Wednesday Minute
No. 69 | April 7, 2010

Play Ball

Our theme this week
Baseball movies

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   Documentaries:  The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg (1998)
Tuesday         —   Biopics:  The Pride of the Yankees (1942)

Today’s feature
Kids at Play

Best in class
The Bad News Bears (1976)

For the real fan
The Sandlot (1993) — A new kid in town joins the neighborhood gang for a “magical” summer of baseball and battle with the mean dog on the other side of the fence.  This appears to be a favorite with many fans, but it feels contrived to me.  The charming bunch of kids are charming only in the way some adults think charming kids are supposed to be (adults who forgot that kids can be tiresome too).

The Bad News Bears

The kids are misfits, and the biggest kid of all is the coach, Morris Buttermaker.  That would be the one-and-only Walter Matthau.  It’s hard to imagine anyone else playing an alcoholic in charge of kids and pulling it off as he did.

Hollywood remade the film a few years ago but it doesn’t stand up to the original.  The 1976 movie isn’t especially pretty—a low-rent affair about as shiny as the beater of a car that Buttermaker drives around town—but it has an authentic feel that’s hard to replicate.  I understand the kids were able to ad lib while shooting scenes, and that may be one reason why they actually seem real.  They’re foul-mouthed, they’re petulant, they’re smart, and they’re funny.  They look and sound like kids I remember from growing up, not like kids in most other movies.  That said, I don’t recall a Tatum O’Neal in our neighborhood, but she would have been welcome.

The Bad News Bears was a sleeper hit when it was released.  It feels today like an artifact of the ’70s, a time when the pace of life was slower, it was simpler to be kid, and it was all right to poke fun at the hypercompetitive world of sports.  The movie is a good reminder:  It doesn’t matter if you win or lose, it’s how you have fun that counts. 

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The Bad News Bears
26-0

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The Bad News Bears
Walter Matthau, Tatum O’Neal

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Quote of Note
“Hey, I tried to teach you how to handle comics in the sixth grade, but oh no.  You wanted to play Little League instead.”
—Brodie (Jason Lee), Mallrats (1995)

…58…59…60.