Did Buster Posey appear as a Houston Astro in Mr. 3000?

It is one of those peculiar figments of baseball pop culture: the notion that Buster Posey – three-time World Series champion, 2012 National League MVP, lifelong San Francisco Giant – appeared as a Houston Astros player in Mr. 3000, the 2004 box office flop starring Bernie Mac as an aged star in pursuit of the titular landmark. 

A young Posey appeared in the film, according to lore, including scenes where he supposedly hits and runs the bases for Houston. The yarn has since been regurgitated and aggregated into accepted cyberspace wisdom, with blurry screenshots tweeted by engagement-farming social media accounts and sarcastic debates captivating Reddit.

Take this thread as an example. ‘Did you know 17 yr old Buster Posey appears in the movie Mr. 3000?,’ the poster asks, offering a familiar snapshot from the film purportedly showing ‘Posey’ as an Astros baserunner. The assertion has been upvoted 580 times, with 81 comments dissecting its provenance.

Similar examples can be found on X, where the tale seems to surface on a monthly basis, typically devoid of supporting evidence. Such hallucinations seem easy to dismiss – I mean, the guy doesn’t look identical to a teenaged Posey – but no less authority that IMDb, the ultimate cinematic almanac, lists the Giants’ current president of baseball operations as an ‘uncredited Astros player’ in Mr. 3000. 

Intriguing.

Is it Buster Posey? Did he appear in Mr. 3000? Are the digital breadcrumbs true? Typically interested, I went looking for answers. And I kinda found some. Well, maybe. Perhaps. Decide for yourself.

Firstly, per the Wayback Machine, Posey’s IMDb page did not include reference to Mr. 3000 in February 2017, but did in July 2021. Somewhere between those dates, then, Posey was added to the Mr. 3000 cast, though determining why, and by whom, is a thankless task. Crucially, anyone can edit IMDb pages, rather like Wikipedia entries, and change logs are not public. I contacted IMDb querying the Posey profile and asking for any information on its contributors, but received no reply.

Unperturbed, I next tried to contact those responsible for casting Mr. 3000, liaising with Joni Tackette, who helped recruit for the movie’s interior shots, filmed in New Orleans. Alas, Joni’s team was not responsible for booking any of the baseball players, as those scenes were recorded in Milwaukee, at the Brewers’ Miller Park stadium. Joni suggested tracking down the ‘baseball coordinator’ for the film, and I tried to do just that.

Margie McLamb Holowaty, a sports coordinator on Mr. 3000, said she did not recall much about the exact personnel, and recommended speaking to Robert Miller, the managing director of ReelSports, intimately involved in the movie’s production. Miller did not respond to messages, nor did Mark Ellis, a sports coordinator who worked alongside him.

Nevertheless, I unearthed an old ReelSports post that referenced tryouts for Mr. 3000, with over 1,900 hopefuls whittled to 400 for an intensive camp at Hank Aaron Field in Lincoln Park, Milwaukee. One account of the tryout process – from Jesse Bouman on Instagram – piqued my interest. “They said I was too young to be a Major League player,” wrote Bouman in a caption related to his eventual involvement as a make-believe batboy. Importantly, Bouman tried out as a college freshman, meaning he would have been 18 or 19. And if he was deemed too young to cosplay as a major leaguer, the same likely applied to Buster Posey, who was even younger at the time of filming.

Indeed, contrary to most retellings, Posey was actually 16, not 17, when Mr. 3000 was shot, in the summer of 2003. The Astros scenes were filmed on July 23-24, 2003, at Miller Park, meaning a 16-year-old Posey would have had to travel around 1,000 miles from his home in Leesburg, Georgia, to participate. Such a scenario seems unlikely. 

What’s more, an early casting call, circulated by the Greater Milwaukee Convention & Visitors Bureau, addressed ‘would-be thespians over 18.’ So Posey probably would have been disregarded from the outset, even if he did want to traverse the country in support of Bernie Mac.

I next turned my attention to the Mr. 3000 extras – most of whom played collegiate baseball in Wisconsin. Surely they, keen hardball enthusiasts, would recall Buster Posey, a future Hall of Famer, in their midst. Except, well, they do not – because it probably never happened.

“I have zero recollection of Buster Posey as one of our extras, nor have I ever heard mention that he was on set with us,” said Andrew Prater, a baseball adviser on Mr. 3000 who also had a speaking part as a Red Sox catcher while serving as Bernie Mac’s personal hitting instructor. 

Prater coached the special ability extras, working with Ellis, having previously appeared in The Rookie, a more successful baseball blockbuster. A former professional player, and now the CEO of the Baseball Solutions training academy, Prater knows the sport, and if Buster Posey was ever his teammate, he would remember it.

Still, if the Astros extra was not Posey, it had to be someone, right? Including Prater, I identified 17 ballplaying extras from Mr. 3000, using various sources. Ironically, that cohort includes Steve Guden, who played a San Francisco Giants catcher in the film. Surely fate would have colluded to put Posey in that preordained role – if he was involved at all. Meanwhile, John Vodenlich played an Astros catcher, so those casting the film definitely missed a trick. 

Ultimately, I managed to contact four of the 17 identified extras, and none were able to identify the Astros player in the Reddit screenshot – Posey or otherwise. Scouring photos of each identified extra, I thought former Texas Rangers draft pick Mike Zywica bore the closest resemblance to the Astros player, though efforts to contact him failed.

What, then, can we conclude from my admittedly incomplete jaunt through the Mr. 3000 milieu? Well, on the balance of probability, Buster Posey probably did not appear as an extra in the movie. He could have, in the same way the White Sox could theoretically win the 2025 World Series, but the circumstantial evidence points to it being highly unlikely. Bernie Mac probably had a better chance of actually reaching 3,000 hits – and that just about sums it up.