Baseball Movies: The Top 10 Best in Cinematic History
By Bill Felber
10. The Bad News Bears
Most baseball memories begin at the youth level. Drawing on this, in 1976 Walter Matthau starred as the disreputable but caring manager of a downtrodden Little League team comprised of misfits. Matthau, a problem drinking former major league pitcher, recruits a couple of unlikely players – a juvenile delinquent in training and a fastballing girl – and turns the team into the least likely championship contender in history.
The first on this list of baseball movies, The Bad News Bears featured teen star Tatum O’Neal as the girl pitcher and Jackie Earle Haley as the troublemaking slugger. Although the league laughingstock at season’s start, the team comes together to make it to the championship game where it plays the ultra-talented and ultra-privileged perennial champions.
It is a plot line that will be repeated across the decades.
The movie was widely praised, mostly for its exposure of the competitiveness of some youth baseball programs. Rotten Tomatoes gave it a rating of 97 percent. Most of the era’s most prominent critics gave it passable, if not always adoring, reviews.
The Bad News Bears was so well received that it spawned two sequels plus a brief television series. Made on a budget of $9 million on sets no more glamorous than some southern California youth baseball fields, it returned $42.3 million at the box office.