Unused The Bad News Bears/baseball op-ed

Monday 6/1/26

Same deal as the Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins pieces.

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The Bad News Bears and when baseball is at its best.

There was a time in America when morning for many involved a quiet and bountiful form of wonder: the reading of baseball box scores.

If you know how to peruse them properly, they contain, in the parlance of Walt Whitman, multitudes. To the uninitiated, they’re just a whole lot of numbers in rows and columns, ciphers sans decoders. But for the cognoscenti, these are ripping yarns of compelling deeds.

The box score has largely been replaced by the reel and social media gab in which so and so is the GOAT, teams compete for “chips,” and every official is necessarily on the take when one’s team loses.

I suspect that people who love box scores are largehearted. Inclined to be keen about nature, reading. A Bogart and Bacall film on TCM. Which isn’t to say that they’re old-timey, but rather that they’re invested in the core components of us being us. The organic human experience.

The modern box score resembles what you would have seen ten years ago, or in 1948, or 1911, save that they include the results of ABS challenges, the powers in charge having decided baseball is so important that meager humans can’t be fully responsible for determining balls and strikes.

Thus, baseball afforded itself a gameshow aspect, which runs counter to what baseball is about. In the spring and summer of 1976, the baseball film The Bad News Bears proved itself quite the hit by how well it understood that humans being human is what makes baseball awesome.

The movie is about a ragtag group of Little Leaguers. They stand on no ceremony and would thumb their noses at the extent to which technology impacts how the game is now played, or “played,” if you prefer.

Hitters step into the box, swing for a homer, and strike out more than Charlie Brown or Reggie Jackson could’ve conceived. Pitchers who know they’re only going to be in there for five innings, try and throw every pitch at 101 mph rather than, say, going about the art of pitching.

What we don’t have much of now are players adept at the playing of baseball. Hitting forty bombs and being a good baseball player aren’t necessarily the same thing. There’s an artistry to baseball, and it’s a human variety. It involves subtlety and understanding how little things lead to big things.

People love to throw the word “parity” around, as though everyone’s similarly good, but parity often speaks to teams and players failing for the same sorts of reasons.

MLB teams produce, for example, a lot of one-dimensional DH types, as if by organizational design, which makes depressing sense, given that fielding has never been less important. The ball isn’t put in play as much as it used to be.

Watch a video of some contest of yore, and you’ll be shocked by the motion and action. First batter of the game chops the ball to the shortstop’s left, he charges and throws off-balance and nips his man at first.

Basic baseball play that would stand out today. You’d be glad you saw that. When we take something preciously individualistic and act as if must be perfect, we forfeit both a healthy perspective and the open-endedness of joy. The clinical takes over. And when was the last time you had fun at your doctor’s?

Look at those kids in The Bad News Bears. Yes, they loved playing, but think of how much differently they’d watch a game and partake as fans themselves. Partaking isn’t consuming. The latter is akin to binging, with details being lost on us.

The poetry and life blood of baseball is in its details. Hitting behind the runner and advancing him to third. Or a batter remembering that the umpire isn’t calling that pitch on the outside corner as a strike today, so he can wait on a ball middle-in and drive that sucker when he gets it.

It’s okay to be human. For matters to be entirely run by humans. For there to be human error. Trust me, you’d love your mom less if she was perfect (and vice versa). That’s not what we want, and it isn’t what’s best for us. And it’s not best for baseball either.