God Save the Fan by Will Leitch

You have to check what it means whenever a sports columnist says they’re there to tell the TERRIBLE TRUTH! about THE WAY THINGS REALLY ARE! Most of the columnists who make such claims aren’t sportswriters. They’re pundits. What they do is write in as bombastic a way as possible in order to stoke emotions and set their readers off. And most of them don’t have any kind of offbeat thought to give – they just regurgitate obvious drivel with the temperament of a whiny seven-year-old.

Will Leitch is one of those rare sportswriters who DOES make it his mission to tell readers the terrible truth. Leitch has been one of my favorite sportswriters since I first discovered his work in 2008, and it’s not because he has the sort of verbosity that can rival a classic British novelist. He doesn’t, and he’s well aware of that fact. What Leitch has to offer are his ideas. Leitch was the man who created the popular sports blog Deadspin, a name which has become reviled in serious “journalistic” circles but popular among fans. Leitch’s point in creating Deadspin was to put the fun back into sports. Unfortunately, that means Deadspin is frequently rife with fluff pieces. But the site does employ real journalists, and when those journalists write about serious issues, they’re frequently on point. Even on lighter subjects, Deadspin’s writers can capture oddities which sports fans usually don’t catch. In any case, Leitch himself left Deadspin a long time ago, but his writing hasn’t changed much. And when I say he offers his ideas, what he does is verbalize a lot of cold, hard truths about sports – things that every fan knows to be true, but vehemently denies because they play counter to our idealist sports narratives.

Leitch’s book God Save the Fan is more or less of a Deadspin offshoot. It’s an essay collection of material that was never put up on Deadspin. And like Deadspin itself, it’s semi-serious and you can find a lot of little truths even in pieces that aren’t so serious. Leitch seems to have a tongue-in-cheek approach toward his own profession, and there are several pieces in God Save the Fan where he writes about the realities of being a sportswriter and beats up the stock phrases sportswriters use to justify their increasingly useless work. He writes with a frankness about sportswriting which is as surprising as it is refreshing, and takes just about every form of sports journalism down a peg. ESPN pundits are a particular target, but he also makes room to explain that fantasy sports experts have access to all the same knowledge as the plebes. Leitch writes that his once-idealistic view of sportswriting was changed by when college basketball legend Robert “Tractor” Traylor waved his penis at a crowd of journalists who were interviewing him.

Some of the other ideas Leitch covers in other pieces mention the following:

• We hate the Olympics and the United States is really the villain
• Sports people don’t have anything salient to say about world-shaking tragedies
• When there’s a strike in a sports league, neither side deserves our sympathy
• Gilbert Arenas matters more than Lebron James
• Sometimes it’s worth it to turn down a sports ticket if you’re a fan in enemy territory

God Save the Fan is divided into four sections: Players, owners, media, and fans. Ironically, it’s the media section where Leitch deploys the most venom. Most of it is reserved for ESPN and the army of pundit puppets that gets paraded out to scream in viewers’ faces. Woody Paige and Skip Bayless get hit the hardest, but Leitch has plenty to say about Chris Berman (whose “You’re with me, leather” line is a source of endless fascination to Leitch), Stephen A. Smith, and Jay Mariotti (who, just a couple of years after the release of God Save the Fan, was charged with domestic battery and subsequently erased from popular media). Leitch writes about owners more matter-of-factly, like they’re more of a force of nature than anything. There’s one piece in God Save the Fan about the crimes of Baltimore Orioles owner Peter Angelos, and another listing Leitch’s picks for the five worst sports owners ever. (Chicago Blackhawks owner Bill Wirtz is on that list.)

In the other sections, about the players and the fans, Leitch is downright animated at times. And why wouldn’t he be? The players are the visible stars of a sports franchise while the fans are the ones who really make the sports world go round. In that section, Leitch stresses the humanity of professional athletes, writing various bits about how they’re no more interesting than regular people, about why Gilbert Arenas is more relatable than Lebron James, and about his appreciation of Ben Roethlisberger’s drinking habits. (He fails to mention Roethlisberger’s sexual assault charges.) It’s the player section of God Save the Fan which was the impetus for creating Deadspin: Humanizing professional athletes. And as for the final section, which is about fans, well, Leitch is a fan himself and he doesn’t even try to hide it. He writes about finding a bar in New York City where he can watch his beloved St. Louis Cardinals about why fantanking is a bad idea, and about why a true fan will never switch his team even if the team moves. (Note: Leitch is from a small Illinois town called Mattoon and therefore was never affiliated to any of his teams by geography, so I’ll grant him a pass on this. But it doesn’t change the fact that he’s totally wrong and that, if you’re from a major league professional sports city, you absolutely SHOULD switch teams if yours moves.) He writes about the difficulty of trying to separate your fantasy sports team from your heart.

Although Leitch does have a lot to say in God Save the Fan, there are certain parts where it looks like he was rushing to meet the deadline. He falls back on a handful of lists. There are lists devoted to the worst sports owners, the worst ESPN personalities, a list of journalists who were blackballed by ESPN, and his guide for how to act when attending a live baseball game is presented in a list format. One of the longer bits is a list of the crimes ESPN has committed. And Leitch dedicates a whole other piece to Cleveland television reporter Carl Monday. The Carl Monday bit doesn’t have anything at all to do with sports. It’s entirely about a segment Monday once created about catching someone jacking off in a library and publicly humiliating him, which ended up backfiring on Monday when he inadvertently turned into the face of everything wrong with public moral puritanism. Leitch admitted that the story has no connection to sports, and that the only reason he was able to run it on Deadspin at all was because Monday’s victim happened to be wearing an Ohio State shirt.

At the end of every section, there’s a funny little glossary covering some of the major personalities mentioned in every section. These are the parts where Leitch seems to be enjoying himself the most. The glossaries are where Leitch presents a handful of some of the big names and gives tongue-in-cheek descriptions of who they are. He has a bad habit of letting his small town roots show up in a bad way sometimes – his various descriptions of some of the people he names “not being black, not really” were a little unsettling, and he shows a subtle streak of sexism in them too – in attempts at being clever which really make him look like the bad kind of redneck. (Note: God Save the Fan was released in 2008, and Leitch has long since matured out of this.) The best glossary is the final glossary in the book, which covers the fans. How do you cover the fans? Well, Leitch goes through every baseball, football, and basketball team and describes their stereotypical fans. Some of these teams don’t have stereotyped fans, so Leitch gets creative. The only disappointing bit about this is that Leitch passes on hockey stereotypes, since he admits to not knowing enough about the sport. (Blackhawks, Chicago: Of COURSE they were fans before 2010! No, they never for a second thought the team moved to North Carolina or Arizona or mistook the AHL’s Chicago Wolves for an NHL team! Sabres, Buffalo: Believes the NHL is actively conspiring against the market that watches more televised hockey than any of the others. Thinks Edmonton’s gamut of first overall Draft picks is part of an effort to destroy the Sabres, no matter how often the Oilers have blown it. Refuses to believe the 1999 Final ended, and is ready to resume whenever Dallas is.)

