Blame it on our seeing "Field of Dreams" at too impressionable an age, but baseball movies featuring fathers and sons get us every time. And so it goes with "The Lost Son of Havana," a surprisingly effective doc about the displaced Cuban pitcher Luis Tiant that premiered Thursday at Tribeca.

Jonathan Hock's documentary offers a deceptively simple premise: young Cuban pitcher comes to U.S. just after Cuban revolution, enjoys fruitful Major League career but can't return home to see his family until he (and a documentary crew) finagle spots on a baseball trip back nearly fifty years later, when much of said family is gone or much older.

Tiant can be a little quiet and reflective as a subject; you don't know if he's too wise or too pained by life to say much, and sometimes it seems Hock should go deeper to get at his essence.  But the moments Tiant reunites with his family are quietly powerful, genuinely heartfelt stuff in which he laments with relatives time lost and lives passed by. And they're juxtaposed kind of brilliantly with dramatic on-field scenes from Tiant's comeback-filled career. (An injury robbed the reticent, roly-poly, cigar-puffing hurler of his fastball at the tender age of 29, so he developed new pitching motions that enabled him to play another decade, including three 20-win seasons and two heart-stopping World Series shutouts with the Red Sox in the 1970's).

Hock captures some great slice-of-life moments in Cuba — a park where locals gather to argue about the best Cuban baseball players of all time, for example. And the film has one of the most memorable scenes in a recent doc not named "Man on Wire" — George McGovern, on a trip to Cuba, convinces Fidel Castro to let Tiant's father (at one time a pitcher in the Negro Leagues who had fallen on hard times back in Cuba) make the trip from Cuba to the U.S.. Tiant Sr. eventually travels to Fenway and throws out the first pitch before a game his son starts, in a moment that's right up there with Costner's "Wanna have a catch, Dad?" at end of aforementioned sentiment-filled 80's baseball pic.

"Lost Son of Havana" was exec produced by the Red Sox-worshipping Peter and Bobby Farrelly, who actually ended up down in Cuba playing a game to rationalize the trip to the Cuban government. Bobby Farrelly at the Q&A (where, incidentally, Larry David wandered in, by himself, slightly foggy, it seemed, but applauding vigorously to several comments made by the Farrellys and Tiant): "You saw these guys who play against us, who cleaned our clock, and we gave them our hats and our shoes and our gloves because they didn't have anything — our team literally walked on the bus in our underwear — and it was the most moving thing you could imagine, because they loved this game but they didn't even have gloves or bats to play it with."

There's something wistful about the film, not just the shots of 70's baseball games on long summer evenings, but the whole pace of life Hock captures down in Cuba, hardships and all. ESPN just bought the movie for a summer airing. Outside of visting the ballpark, we couldn't imagine a better way to spend a sultry August evening.