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“…push the sun back up in the sky and give us one more day of summer.”
It’s not just that these are two superb baseball documentaries. It’s that they are so very different from each other. To start, the total runtime of Baseball is nearly 25 hours while Battered Bastards is 77 minutes before credits. Yet both capture the underdog, everyman nature of the game. There’s no sport more meritocratic than baseball. You don’t have to be the fastest, you don’t have to be the smartest, you don’t have to be the strongest. If you work hard enough, maybe you, too, can be great. If not great, at least good enough to have a great time playing.
Ken Burns’ eleven-part masterpiece Baseball charts the entire history of the sport, from its humble beginnings on city streets and behind farmhouses to its incredible success at the turn of the nineteenth century, its struggle to survive during The Great Depression, and finally the turbulent changes of these past few decades. There are labor movements, culture-shifting scandals, incredible acts of violence, racial segregation and, finally, racial integration. It’s not just the history of baseball. It’s the history of America.
Maclain and Chapman Way’s incredibly fun and bittersweet The Battered Bastards of Baseball, on the other hand, tells the story of one small minor league team in the Pacific Northwest: the Portland Mavericks. The team was owned and operated by longtime character actor Bing Russell (father of Kurt), and they played by their own rules. Literally. For five years, they challenged every norm, recruited wannabes and has-beens alike, drew record-breaking attendance and won more games than you’d ever believe. Big League Chew was invented in the Mavericks dugout, for god’s sake!
All of it roiled the purveyors of the traditional minor league farm system (the Mavericks were an independent team, with no direct major league team affiliation). The film features many colorful talking heads, including a movie star (Kurt Russell) and an Oscar-nominated director (Todd Field). Ian puts it well: “If someone told me James Earl Jones’ speech from Field of Dreams was based on the story of the Portland Mavericks, I think I’d believe them. Bastards has the same emotional understanding of how sport connects people to something bigger than themselves, and how that connection offers people a second chance.”
Field puts it even more poetically in the doc: “When I think about the Mavericks, I don’t really think much about baseball. I think about those guys. I think about those characters. The fact that they enjoyed themselves more than I’d ever seen any grown men enjoy themselves. And I remember thinking, ‘I hope I feel that way when I grow up.’”