I think this pretty much says everything about God Save the Fan, but there’s IS one more thing I have to mention about it: It was released way back in 2008, and the time-centering nature of essay collections creates a certain dissonance with this one. Lord knows God Save the Fan still makes for a fun, interesting read, but it ultimately pops up in a narrow window of sports history. You can read it and get a sense of things that seemed big back in 2008 – Leitch writes about steroids and gay athletes. We’ve definitely made our peace with the former and the latter isn’t the great whopper it was 11 years ago. He mentions Ryan Freel in a glossary; Freel, tragically, became another mental health statistic upon his recent suicide. He mentions the Seattle Supersonics in the fan glossary and jokes about Sonics fans wondering how much flights to Oklahoma City cost. (This isn’t funny to Seattleites. Natives and long-termers feel every bit as cheated as New York City, Baltimore, and Cleveland, and the only reason Seattle isn’t recognized as such is because of its status as a rich, West Coast transplant haven rather than a dead factory city in the Midwest. Both Clay Bennett and Howard Schultz are berserk buttons; Bennett WILL be lynched if he ever visits Seattle again, and it’s a testament to Schultz’s personal security squad that he HASN’T been.) Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens were still marketable, there was still debate about whether or not Tom Brady was better than Peyton Manning, It’s actually pretty conceivable for someone born in the 21st Century to pick up God Save the Fan and wonder what Leitch was talking about. It’s certainly fun to pick it up as a Millennial and suddenly read about some odd, long-forgotten bit of sports which seemed like a big deal at the time.

So… Yeah. God Save the Fan by Will Leitch. It’s worth a quick read, but it IS popcorn. Leitch has matured a lot since its publication, and in fact some of his more recent writings have walked back chunks of it. (Unlike a lot of other sportswriters and pundits – notably Bill Simmons – Leitch appears to have wholeheartedly embraced his maturity.) The sports world has also changed a lot. Some of God Save the Fan’s insights are still incredibly astute – his description of a football team being constructed in a way which makes every player both irrelevant and irreplaceable is something that really stuck with me – but as a book, it’s more of a relic than anything. It’s a book that’s squarely within its time, so it doesn’t offer anything new to people who were around for everything Leitch wrote about in it.

Open by Andre Agassi

For all of its reputation as a country club sport for people who sit down for tea breaks between lobs, tennis is brutal. Tennis is a pure form of pugilism. The first time I opened my mind enough to give tennis a chance and watch a match, I knew exactly what I was seeing: Two people in a survival struggle. Two fighters out to kill each other. It wasn’t a sporting event, it was combat. And for the imagery of tennis being a strict province of rich people, there are a good number of players who come up from situations not dissimilar to those of other pugilists. The Williams sisters came from the bad part of Los Angeles. Jimmy Connors was raised in East St. Louis. Andre Agassi is from working class Las Vegas.

Like far too many other pugilists, Agassi wasn’t magically drawn into pugilism out of fascination or curiosity or enjoyment. He was yanked into it forcefully and legged it out in order to survive. In Open, his autobiography, Agassi is open about a fact tennis aficionados wouldn’t expect about him: He hates tennis. Since the release of Open, Agassi seems to have at least made his peace with his sport and accepted his lot as a tennis lifer. A recent news report said he’s acting as a coach. He appears in ads for major tournaments, still shows up at those tournaments, and posts occasional updates about tennis on his social media accounts. (Although most of his social media updates revolve around his family, and his Twitter feed is full of pictures of them at Vegas Golden Knights games.) (PS: You totally need to follow the Golden Knights on Twitter – they run the greatest account in sports, ever.)

Agassi loves the movie Shadowlands and is a deep introvert who loves a quiet evening in with close family and friends. Yet, the media painted him as a rebellious bad boy. Open is a portrait of a man who had everything one could ever want, except a sense of who he was. The thing about Open that’s most impressive is how it manages to avoid every athlete autobiography trope that ever existed. Throughout the book, the picture that Agassi forms about himself is one of a man who is deeply confused about how a basic human being functions. His entire modus operandi is to make major decisions by wondering to himself, “This is what normal people are supposed to do, right? This is how normal people act, isn’t it?”

Open is the story of what happens when a proper childhood gets deferred in favor of a demanding parent’s dream. Andre Agassi never wanted to play tennis, let alone go professional or become the world’s first-ranked player. In the opening chapters of the book, Agassi comes off as, well, I don’t want to say nerdy, but low-key and shy. His father was a tennis obsessive who demanded Andre stand out in the yard hitting tennis balls every day before school, then every day after school until night. In the middle of the seventh grade, Agassi was pulled out of school and enrolled against his will in the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy. His father was inspired to put Andre there after seeing a news report on it… Which exposed it as what was basically a tennis sweatshop that employed child labor. Agassi, in short, was robbed of a normal childhood and spent decades forcing himself on and off tennis courts out of survival. Tennis was the only thing he knew. Agassi’s entire life was fallout.

The idea of how normal people function is a constant theme throughout Open because it was what Agassi wanted most. One of the notable things about this book is that it doesn’t act as any sort of advocate for the life of a professional athlete. This isn’t a typical excesses-and-waste autobiography. Instead, it’s about one man’s search for inner peace and identity in a sport he hates. Since tennis was his life rather than his work, Agassi describes how he left all of his emotions on the court, fighting for every point as if his own life was on the line. He vividly describes the way tennis constantly put pressure on him and shows a sort of jealousy toward his great rival, Pete Sampras, whom he describes as more or less of a robot. He describes the way his fame from his “Image is Everything” ad affected him in a bad way, and how his primary concern during many matches was his wig staying in place.

The way tennis was shoved down Agassi’s throat ended up with a terrible side effect: When Agassi came of age, he had no clue how adults are supposed to think or act. Open isn’t a book about psychology, but there are deep psychological undertones to it. Why is he here, how does he act, and what does he do in various situations? After getting let off with a lenient punishment by a judge at one point, Agassi leaves the impression that he almost wanted the punishment just to see what it would be like. When he marries Brooke Shields, you get the impression that he was proposing because it was expected that a man his age be married. In the meantime, no one ever teaches him how to find people to trust, and so he repeatedly fails to find a team which is more than an entourage. At some point, he spent time with some loser who called himself Slim and used meth. He was lucky to get off lightly doing that, but he ran around the tennis circuit for awhile tanking matches.

