the greats,” Felix tells him. “You just blew it.” That’s enough motivation to help Russ get his fastball back — which he discovers when he throws it at the back of Felix’s head, killing him. Instead of calling 911, Russ swaps out the spiked gum and turns the pitching machine to max power, making it look like it was the machine and not Russ who was responsible for the fatal pitch.

Charlie also gets a ball straight to the head, which is how she enters this story. Hoping for community and inspired by a binge-watch of The Office, she’s taken a job as an administrative assistant, only to discover everyone else is working remotely post-COVID. That’s when a baseball flies through the window and knocks her into the path of the Cheesemongers. Once she’s assured Lucille she’s not going to pursue legal action (“I’m a lover, not a suer”), Charlie gets a job as a ball girl. Here’s the community she was looking for, and it ties into her natural love for the downtrodden. Lucille is barely keeping the lights on at Velvety Canned Cheese Park, and Russ is a tragic story of squandered potential. When she hears a fan yell “shake it off, Rocket, you still got it,” she concludes that’s “sadly bullshit.” At the bar post-game, Charlie tries to cheer Russ up, but he’s candid that it’s been years since he’s been able to throw a fastball. Baseball is the only thing he’s ever had a gift for, and now he doesn’t have that. Charlie, no stranger to having an unusual gift, understands his pain.

Charlie seems happy here in Montgomery, but a run-in with Felix sends her to another plane of existence. While she knows he’s not lying about not taking drugs, he’s clearly high out of his mind. Unfortunately, she doesn’t guess that the culprit is spiked gum before she takes a handful for herself. Charlie’s trip is a charming Yellow Submarine–inspired animated sequence in which the aforementioned Hiram (B.J. Novak) urges her to save the ballpark and save the team. That’s enough impetus to put her on the case when Felix is found dead by the pitching machine the next morning. She’s not motivated by any special affection for the kid, but by the responsibility she feels after her LSD trip — a wrongful death suit would shut the ballpark down for good. If Felix was high while using the pitching machine, that would mitigate Lucille’s responsibility. Charlie knows Felix was drugged thanks to his honest denial and her own colorful experience, but when she has his gum tested, it comes up negative. For now, she’s reached a dead end.

This isn’t a hard case to solve, though. She sees a news report about someone winning over $3 million betting on the Cheesemongers’ losing streak, then spots Carl with a solid gold grill. It doesn’t take a special gift to figure out what’s going on. “It’s not like we’re talking criminal masterminds here,” Charlie tells Cheesemongers fan and former cop Benny (Lance Roberts), and I appreciate the show’s acknowledgment that these idiots were always going to incriminate themselves. But while Carl admits that they spiked Felix’s gum, Charlie doesn’t have the proof she needs — there’s no toxicology report attached to Felix’s autopsy. The report does, however, include the detail that the ball that killed Felix must have been traveling at over 100 miles per hour to cause the skull fracture. The machine couldn’t have thrown a pitch that speed, so who’s responsible for the fastball? Charlie gets her answer when Russ tells her, “My fastball’s gone and it’s not coming back,” which she immediately identifies as bullshit. She didn’t want to think Russ was involved with the illegal betting and the spiking of Felix’s gum, mostly because she liked him. (These episodes are always more interesting when Charlie is closer to the killer than the victim.) But when she triggers Russ by calling him a failure who threw his gift away, she gets to see his killer fastball in action — thankfully not at anyone’s head this time.

At the ballpark, it’s Russ’s final game and a celebration of his career, but maybe he doesn’t have to retire. Charlie tells him there’s a Major League scout in the stands, which he can’t help but believe, no matter how unlikely it seems. As he pitches, Russ looks for the scout, and sure enough, there’s someone with a radar gun watching him closely. Charlie gets a cheer for Rocket going, and the crowd’s energy finally helps him deliver a 101 mph fastball during an actual game. That’s exactly what the “scout” was waiting for — he’s really a cop, tipped off by Charlie, and he radios his fellow officers to block the exits. Instead of trying to run, Russ tips his hat to Charlie and continues to play. It’s a surprisingly poignant ending, and this is coming from an avowed nonfan of baseball. There’s something bittersweet about watching Russ, who knows his time is up, throwing another fastball as the crowd continues to cheer his name.

Just One More Thing

• Charlie’s ongoing conversations with Good Buddy give these episodes a nice frame now that Beatrix Hasp has called off her hit, but her reasons for wanting to keep moving feel so much more nebulous now. If she’s found a community in Montgomery, what’s going to make her take off, presumably before the next episode?

• Saying an episode of Poker Face has a stacked cast is almost redundant, but I did want to call out Ego Nwodim, who is so funny as a baseball announcer whose addiction to Velvety Canned Cheese is causing physical side effects. “I’ve been noticing a slight numbness in my right arm,” she says, later sharing that she can no longer see the color green.

• I also got a kick out of B.J. Novak’s cameo once I realized he was conjured out of Charlie’s psyche because she watched all of The Office.

• Noah Segan, who plays Lew, the most reluctant of the betters, is a Rian Johnson mainstay, having appeared in Brick, Looper, The Last Jedi, Knives Out, and Glass Onion.

• I was glad victim-of-the-week Brandon Perea was able to make the most of his screen time with some great drug acting. He leaves quite an impression talking about his vision of God and the angels, who manifest as monkeys.

• One of my favorite bits throughout the episode is Skip reading So You Find Yourself in an Open Marriage and making repeated references to his new (unwanted) relationship status. I laughed out loud at his “and while we’re at it, let’s win one for good old-fashioned monogamy,” followed by Carl’s single, sad “woo.”

• Felix’s gum is obviously inspired by Big League Chew, which was co-created by Tár director Todd Field. It’s true, look it up!