Marq Evans collected baseball cards as a kid. Ken Griffey Jr. and Bo Jackson, especially the painted portraits in the Donruss Perez-Steele Diamond Kings collection, were favorites.
“I loved those cards when I was 9, 10, 11, 12 years old,” says Evans (’03 Busi.), who rediscovered his old Diamond Kings in June 2022 when his son Jude, then 12, “started falling in love with baseball.”
Evans pulled his old collection out of the garage. “It was a portal back to my childhood,” he says. “I hadn’t thought about them in a long time. My first thought was: I wonder what the story of this artist is?”
Evans answers that question—and tells the story of the history of baseball—in his new documentary film The Diamond King, which hit Apple, Amazon, and more April 25, 2025. On April 26, the film’s narrator, actor John Ortiz, throws the first pitch at the Mariners v. Marlins game. April 27, Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture hosts a screening and Q&A with Evans, artist Dick Perez—the “Picasso of Baseball” and subject of the film—and more.
Perez might be most well-known for painting the Diamond King cards between 1982 and 1996. But he was the official artist of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and the Philadelphia Phillies, and he has painted the entire history of the game.
“He talks a lot about fortuity, how one thing leads to another, and how that created opportunity for him,” says Evans, who Googled the artist after rediscovering his old Diamond Kings. The search took him to his website, which lists contact info. Evans reached out right away. He was going to be in New York that August and arranged to meet Perez at his place in Brooklyn. “We hit it off right away.”
A Kickstarter campaign raised just over $59,000 for the film, which took two years to produce. It was officially released in January at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, where it was rated one of “The Best of the Fest” by the audience and jury-award winners. That was the first time The Diamond King was shown to a general audience. Before the film festival, there were sneak peeks last summer at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri.
Perez “battled adversity as a young kid, followed his dreams, and never gave up,” Evans says. “At 84, he still does what he does. The way he shows up and goes to work and paints every single day, even now, and the way he carries himself as an artist is inspiring to me. I’m excited to introduce more people to his art and to him as a person.”
The Diamond King is Evans’s third feature-length documentary. Claydream, which details the rise and fall of Will Vinton, the “Father of Claymation,” came out in 2021. His first major project, 2015’s The Glamour and the Squalor, documents the life and times of famed Seattle deejay Marco Collins, credited with popularizing bands such as Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and others.
Evans fell into filmmaking when his stepfather died. He and his stepbrother, Kevin Noland of Spokane’s Spirit Lake Pictures, created a short video for the memorial. Soon, they were flying back and forth from Haiti, working on a documentary about the catastrophic January 12, 2010, earthquake and its aftermath. “We’re finally finishing the film after 15 years,” says the Bremerton-based Evans, who was born in Yakima and grew up in Tri-Cities. He earned his master’s of fine arts in film/cinema/video studies in 2020 from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and teaches filmmaking part-time at Olympic College.
Evans had been working on a true crime film documenting a woman’s 1986 disappearance in Kodiak, Alaska. It hasn’t yet been picked up. “We pitched it like crazy and many times it felt like it was on the one yard line to get financed but it just never happened. It’s still a story I’m really interested in and believe in,” says Evans, who’s also working on a documentary film about Bigfoot that’s slated to début next year.
Meantime, he’s excited about the launch of The Diamond King, written by New York Times bestselling author Joe Posnanski. Besides baseball, the script covers universal themes: marriage, friendship, business. It’s an immigrant’s story. A love story. The story of a man’s relationship with his mother.
When Perez was 5, his dad died in his native Puerto Rico. When he was 6, his mother sent him to America. She put him on a plane—alone—to live with distant relatives in Harlem. That’s where he fell in love with baseball. “He found the Yankees. Mickey Mantle became his favorite player. And that’s how he really began to learn about America. He learned English and made friends because of baseball.”
Five new Perez paintings are featured in the film. “I just think there’s a lot to learn from his story,” Evans says. “It’s a story about someone who’s trying to be the best version of themselves that they can be. He exemplifies that in both his work and his life.”
Dick Perez painting (Courtesy The Diamond King)
Podcast
The art of baseball: Dick Perez, Marq Evans, and The Diamond King