Agassi does learn his lessons, though, and it’s at this point that the comeback which turned him into tennis royalty begins. Finally finding a caring father figure in his trainer Gil and a good coach in tennis legend Brad Gilbert, Agassi managed to turn his career around to such a point that he became the oldest first-ranked tennis player in history. He also finds his wife, fellow tennis great Steffi Graf, the only person who could possibly relate to the kind of pressure Agassi faced. Things do turn and end well for him, if not with the sort of anonymity he craved.

Autobiographies like this are rare things. Usually there’s a set group of tropes that athletes adhere to, and Open avoids them all. If an athlete promises to tell a truth that “crazy” or “unvarnished,” those are usually buzz words for a 200-page tome about how awesome the athlete is. In avoiding those tropes, Open pulls off the incredible trick of reminding readers that professional athletes are ultimately the one thing we forget they are: Human. It’s because of this that Open immediately found a spot on my list of all-time favorite sports books.

Football for a Buck by Jeff Pearlman

Jeff Pearlman has written eight books, and along that line, he’s turned into one of my favorite sports book authors. Despite that output, though, there are just two ways to classify his books: One is biographies, and the other is narratives about extraordinary teams with players of both incredible skill and questionable character. Football for a Buck, Pearlman’s eighth, is new territory for him, and it has a clunkiness and a brokenness which doesn’t put it among his best works. Now, I’m not saying it’s BAD; it’s quite entertaining, and as far as Pearlman’s work goes, it’s not the worst of his output. (That would be The Rocket that Fell to Earth. Pearlman admitted that the Clemens bio was painful territory for him, and that he hated writing it.)

Football for a Buck is an ambitious venture by Pearlman’s standards because he’s not looking to tell the story of a single person or team. He’s looking to tell the story of an entire league, the United States Football League. Unfortunately, telling the story of a sports league can be difficult because there’s more than the usual stories to tell. Trying to write a book about a league consists of getting viewpoints from the league boardroom, the individual team boardrooms, the individual team locker rooms, and the various media outlets that covered it. One of the things they teach you in rudimentary writing classes is that all stories have to have focal points to create a way to ground them and get everything else to circle it in some way. This can be tricky if the subject is a sports league, but it’s still doable. The supreme masterwork on NFL history, Michael MacCambridge’s America’s Game, used eight of the league’s oldest teams as a way to center the story. Brett Forrest’s Long Bomb, a history of the XFL, was centered around the Las Vegas Outlaws and their enigmatic running back, known as He Hate Me. (It probably helped that Forrest was also working with a much smaller sample size; the XFL only lasted for a single year.)

The biggest problem with Football for a Buck is that it lacks such a grounding. What it has is a handful of characters that pop up throughout – Herschel Walker, Donald Trump, Bill Oldenburg, Jerry Argovitz, John Bassett, and a few others – but as an entity, you’re not really going to get to KNOW the USFL. As far as a narrative history goes, Football for a Buck is clunky, and the lack of a real base means Pearlman regularly goes off on weird, seemingly offhand tangents. He spends two random chapters covering the Arizona Outlaws and the San Antonio Gunslingers, constantly yanks lights from the New Jersey Generals and Los Angeles Express, tells too little about the Philadelphia/Baltimore Stars, and frequently doesn’t go into enough detail to let you sufficiently know these teams. We don’t get to know a whole lot about the Denver Gold or the Oakland Invaders or the Boston/New Orleans/Portland Breakers, and there are countless moves which get left out. The Chicago Blitz is woefully underdeveloped despite a general manager and head coach who moved on to build Super Bowl teams in the NFL. Pearlman shines his best in this book when he goes into depth about the Outlaws and Gunslingers, and that makes me think Football for a Buck would have been most effective had each chapter told the story of one of the league’s individual teams. Of course, I suppose a format like this would have cut out some of the more unique aspects of the league’s boardroom history.

Sports history veterans know at least something about the history of the USFL. It featured a lot of players who moved up to dominate in the NFL, including Steve Young and Jim Kelly. Donald Trump owned a team and was trying to use the league as a stepping stone to ownership of an NFL franchise. (According to this book, NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle not only rejected Trump’s attempt to own an NFL team, but was very blunt about doing so.) The NFL has seen a couple of professional football leagues rise up and try to challenge it over its existence – most notably the AFL and the AAFC – but the USFL holds a special place in the hearts of those who remember it. Then again, the USFL was never meant to compete with the NFL. It was conceived as a quirky, fan-friendly football alternative that ran during the spring. Then Donald Trump got ahold of the New Jersey Generals and blew the whole thing to hell when he tried to get the league on a fall schedule.

Anyone who reads my Every Team Ever blog knows that I refer to the developmental years of a nascent sports league as the Crazy Cousin Years. The USFL was a league that was all Crazy Cousin Years, throughout its whole three-year existence. Teams moved every which way, there was one instance when an entire franchise got swapped, projected superstars got signed to giant contracts which they didn’t live up to, marquee teams were ignored, and small market teams like the Jacksonville Bulls and Memphis Showboats drew. Since there’s no main focus, it’s tough to get ahold of what was doing what and when. The story of the Pittsburgh Maulers, for example, is presented in a way which leaves readers thinking the team was cancelled right in the middle of its only season. If you’re looking for any sort of groove during the narration, good luck finding it. Pearlman’s style is as breezy as it ever was, but try not to get too comfortable with anything Pearlman looks like he’s starting to cover at length, because a switch will be coming soon.

The parts of Football for a Buck where Pearlman is the most comfortable is when he falls into the tropes that have defined his authorship career: Vices and the absurd. Although there is a little bit of writing about the nice perks that come with high-level professional athleticism, the the parts that stick out come at the expense of the eccentric band of team owners. They included Donald Trump of the New Jersey Generals, Bill Oldenburg of the Los Angeles Express, and Clinton Manges of the San Antonio Gunslingers. The Gunslingers have a richly-deserved chapter all to themselves because the Gunslingers were such a two-bit operation. Pearlman is usually at his best when he describes off-field vices, but in Football for a Buck, he’s best when it comes to writing about big, rich egos. The stories he tells about Oldenburg and Trump are a little jarring, especially in the case of Trump, who has the lion’s share of blame for destroying the USFL. It was Trump who sold the league on moving to a fall schedule, Trump who dreamed up the idea of suing the NFL for monopolist practices (the USFL won the case but the NFL was forced to award it just $1 – one dollar), and Trump who started handing out huge contracts to players and ended up jacking up the payrolls of most teams.

It’s only within the last few chapters that Football for a Buck finally discovers its narrative. That’s the story of when the other owners in the league decided to cave in to Donald Trump and take on the mighty NFL head to head. This is where the story comes together and finds cohesion because at that point, almost all of the major players in it are on the same page. And the NFL, which is basically a ghost through most of the book, is able to emerge and become a proper villain. Pearlman even gives us a list of the various ways the NFL started to prepare for combat against the USFL.

