Paul Haddad contacted me yesterday about writing a guest post on Baseball Musings. A book of Paul’s on the Los Angeles Dodgers will by published next March, and Jon Wiesman of Dodger Thoughts fame wrote the introduction. It’s called High-Fives, Pennant Drives, and Fernandomania: A Fan’s History of the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Glory Years: 1977 – 1981. Here’s Paul’s article comparing the movies Moneyball and the Bad News Bears.
Billy Beane,
MEET MORRIS BUTTERMAKER
In a year (or four) that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened: Moneyball has risen from the ashes of development hell and will make its big screen premiere on September 23. But before we get too excited, consider this: Hollywood’s track record of adapting baseball stories is spotty at best. Its biggest problem is that it treats baseball with too much reverence. Ever really watched The Natural or Bang the Drum Slowly? They’re as sterile as a game in the old Houston Astrodome. Field of Dreams may have spawned a memorable catchphrase (“If you build it, he will come”), but its heavyhanded stabs at Father-Son bonding were undone by what I call TPS (Too Precious Syndrome). That’s why films like Bull Durham and A League of Their Own feel so fresh. They’re messy, unpredictable, profane affairs… like life itself.
No movie captures this baseball-as-real-life angle better than The Bad News Bears, starring Walter Matthau as Morris Buttermaker, the Bears’ alcoholic, minor-league-washout Little League manager. But it came out 35 years ago (and please, let’s just pretend that the remake with Billy Bob Thornton never happened), long enough for me to conclude that my odds of seeing another baseball movie that truly spoke to me were about as slim as seeing a player bat .400 again.
Fortunately, the critical buzz of Moneyball has been mostly positive. Dodger Thoughts’ Jon Weisman’s review was downright glowing. I haven’t watched it yet, but it seems to me Moneyball just might stand a chance of joining The Bad News Bears as the exception to Hollywood’s archaic baseball ruminations. The filmmakers obviously deserve whatever credit they have coming to them. But at its core, I would argue that much of its (future) success can be attributed to a shared philosophy that links the protagonists of Moneyball and The Bad News Bears.
On the surface, Billy Beane and Morris Buttermaker would appear to have little in common. Beane is portrayed in the Moneyball movie by Brad Pitt, Buttermaker is played by an actor whose face looks like a Basset Hound’s. Beane is a real person, Buttermaker a piece of fiction. Even the intended audiences of these two movies are vastly different. But a closer look at these iconic characters reveals them to be unlikely cousins. Each led a ragtag team of rejects to surprising heights. Their players, most of whom were not blessed with Rockwellian baseball bodies, proved there is no single way to success. Buttermaker recruits a girl as his pitching ace and a Harley-riding juvenile delinquent as his star slugger. The A’s under Beane drafted, in Billy’s words, a “fat kid” nicknamed “The Greek God of Walks” – future star Kevin Youkilis.
Their on-field strategies are also strikingly similar. Beane preaches on-base percentage. He famously signed part-time catcher Scott Hatteberg and converted him to a full-time first baseman because he knew how to work a pitcher. Buttermaker teaches the weak-hitting Rudi Stein the art of getting hit by a pitch, and goes ballistic when another player, Ahmad Abdul Rahim, has the audacity to swing at a pitch instead of trying to finagle a walk. Buttermaker is a born gambler who even bets the 11-year-old O’Neal twenty dollars she can’t break a curve ball the way she used to. Beane? Lewis equates him and his merry men of computer nerds to “card counters at the blackjack table.” Buttermaker and Beane come across as both underdogs and rebels. Add it all up, and you’ve got two antiheroes who neatly encapsulate two fundamentally American attitudes. And this should be celebrated.
The scorecard of entertainment and sports icons backs up Americans’ love of antiheroes. The flawed guy almost always wins our hearts, hands-down, over the picture of perfection. We love Babe Ruth over A-Rod; Batman over Superman; Die Hard’s Willis over Mission Impossible’s Cruise; Rodman over LeBron; even the original Rocky Balboa over the tanned beast who dominates in all the sequels. It is in this realm where The Bad News Bears and A’s reside. Buttermaker and Beane play by their own rules as a matter of survival. Unable to compete under the Establishment’s rules, they become cleverly resourceful. Secretly, we yearn to do what they do, but don’t have the fortitude to do ourselves: to stick it to the man — or where the sun doesn’t shine, which is where the Bears tell the Yankees to stick it when the Yanks beat them in the Championship.
Which, alas, brings us to the men’s final connection. Beane’s A’s teams also lost to the Yankees in the post-season, in 2000 and 2001, the two times they faced them. The pluck of the A’s and the Bears is ultimately no match against the Yankees’ machine.
But just as no one cheers for Coke, it’s hard to get movie audiences to root for The Establishment. We see ourselves in Morris Buttermaker. In the erratic annals of baseball cinema, it appears that someone was smart enough at Sony Pictures to see us in Billy Beane too. And I couldn’t be happier about it. Now let’s just hope The Establishment doesn’t drop the ball on this one, too.
Thanks, Paul, and good luck with the book.
, available now for pre-order. From the press release: