Listen, Lupus, you didn’t come into this life just to sit around on a dugout bench, did ya? Now get your ass out there and do the best you can.
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The Bad News Bears is amazing. It’s still hilarious, and at its core, it’s as socially relevant today as it was when it was released in 1976. It’s an essential baseball movie, an essential sports movie, and an essential movie in general.
It was a truly unique onscreen depiction of baseball when it came out. Before it, cinema sanitized the game — a practice that often happens even still. It’s common when baseball is projected on the silver screen that the imperfections have been airbrushed out, a lens filter gives the whole affair a heavenly glow, and bad words are overdubbed with more family-friendly alternatives. The functioning belief was that the game is only beautiful when it’s pristine and unblemished.
Then, The Bad News Bears came along to make clear that baseball is beautiful even when it’s dirty and irreverent. Maybe especially then.
Irreverence is an underrated quality. The world is tilted against the little guys, the outsiders, the freaks and weirdos, the marginalized. The systems and authorities that govern our world aren’t built for us. Irreverence is the appropriate response to the powers that be. The people with money and power walk all over us, treat us like shit, and then, if we’re lucky, offer a half-hearted apology.
There’s only one sane reaction, which can be summed up in the immortal words of the great poet Tanner Boyle: “Hey Yankees… you can take your apology and your trophy and shove ’em straight up your ass!”
The film itself, and the characters within the film, refuse to let baseball belong to the establishment. [Fun fact: the film was released at the peak of Portland Mavericks baseball.] The team refuses to toe the line of respectability which everyone else assumes to be a given. They reject the idea that some authority gets to dictate what makes the game beautiful, and how a good life should be lived. You could definitely pick a worse movie to glean life lessons from.
And speaking of life lessons, I came away with three while watching it this time around.
- “This quitting thing, it’s a hard habit to break once you start.”
- When success comes, it can be tempting to join the dark side. But in the end, it’s not worth winning if it means playing by their rules.
- We’re always going to be afraid of fucking things up, but, “you didn’t come into this life just to sit around on a dugout bench, did ya? Now get your ass out there and do the best you can.”
Next Up: The Stratton Story — Jimmy Stewart plays real-life pitcher Monty Stratton, who lost a leg in a hunting accident and still fought his way back to pitch in the minors.