For all its flaws, though, Football for a Buck is ultimately an enjoyable read because of its haphazard presentation rather than in spite of it. Most of its flaws can be easily forgiven because its general essence is that of a raving fan. The USFL was a fan-friendly league that had a lot more influence than one would think a league that ran for three years would have. (The USFL created the two-point conversion which is now standard at every level of football.) And much of Football for a Buck comes off like Pearlman is writing it as a USFL fan who misses the league and its odd little quirks. And he makes it clear that the USFL did a lot of things right: It went out and uncovered untapped and unlikely markets. It discovered and signed some of the greatest players to ever be employed in the NFL. And most of all, it could have evolved into a great league which served as a nice spring compliment to the regular NFL and NCAA seasons. And various little bits and pieces of this book allow Pearlman to write about the morbidly fascinating in the way that he does better than anyone.

If you’re looking for a book about the USFL which is good, you may want to keep looking. But if you want one that’s fun and entertaining, Football for a Buck is a real treat that will make you suddenly go fishing around on Amazon for some old Houston Gamblers togs.

 

Jumping the Shark

I’ve mentioned this idea in a couple of new(-ish) pieces lately, but that list of teams to the right is about to get four times bigger.

If you’ve been reading this for awhile, you should know that this blog came out of a fight with unemployability. The thing about being unemployable is that that you get left with a lot of free time, and I had lots of time to catch up on my reading. After a few years of sporadic work and being forced to move back home, I took stock of my life, where I wanted it to go as opposed to where I was and how I got there, and cleared my head enough to launch an ambitious plan to get my life to go in a direction I wanted it to go. This blog became a casualty of that, and I went on an indefinite hiatus. I’m very happy to say that things have worked out for me quite well – I’m gainfully employed at a great place, have everything I need, and am saving money.

Unfortunately, that free time I had which resulted in the creation of this blog isn’t nearly as plentiful.

Does that mean I’m closing up shop for good? Well, actually, no! See, I’m a SPORTS nerd in general. Not just a baseball fan. So I read sports books of all stripes. Baseball was the focus of this blog at first because it’s a literary sport and easy to concentrate on, but I like several sports. And without my free time for reading, it’s a lot tougher to put any kind of focus on baseball books. So rather than shut this blog down, I’m doing the opposite and turning it into a blog for sports books. Yes, there will still be reviews of baseball books, but there will also be reviews of books about other sports. I don’t think I’ll be changing the URL or site name, though, because they’re part of my history. But I might add more pages. I haven’t decided. But as I read books about all kinds of sports, it’s time to start sharing them with everyone. And I suddenly have an awful lot of new books to start writing about!

I might get Twitter and Facebook accounts up for Lit Bases as well. But until those, you’re free to look me up as Niko Croston on Twitter, or by my unabridged and unaltered moniker on Facebook. (I’ll have everyone know, though, that I talk about a lot more than just sports on both platforms.)

Every Team Ever

So… Those who have been checking in or remember the old days may remember that I’m a sports fan, first and foremost, not simply a baseball fan. So the reason for my silence lately is because of another blog project I’ve been working on. It’s called Every Team Ever, and it’s a simply primer for every major professional spots team explaining their histories, ethos, and quirks. The language is considerably saltier, and while I try to downplay my biases as much as possible, I don’t bother to hide them. Here’s the link:

https://everyteamever.wordpress.com/

I’m about halfway through the list, and I’m currently working on a piece about the Saint Louis Cardinals.

In any case, in order to keep this blog going and post more often, I’ve been giving serious thought to making it into a blog about sports books in general. There are many more sports which fascinate me with their histories, strategies, psychologies, and fan devotion, and it would be a thrill to share those with everyone. In case you’re wondering, here’s the peking order of sports worth reading about in books, based on my own experience:

1 – Baseball

The obvious first pick. America’s Pastime has produced real, honest-to-god literary classics.

2 – Basketball

America’s immigrant sports heritage. Invented by a Canadian who lived in Massachusetts as a way of getting exercise indoors during winter, basketball has turned into America’s contribution to the world’s sports landscape. Basketball has produced the most well-rounded viewpoints of literature; the best books about basketball are written about every level of it, from pickup games in parks to small-town workers’ leagues to college basketball and the NBA. A great basketball book is a magical piece of work, but when a bad writer writes about basketball, well, you’ll be tossing that book into the fire ten pages in.

3 – Football

America’s Game, of course, inspires equal parts awe and ire. There has been some astounding work on football. Unfortunately, writers have a tendency to get too caught up in the heat of it. They get pretentious or defensive or they fail to offer real scrutiny, real criticism, or analytical angles. The market can also get flooded with trash written by football people nobody cared about until they won a Super Bowl that will be forgotten in the next season. Great books about football – like Michael MacCambridge’s America’s Game – are excellent, though.

4 – Hockey

My favorite sport is ironically the one I’m least inclined to read about. Hockey is fast and its statistics are basic, which makes it difficult to write about as it is. But how many takes on hockey are original these days? The NHL just awarded a 32nd franchise to my current hometown of Seattle earlier this month. When I was a kid, the NHL was literally half that size. Only six NHL teams were created before 1967. That makes it difficult to keep up with any material about hockey that can be updated. Then you have the usual assortment of crap: Fawning odes to the Original Six, fawning odes to the Miracle on Ice team (as if either of those subjects can be written about in ANY original way anymore), terrible autobiographies, and writers zooming in on subjects that nobody cares about.

Yes, I read lots of books about other sports too. Hell, I’m a bit of a pugilist sports guy at heart. (Those not in the know about hockey tend to think of it as boxing on ice, even.) I even cheated a little on this blog before, using the baseball movie Fever Pitch as an excuse to write about the soccer book it was based on. But I just haven’t read enough about those sports to include them on a comprehensive list of sports worth reading about.

The Cubs Way by Tom Verducci

Back when I first logged in to WordPress to debut this blog during an unemployed stint in 2009, I began by reviewing a book by Tom Verducci about a team that was recently the best in baseball. How better to begin a rebooting of this site – and a possible revamping so it covers books about EVERY sport – than with a book by Tom Verducci about a team which was recently the best team in baseball? Here we have The Cubs Way, about, well, you can figure it out…

Okay, no, actually you can’t. When we think of books with names and subject lines like this, we think of one type of book: A chronological narrative of the season in which the team did the thing. Winners, losers, strangely no middle-of-the-roads or underperformers, it’s always a chronological narrative. It covers a small chunk of the offseason, starts up at the preseason, takes off in the opening months, lulls during the dog days of summer, and hits a dramatic apex around August meant to either inspire us or break our hearts. And in any regular book about the Cubs, it would be the latter. We knew all along that that Cubs, no matter how good, would stutter and eventually fall. The 2016 Cubs, though, were not an ordinary Cubs team. And The Cubs Way is not an ordinary chronological narrative about a legendary single-season team. For that matter, The Cubs Way is not a book about the 2016 Cubs season.

