Movie of the Week: The Battered Bastards of Baseball

Alexa: I’m not the biggest sports fan, but I couldn’t help becoming invested in “The Battered Bastards of Baseball.” I love a good underdog story, and the Portland Mavericks have a pretty inspiring one. It sounds like the plot of a feel-good sports movie rather than reality: Hollywood star launches independent baseball team with a roster of has-beens and players who never got their chance to shine, but they prove their worth through unconventional methods. But the fact that it’s a true story makes it all the more compelling. As a documentary, the movie is good, not great. It’s a bit one-sided (independent baseball = real baseball, MLB = soulless corporate greed), but it does a solid job of capturing the era and conveying the significance of this rag-tag team’s success. The team’s story is stronger than the film itself, and fortunately that story is the centerpiece here without a lot of bells and whistles around it. If you enjoy a good Cinderella story and sports nostalgia, “The Battered Bastards of Baseball” is definitely worth a watch.

Joel: This documentary was directed by Chapman Way and Maclain Way, the grandsons of Bing Russell, who is the central figure of this documentary. As you’re watching this movie unfold, you can tell that this is a story that they’ve been dying to tell for years. Especially in recent years as Russell’s entire career seems to have become a footnote, or a bit of trivia in the biography of his much more famous son, Kurt Russell. What Bing Russell was able to accomplish in the 1970s with the Portland Mavericks is an incredible story, and the documentary presents the whole thing in a masterful way. The way the movie unfolds, you get caught up in the narrative just as much as if it were a dramatized version of the whole thing. An underdog sports movie that gets a good bit of a legal drama thrown in toward the end, this tale is ripe with everything that you could want out of a good old fashioned Hollywood movie. The movie even has a “where are they now” segment for the players towards the end that might be more interesting than any “where are they now” segment to end to any fictional movie I’ve ever seen. Through the interviews you can see the love for The Mavericks and for baseball in general that everyone seems to have. Even if baseball isn’t your particular game, it’s easy to get swept up in the enthusiasm and passion that everyone exhibits. It’s well worth the time to watch this one and just be impressed by the mad cap string of events that Bing Russell and his Mavericks went through to try and play some baseball.

Chris: I can’t adequately state just how much I enjoyed watching this documentary and how much I wish I had been around to witness a team like the Portland Mavericks. In a world of somewhat sanitized, corporate sports, it’s hard to watch The Battered Bastards of Baseball and think you’re watching a mockumentary because it almost seems impossible to be nonfiction. It really does feel like a movie where you have a team of raggedy outcasts and yet things still work out for the team to be successful because their formula went against the traditional baseball formula still to this day. Now that I think about it, I find it harder to believe that there hasn’t been a movie made about the Mavericks considering it would fit in pretty well with Disney movies such as Miracle or Invincible. Although the events that actually happened seemed so far-fetched and unbelievable that if a movie were to depict it, it would probably get criticized for being too outrageous.