It's hard to know what viewers might consider a genuine spoiler for a mystery movie as meticulously crafted as "Wake Up Dead Man," the third and latest installment in director Rian Johnson's "Knives Out" series. The murder mystery franchise features intricately plotted puzzles rife with red herrings, locked rooms and other delightfully devilish twists and turns, so even the smallest detail is fair game to have important implications. Even so, I don't think it would meaningfully alter your deductions to learn that, in the film, a character watches a baseball game.
But just to cover our bases, here's a Spoiler Alert that minor plot details of "Wake Up Dead Man" lay ahead. Proceed at your own risk.
With that out of the way, let's take a closer look at the game in question. It would actually be more accurate to say games, because Thomas Haden Church's character Sampson is shown watching two different Cubs games in the film, including during a pivotal scene on Good Friday (April 18) 2025.
Why the Cubs, when the movie is set in upstate New York? Well it wasn't always the plan, as Johnson explained in an interview on the MLB Network Podcast released on Sunday.
"I wanted the movie to be set in 2025. And to be clear, we shot the movie in '24, so it was set in the future," Johnson said. "Through most of editing, we had slugged -- I think we actually slugged in a Dodgers game on there just as a temporary thing, because that game hadn't happened yet. And so we were waiting until the very last moment of post-production, until we had that specific Cubs game that happened, that I was like, 'OK, this one will work.' It happens the day of the murder. It happens at exactly the right time. Luckily there wasn't a rain delay."
Indeed, the Cubs are the only team that routinely schedules day games on Fridays, so when you need a Good Friday afternoon game, you make your character a Cubs fan.
Sampson's Cubs fandom is established early in the movie, when a brief shot of his old-school rabbit-ears TV shows then-Twins utility man (and future Cub) Willi Castro making an out against Drew Smyly on a sun-splashed day at Wrigley Field, pegging it as the top of the fifth inning of this Aug. 7, 2024, Chicago victory. Interestingly, Castro hit a flyout to center field in real life, but the action shown in the movie splices in a shot of the right side of the infield, something more akin to a groundout to second. Just a little artistic license, one presumes.
The Good Friday game gets much more screen time for reasons relevant to the film's plot, but the game itself happened to be worthy of an Oscar on its own. The Cubs beat the D-backs, 13-11, in a record-setting slugfest that featured two massive comebacks, 21 runs scored across three consecutive half-innings and seven combined home runs (including two grand slams).
Arizona erased a 7-1 deficit by scoring 10 runs in the top of the eighth, but then let the Cubs climb right back in front by allowing three homers in the span of four batters in the bottom of the frame. The D-backs brought the tying run to the plate with two outs in the ninth before Ryan Pressly (remember him on the Cubs?) retired Corbin Carroll to finally end it.
It was a historic game on several fronts: The D-backs became the first team to score 10-plus runs in an inning and lose since the Royals on Aug. 23, 2006, while the Cubs became the seventh team in the past 125 years to allow 10-plus runs in an inning and win. The 16 combined runs in the eighth inning were the most in one frame in Wrigley Field history (since 1914).
“I mean, it's unbelievable,” Randal Grichuk said afterward. “I don't know if I've ever been a part of a game like that.”
So much else happened in the 2025 season that might have pushed this barnburner to the back burner of your memory, but we can thank "Wake Up Dead Man" and its mystery murderer for giving us a good excuse to revisit it.