There’s but one narrative in The Cubs Way, and that’s seven chapters devoted to individual games for the 2016 World Series. That’s out of 15 or 16 chapters. Every chapter in between is about the decisions that were made in creating the 2016 Cubs, and the thought processes that went into making them. The Cubs Way is, more than anything, about minutia. It tells you everything you could ever want to know about the little quirks and ticks of what makes a player good; why they make that player good; the role a mentality can play; and a lot of other things of that nature that you and I think are pretty simple issues.

Meet Theo Epstein. Yeah, THAT Theo Epstein. The same Theo Epstein who gave the Boston Red Sox a clean slate after they hadn’t won the World Series themselves in 86 years. He was brought in to run the Cubs – not be the general manager, as he was in Boston, but the team President – who were having even bigger problems than the Red Sox. It wasn’t just that their curse ran longer. The Red Sox had been a very good team during a lot of their drought years. In fact, they were outright great in some years, and had come within a few whiffs of the title. The Cubs were an altogether different  monster. The Cubs had spare good years, hadn’t even gotten to the World Series since 1945, and had acquired a reputation as losers of the lovable kind. They owned the hearts and souls of casual baseball fans in Chicago, but they also shared their city with an AL team – the White Sox – that had broken up an 88-year-old curse of its own back in 2005. One of the things Verducci does in an early chapter is present us with statistics which spell out just how hopeless the Cubs were: Since the Cubs last made the World Series in 1945, their losing seasons had outnumbers their winning seasons by a 45-19 margin, with an additional two setting them to rest at .500. In their more recent years, only a couple of their top draft picks spent more than two or three years with the organization. (You’ll have to forgive me for not giving off specifics – I can’t find the exact chapter where they’re located. But it’s absurdly low.)

One of the things that jumps out of The Cubs Way is just what makes Theo Epstein so good at what he does. Epstein is not a static practitioner who developed a single way of thinking when he got into baseball and stuck with it the whole time. He doesn’t run around grousing about tradition and respect and all those other things old people whine about that are make baseball into America’s most insufferable sport. When Epstein was hired by the Red Sox, he went into the job in his 20’s as baseball’s preeminent stathead. He famously built a machine in Boston using the work of Bill James and turned the Red Sox into a more expensive version of the moneyball Athletics Billy Beane created in Oakland. But by the time the Cubs got to him, he was a mature man in his 40’s, and despite having successfully built a machine in Boston, he decided to embark on cursebreaking in Chicago using what he had learned along the line rather than what had worked for him in the past. Although statistics are still a big part of Epstein’s decisions, he adds a new aspect: Character.

Character, Verducci stresses, might have been the most important aspect of Epstein’s ultimate goal. Although winning the World Series was definitely a huge issue, the real goal of Epstein’s Cubs was changing the team’s culture. Changing a culture meant getting the Cubs to think uniformly. It also meant getting the players on the team to reject the longtime Cub mentality. There were to be no lovable losers at Wrigley Field. Epstein wanted to compile players who not only wanted, but EXPECTED to win. The most important thing, according to Verducci, was that Epstein’s Cubs be able to work with each other in creating that mindset. References to the Cubs way were to be turned on their heads so that the Cubs way was a way of thinking of the best possible way to play baseball.

Every chapter in The Cubs way is devoted to a particular key player on the 2016 Cubs and an analysis of the particular strengths they brought to the team. The way The Cubs Way is put together makes it flow more smoothly than a description would make it look, and the little interludes for the seven games in the World Series are seemlessly integrated with the rest of the book. Verducci doesn’t make the mistake of trying to write a gripping narrative. Since we already know the result, there’s no point to doing that. And the 2016 World Series was gripping enough as it was.

Overall – as I try to get back into the flow of trying to review books again – I have to say that The Cubs Way is an interesting look at the kinds of thoughts that go into putting a team together. It explains why your favorite team may not be going after a player with the gaudist numbers, and why that player who blew up with your team’s rival may turn into the best thing that ever happened with your team.

Abner Doubleday: Boy Baseball Pioneer by Montrew Dunham

Babe Ruth. Jackie Robinson. Joe Jackson. The mythologized legends of baseball, those who have an extra layer of interest in their characters. Those are the names written all over fawning biographies, each claiming to find that elusive extra angle. But what of the life of Abner Doubleday? You know, baseball’s ostensible creator? The man responsible for dreaming up an entire beloved sport, and apparently a Civil War General, which I guess should probably warrant some sort of mention. Surely the greatest giant of baseball deserves to have some sort of biography written about him!

Okay, I confess that lead-in paragraph is misleading. Abner Doubleday: Boy Baseball Pioneer isn’t a biography. In fact, it’s a kids’ book, which I’m normally not privy to reviewing, but I was just so eager to get something about an actual book posted that I picked something short and easy. Abner Doubleday: Boy Baseball Pioneer isn’t actually a biography, either. It couldn’t be – after all, as many writers (myself included) have stressed, ABNER DOUBLEDAY DID NOT INVENT BASEBALL! Thousands of diaries, not a single mention of baseball, no evidence of him playing it outside of a letter sent to the MLB offices by a man in the nuthouse… If you believe Doubleday invented baseball, you’re a hopeless idiot.

I have to give credit to author Montrew Dunham, because he doesn’t come off like an idiot. Abner Doubleday: Boy Baseball Pioneer isn’t a biography, and it has nothing to do with Doubleday inventing baseball. This book is a narrative, and it comes off as one of those common childrens’ books about the typical life of a boy being a boy during that particular era of American history. Be that as it may, there’s no actual baseball anywhere in the book, either. It involves a handful of the ball-and-bat games that baseball popped up out of, but none of them are baseball proper. In the aspect of creating a window into the past of how an everyday kid from the 1820’s would have grown up, this book does quite a passable job. They even use the jargon of the pre-baseball days: A run is called a tally, and a base is called a goal. There’s a version that gets played with only a single base.

On the downside, Abner Doubleday: Boy Baseball Pioneer doesn’t do anything unique. The book reads like one of the schoolkid reading books I was given when I was about 10 years old. For god’s sake, there’s even a chapter called “Brownie Wins the Game,” and if you haven’t already figured out that that chapter is about a dog screwing with a game, you may be functionally illiterate. Of course, I was maybe the most advanced reader in my school back then, so make of that remark what you will.

As for the story, well, there isn’t one. The book doesn’t have any kind of overarching thought or plan. Save the first chapter, where General Lafayette visits Doubleday’s hometown, this is not a book where anything big happens. It just drifts from one scenario to the next – the dog does something that wins a ballgame, Abner and his friends find a stolen trunk in the woods, Abner’s Father runs for one of the federal government seats in New York and Abner frequently stands outside waiting for him to return home… It’s not until the last couple of chapters when the narrative takes a jump and ages Abner by ten years, turning him into the Academy student-to-be who would go on to command in the Civil War and create the country’s first cable car system.

Honestly, there’s not much substance, and the baseball involved in the book isn’t real baseball. According to the appendix at the back of the book, though, Montrew Dunham admits the goal of his book wasn’t to focus on Abner Doubleday, the ostensible inventor of baseball. I think I can live with that.

The Babe (Movie)

Babe Ruth is more than just a legendary baseball player. He’s known as an American icon who lived a larger life than most. His accomplishments in baseball were so far ahead of his time that modern ballplayers have trouble approaching his numbers – most of them still can’t touch him. For god’s sake, Ruth is a sports star who has turned into required learning in elementary school classrooms. And with the way he lived his life, there’s certainly a good movie inside his massive girth somewhere. That good movie, though, is NOT The Babe.

The Babe is one of those movies that tries to take a man and transform him into a pure American myth. I don’t mean that in a good way, either; in this country, we have a way of softening up things that are cold and hard to make them palatable to an audience which demands simplified paragons of virtue. The hot parts are watered down, if not removed completely, and the subject gets Disneyfied. And that’s exactly what The Babe does to Babe Ruth: It tries to present a PG-rated version of a life that was rated a hard R. Screenwriter John Fusco and director Arthur Hiller seem desperate to present Babe Ruth in the way that The Pride of the Yankees presented Lou Gehrig. The trouble is that the material to perform such a trick just isn’t there. Gehrig, by all accounts, was one of the true good guys in the history of the sport. He was 1950’s America before 1950’s America existed – the so-called All-American Man. He lived the stereotype almost to a tee. Parents would want their sons to emulate Gehrig and their daughters to marry men like him. Ruth, on the other hand, was all kinds of a hellraiser.

More astute fans will also notice that The Babe gets truckload upon truckload of basic information wrong. Are my facts wrong, or is The Bambino’s signing bonus in The Babe about $25,000 more than it was in real life? This movie refers to Lou Gehrig; there’s only one reference to him being nicknamed Iron Horse. Most of the characters call him Iron Man, to which even a semi-knowledgeable baseball fan has to wonder when Cal Ripken Jr. managed to attain a time machine. Although The Babe is right about Ruth’s ability to hit home runs turning him into a star, it totally botches the fact that when Ruth was first signed by the Boston Red Sox, it was his ability to pitch southpaw that they wanted; he was thrown into the batting lineup and outfield because he was bored. Ruth wasn’t always fat, he didn’t retire on the day he hit his final three home runs for the Boston Braves, dear lord the things this movie gets wrong are just endless.

I’m not even sure this was done because the extent of someone’s knowledge about Babe Ruth was that he hit a lot of home runs. There’s a weird sort of pressure on baseball fanatics. We have to be able to write sympathetically about baseball while trying to destroy many of the myths that have become engraved in stone by a society that can’t stand blemished heroes. The Babe doesn’t do very much to contribute to the cause of exploring and stomping out a lot of the myths surrounding Babe Ruth. Screenwriter John Fusco doesn’t even mention the fact that Harry Frazee considered himself a theater man who just happened to run a baseball team. Fusco and Hiller try everything they can to soften up Ruth’s character, but all that does is turn The Babe into a bad biography with skewed facts, half-truths, elements crossing over into outright fantasy, and a lot of stuttering and inconsistency. No one involved with this movie is able to decide whether Ruth was a man who lived as rich a life as he could for both better and worse, or if he was just an overgrown child: One of the habits this movie’s version of Ruth does is refer to everyone as “dad.”

Watching The Babe as a knowledgeable fan makes Fusco and Hiller looks like they’re trying to pull off an impossible contradiction. The filmmakers want to play up the mythological elements of Ruth’s life story. So they play up the part of his life where he hits a lot of home runs almost to the point that his early use as a pitcher is an afterthought. The Babe presents him as a jovial and gregarious socialite with an overriding love for children in such a no-holds-barred way that it even includes one of those damned Little Jimmy scenes. You know the type: The ailing kid, Ruth vowing to hit two home runs for him to get better, yada yada yada. But when it comes to exploring the less savory aspects of Ruth, Fusco and Hiller pull every punch. Actor John Goodman, who plays Ruth, also seems to pull punches at times, although he’s less prone to doing so. But Ruth’s vices are treated more like little character quirks. Yes, he eats and drinks, but his lust for food and booze are rather tempered. So is his womanizing, for that matter. The summary of Ruth’s take on women is more “cheated on his wife a few times with a woman he eventually married” instead of hooking up with any woman that moved.

The most absurd thing about The Babe, though, is just how much of Ruth is portrayed with anger and sadness and other negative emotions as driving forces in his life. Okay, in real life a portrayal like that makes a little bit of sense – Ruth lived in an orphanage until the Orioles bought him, and that probably had a few residual effects. But while John Goodman does everything in his power to salvage Ruth and make him pop to life, the script just doesn’t want to give him room to show anyone a version of Ruth that’s anything more than pissed off or depressed beyond belief. Wasn’t Babe Ruth ever happy? In one scene, he’s caught crying in the locker room repeating a mantra the monks at his orphanage probably taught him. It makes the movie much harder to watch because it creates a disconnect between the subject and the audience, and since everything is shown in a melodramatic way, the audience gets to be left tapped out and annoyed.

Worse still is the onslaught of cliches. The Babe is hackey. REALLY hackey. I already mentioned Little Johnny up there, but that’s just one scene. The Babe is a highlight reel of cliche. Slow motion, power music, all orchestrated in that typical way in which a bad director tries to tell the audience, “Look at how larger than life this is! I can’t believe how larger than life this is! Can you believe how larger than life this is?” I give a lot of crap to The Pride of the Yankees because I think it’s trite and uninteresting, and it hasn’t aged well. But at the very least, it was a solidly-made and consistently presented flick. The Babe doesn’t have any of those redeeming virtues. It’s not exactly a mess, mind you, but it creates a lot of problems for itself that could have been easily avoided had it given us a look at the real Babe Ruth: The one who was called “(n-word) lips” in school because he had “black features,” and not “fat chops” as in this movie. The one who was a powerful, speedy, and muscular athlete at the beginning of his career. The one who did manage to keep up a good training regimen which he took seriously even as he reeled up more and more mileage and wear and tear.

There was a lot more to Babe Ruth than what gets seen here. It would have been a great service to baseball’s original legend to play him how he really was, not how he was seen by people who clearly aren’t baseball fans.

 

Field of Dreams (Movie)

When I started this blog, I was a little younger and a lot dumber – it came out of an extended fight with unemployment in 2009. I had just turned 28 and spent the previous three years existing on a 45-hour-a-week, sub-minimum wage job that left me riddled with debt and poverty. If I had seen Field of Dreams back then, I might have understood and even sympathized with Ray Kinsella, the character played by Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams. And, well, things have changed a lot for me since that day in October of 2009 when I posted my first baseball book review for this blog. My life still has a few issues that need sorting out, but on the whole, there’s much more going right for me than wrong now. I’ll spare the full-length biography, but there’s a reason I feel compelled to say all this: It’s because, at 36 years old, I am now the same age as Ray Kinsella. And after watching Field of Dreams, I can honestly say it has lost me.

I don’t believe I will ever be able to watch Field to Dreams and view Kinsella as anything more than a lavish idiot. The story is pretty well-known by now: Ray Kinsella buys a farm. One day, he hears a voice telling him that, “If you build it, they will come.” It’s not very specific, but Ray figures out that the voice in his head told him to wreck a significant portion of his farm and nearly bankrupt himself in order to make a baseball field. Which Ray subsequently goes right out and does. Months go by, but nothing happens until one night when Ray sees someone walking around on his diamond. That someone turns out to be Shoeless Joe Jackson, uniformed and looking for a nice field to play on. This starts the movie’s disconnect from reality and logic.

The appearance of Shoeless Joe begins a wild, winding journey through baseball past for Ray. It takes him to a reclusive author in Boston, a ballplayer who only played a single game in the bigs, and some sort of fantastical time warp in Minnesota. Eventually he winds up back on his farm in Iowa, being yelled at to sell the farm by his brother-in-law.

Field of Dreams toys heavily with fantasy elements. The great difficulty in writing fantasy, though, is that it doesn’t take place in the real world. A great piece of fantasy doesn’t start with a great story, but a fixed set of rules within the piece’s universe that the writer adheres to in order to get the audience to suspend its disbelief. This isn’t just true for hard fantasies like The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones; it goes for the softer, simpler ones that take place in the real universe as well. Field of Dreams, though, seems to have reversed that formula, and so the narrative logic of the movie seems to be applied in accordance to screenwriter/director Phil Alden Robinson. For example, when Shoeless Joe and the other old-timey ballplayers start to appear on Ray’s cornfield, the Kinsellas are the only people who can see or interact with them. When Ray takes his trip to Boston to see a ballgame with a reclusive author, there’s a constant implication that the author is still drawing breath until the finale at the cornfield. Was he alive or was he dead? And if he was never there at all, how did Bostonians keep telling Ray where he was, and how was Ray able to buy tickets for him when he wasn’t there?

One of the great fantasy authors of all time, the late Terry Pratchett, was known to refuse to draw up or describe an accurate atlas of his most beloved creation, the Discworld. His logic is tough to dispute: He argued that you can’t map the human imagination. That’s certainly an acceptable truth, and it served its purpose of bailing Pratchett out of a lot of traps the Discworld series could have fallen into. But the reason fantasy fans accepted that from Pratchett was because his work was always irreverent and satirical – while the Discworld felt like a living, breathing world to its fans, it was also a vehicle for Pratchett to do his griping about the real world. So literature buffs granted Pratchett immunity on the grounds of the Law of Cool/Funny/Reality. JRR Tolkien, George RR Martin, CS Lewis, JK Rowling, and Frank Herbert always placed the rules of their created worlds before the story, so they never needed to offer an excuse. (Although Rowling really pushes it sometimes – mention the hourglass from Prisoner of Azkaban to a serious fantasy critic and enjoy the ensuing fireworks.) Other authors like Neil Gaiman and Stephen King (yes, King has delved into works of pure fantasy; The Dark Tower was a fine example) partially based their work in this reality, and they always played by setting a few rules which they never contradicted.

Field of Dreams clashes with its own rules and logic again and again. What are the rules on who can and can’t see the ballplayers? Robinson pulls an everyday, inexplicable, unexplained switcheroo during the finale: Ray’s brother-in-law, Mark can’t see the ballplayers. Then he can suddenly see them when Ray’s daughter gets hurt! Okay. Right. Whatever you say. Ray himself doesn’t seem any clearer on the rules; Field of Dreams takes an almost meta turn when the ballplayers invite Terrence to visit the other side of the cornfield with them. Ray spends a good five minutes trying to argue the point before giving up.

Field of Dreams is among the highly popular and beloved of all baseball movies. It earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture in 1989, and baseball fans of all stripes have been moved almost to tears by it. Perhaps this is my weakness in criticizing it, because I wasn’t a dyed-in-wool fan from the cradle. I came into baseball fandom at a comparatively later age – I was 19 when I opened my mind to give the sport’s nuances and quirks to give it a real shot. If one thing about this movie has been a part of me through my life, it’s the fantasy of it, having grown up a lonely kid who found solace in his cartoons, sci-fi/fantasy, and video games. And when I really grew up, baseball was a vehicle which enabled me to connect with the real world rather than escape from it. None of that, however, changes the fact that all I see in Field of Dreams is a schmaltzy popcorn flick.

This movie takes us down a weird and loosely-connected path, and if there’s any sort of theme or idea that can be cobbled together from the whole of it, it’s… Well, is it the idea that sports can connect generations? Is it to show that sports will, in spite of corporate branding, always be contests for regular folks to put their troubles behind them? I would personally vouch for the latter there, but Field of Dreams has a sickly after-school feel to it. Robinson takes the old Innocence of America path which wears on baseball’s mythology. Several of the cliches are here: The movie’s fulcrum seems to be Ray’s relationship with his father. Shoeless Joe Jackson is the sweet, naive country boy who could have just as easily been called Clueless Joe Jackson. (I do find it funny that the emphasis is on how much Ray’s father loved the White Sox, by the way; the opening narration says the family eventually settled in New York City and that Ray’s dad cheered for the Yankees. I do understand that the movie needed a tragic baseball figure to activate the plot, but the Yankees have that too; Lou Gehrig is at least as tragic a baseball figure as Shoeless Joe Jackson, if not even more of one.) And among the major plot points are Ray helping a reclusive author rediscover the joy of baseball and helping a career minor league player, Archibald “Moonlight” Graham, live out his dream of facing a big league pitcher. Graham lives in a small town in Minnesota.

For all the cliched schmaltz, though, Robinson does get something right: When he has to present one of his cliches, he doesn’t dwell on them with power slow motion shots and Full House music. He gets in and out with them, playing a licensed soundtrack, and that succeeds in giving Field of Dreams an earnestness that a lot of other baseball movies – including classics like The Pride of the Yankees – lack. Robinson wants your emotion to be real instead of melodramatic, and Field of Dreams doesn’t care if you feel that way or not. It knows that if you’re going to be emotionally touched by a movie like this, drawing out the key scenes won’t do anything, and if you’re not, you’re only going to be annoyed.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t go into much detail over Ray’s character, and it doesn’t sufficiently answer the question: Why? Why did a voice come out of nowhere, speak only to Ray, and what in his character compelled him to comply? It’s made obvious in the opening that Ray and his wife, Annie, were 60’s kids who never quite surrendered their old ideals. But one thing I’ve noticed as I get older and start transitioning into middle age myself is that, even though my ideals have changed very little, my methods have gotten more pragmatic. As I mentioned, Ray Kinsella is the same age as I am now, and our forms of rebellion have gotten smaller-scale as pragmatism has moved in on us. I even understand the angle of wanting to feel close to his dead father – a point which was really hammered home for me a year ago when my beloved mother fell to cancer. (Feeling closer to her is about the only reason I have for following the NFL these days.) What in his logic process starting at Point A sent him on a journey where the logical Point B is to spend his life savings on a baseball field? Yes, he spends the movie going on a journey, but that was a result of building the baseball field. Let’s think of this as Close Encounters Syndrome, remembering the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, when Richard Dreyfuss walks onto the alien spaceship to go on an intergalactic journey… Leaving his wife and kids behind and not so much as a note. (And an ending that Steven Spielberg said years later he came to hate for that very reason.) Robinson doesn’t go into such a character exploration. While Ray grows a little as a person throughout the movie, he doesn’t do so enough to create a satisfactory answer.

About the best I can offer for Field of Dreams is this: It does the job. It feels more like a Saturday Matinee movie like the cheap time-wasters old broadcast stations used to show on weekend afternoons. If you’re willing to take Field of Dreams as that and nothing more, it’s pretty good. Just don’t try to overthink it. And don’t try to find anything Oscar-worthy in it, because it’s just not there.

The Bad News Bears (Movie)

Its been awhile, but I think I’m finally able to get back to doing this again…

Well, if the very few of you who have stayed subscribed to this blog during my educational hiatus remember anything – anything AT ALL – about the way I think about baseball movies, you may recall how much I hate seeing kids in them. If not, long story short: They’re cheap directorial tools which are usually there strictly as metaphors for a more innocent time. (This has never been more obvious than in Eight Men Out.) If the movie is about the kids, then the grown-up jocks in the movie are – save the big egotist who thinks his star is under assault – there to be role models, all sensitive to the kid. Maybe you also recall that one of the things I liked about the Major League series is that it took a no-holds-barred approach to portraying ballplayers.

That’s probably the thing that impressed me the most about The Bad News Bears. Whereas Major League showed adult athletes the way they probably talk and act in real life, The Bad News Bears shows that the kids have no more varnish than the adults. Forget what we think we know about all-American kid values shown to us from saccharine 80’s sitcoms; the Bears are the real deal. The kids in The Bad News Bears are a ruffian bunch thrown together and forced to make whatever they can of it. They trash the English language. They trash opposing ballplayers. They trash their manager. They trash each other. And if you’re familiar with the sensibilities of the working classes (I was raised in a lower working class neighborhood in upstate New York myself), you’ve known every single one of them.

The ragtag crew includes an overweight catcher named Engelberg; a mercurial and foul-mouthed shortstop named Tanner; a Hank Aaron wannabe named Ahmad Abdul Rahim; Timmy Lupus, a bullied kid who has become withdrawn; and a great assortment of other lack of talent. The man who get charged with the thankless task of patching this group of angry rapscallions together is Morris Buttermaker, a onetime coulda-been-contender turned pool cleaner and boozehound. And what cosmic disaster brought these kids together? A lawsuit. Just before the start of the movie, a lawsuit was filed against the Bears’ league for excluding the least athletically-gifted kids, and the Bears were formed in order to settle it. As a result, the Bears have been cast out by the rest of the league. It’s so bad that their sponsor is a bail bond company.

Buttermaker doesn’t begin to teach the Bears how to play baseball because he feels a sense of duty. He does it because he sees a group of kindred spirits. In the meantime, parents of kids from opposing teams strike a stark contrast to the easygoing Buttermaker. They get angry and heated while Buttermaker lets his crew mosey through games and mostly lets them play out the games. Now, I do think this was one of the major themes of the movie: Ultra-competitive little league parents and kids who are playing because they just want to have fun.

At least that’s my general impression. The truth is, at some point this theme gets muddled, possibly to extend the length of the movie. A lot of what happens once the theme is established go right against it: Buttermaker picks up a couple of hotshot recruits so the Bears stand a chance at winning games; tells one of those hotshots to nad every ball he has a shot at; and yells at a player to intentionally get hit by a pitch. Yes, he finds himself once again and all is well that ends well, but sheesh! And that’s the ultimate problem with The Bad News Bears: It can’t tell whether it wants to come or go. The extremes are exemplified best by Buttermaker himself. While star Walter Matthau is at his grumbling, surly best as Buttermaker, his lackadaisical way of playing his character doesn’t do very much to reveal the sort of fellow that Morris Buttermaker is. He appears to act less on long-held personality traits and more on what’s in front of him. Although, this may be the point, since it makes us believe he’s capable of pretty much every action he performs in the movie.

The Bad News Bears is mercifully short on sentimentality or morals. By the end of the movie, it feels like the Bears came together in the name of a single object, but that’s it. No one gives off the air of someone who just learned a lesson, and the final action of the Bears in the movie is to tell their opponents, the Yankees, where they can stick their second-place trophy. Buttermaker certainly doesn’t become a better person, either.

For all The Bad News Bears gets right, unfortunately, it suffers from a severe case of front-loading. The movie is tightest and most coherent in the first half, when it looks like it’s going to succeed in getting its point across. But around the time Buttermaker starts trying to recruit his daughter into pitching for the Bears, it starts to crumble. Director Michael Ritchie starts going haywire in trying to cram too many different points of view into the movie, then the thing ends on a climactic Big Game that’s prolonged for far too long. And the legalese surrounding the right of the Bears to exist gets in the way of further character development. And that’s a shame, because the characters are written so strongly that you want to see how they develop.

Still, The Bad News Bears gives you the sort of baseball movie you want to see to unwind: It tells a good story, it provides you with memorable characters, it makes you laugh, and it makes the Yankees look bad. And it’s a refreshing change to see a group of kids in a movie who aren’t acting like little paragons of innocence.

(And no, I’m haven’t turned against the Yankees.)