The Battered Bastards of Baseball is timeless and topical: Way Late Baseball Movie Reviews
The 2014 documentary about the Portland Mavericks and Bing Russell vs. the Baseball Establishment is worth revisiting as late capitalism pushes MLB even further from fans.
Bing Russell put the lie to the line that dreamers are not doers. That is a big part of the charm of the doc his grandsons made about the Portland Mavericks, which was Russell’s very 1970s, very Portland, Oregon, contribution to the summer game.
Chaplain Way and Maclain Way, on their first try as directors, made a documentary about a lost but vital bit of baseball history. The Battered Bastards of Baseball (2014, Netflix) wowed the crowd at the Sundance Film Festival, who are not exactly the target audience for Major League or Mr. 3000. That happened.
A good documentary drops you deep inside a story that remains relevant in our time. It also does not tip its pitch, crediting the viewer for being smart enough to draw their own conclusions and overarching themes. The Portland Mavericks’ arc was documentary gold; as the great actor Kurt Russell (son of Bing, uncle of the Ways) once put it, “The story was right in front of us, but needed one generation to pass for someone to put it together.”
By the early 1970s, major-league baseball, the American and National leagues, had created a monopsony — a market where there is only one buyer for workers’ skills or a resource. They had no more worlds to conquer, or at least no more competitor leagues that could pay the going rate for top talent. They stood along while the NFL had just carried out a merger with the American Football League, and while the NBA and NHL were contending with the upstart American Basketball Association and World Hockey Association.
Racial integration of the NL (first) and AL (second), while a step forward, focused on seeking economic rents from African-American and Afro-Latino players. Doing so sank decades of culture, institutional knowledge, and infrastructure from Black baseball, in a way that probably had late-breaking repercussions for overall participation. By the 2020s, the sport would celebrate Jackie Robinson every year on the anniversary of his début with the Brooklyn Dodgers, the recovered stats of all-time greats such as Oscar Charleston or Martín Dihigo would be on Baseball-Reference.com, and teams would break out specialty uniforms in homage to the Detroit Stars or Seattle Steelheads. There would, though, be no African-American chairpersons of MLB teams, only one team with both a Black general manager and dugout manager. When the 2022 World Series was the first in seven decades where no U.S.-born Black players competed, no one was surprised.
Other plays for major-league status — by the late 1940s Mexican League, the 1950s Pacific Coast League before the L.A. Dodgers and San Francisco Giants planted their flags, and Branch Rickey’s proposed Continental League — also wound up being deposited in the What Mighta Bin.1 The leagues that faced successful challengers, the NFL and NBA, would end up absorbing them, adapting, and surpassing MLB in popularity. Shirley, that’s some coincidence.
Baseball was on the back foot but did not seem to know how it got there. Enter Bing Russell in Portland in 1973 for a symbolic proxy battle.
Russell was the paterfamilias of a significant Hollywood acting family. He was the father of Kurt (a titan with a half-century career, ranging from Disney child actor to horror films such as The Thing all the way to Quentin Tarantino’s Hateful Eight), father-in-law of actress Goldie Hawn, grandfather of romcom queen Kate Hudson, and grandpa of Wyatt Russell (22 Jump Street and U.S. Agent in the Marvel Cinematic Universe).
The elder Russell, whose roles included Bonanza and The Magnificent Seven, knew baseball talent. He played the sport avidly and made instructional videos for Little League-age players. The Dartmouth College grad also had informed-by-experience ideas about making entertainment. And the sports and entertainment worlds were siloed back in the 1970s, apart from a few athletes who got movie and guest-star gigs.
And he applied that to prove a point to the Baseball Establishment. Opportunity knocked in Portland. You might associate that place with being a hotbed of cultural nonconformity. The Portland Mavericks took from, as Entertainment Weekly once phrased it, finding players from among “a scrap heap that included a fair share of burn-outs, head-cases, and outright degenerates.”2 Eat your heart out, Jared Keeso.
That David vs. Goliath theme hit home with both people who do not care for baseball and obsessive fans alike. The observations that Kurt Russell and his mum Lou Russell (1928-2021) share on-screen about Bing are on-point and often hilarious.
As Kurt put it: “They couldn’t stand him. He couldn’t stand them!”
The Mavericks played against farm clubs stocked with “bonus baby” prospects in the short-season single-A Northwest League. Some diving into Baseball Reference backs up the characterization.
The average age of NWL teams was around 19 or 20. Rickey Henderson, the greatest run-scorer in MLB history, played in the NWL in 1976 as a 17-year-old directly out of high school in West Oakland. The Mavericks' average age was about 23 or 24, and a few players were in their 30s.
Their arsenal was also built around getting on base and tearing around them. The Mavericks once averaged almost three stolen bases per game for an entire season. Leadoff batter Reggie Thomas, over one two-season stretch, on-based .460, scored 129 runs and had 143 stolen bases in 139 games — veritable video-game Rickey Henderson numbers.
That is the anodyne piece. The Mavericks were a motley crew with a score to settle. I might be whiffing at doing justice to how the scraggly-bearded Portland ballplayers carried on in the 1970s. As long as the flick gets it right, eh? Open alcohol and taking some tokes on the team bus were part of the act. Jim Bouton, exiled from the majors after writing Ball Four, hooked on with Portland when he began a baseball comeback. Years after, having trimmed his hair and put on a suit, he told David Letterman the manager said the only team rule on road trips was, “Don’t smoke a joint at the front of the team bus,” i.e., where little kids could see.3
Baseball has long had something of the renegade to it; those players used to be called “Flakes,” the ones whose career CV included stories, often apocryphal, about their eccentricities. Oftentimes the players slotted into that category just happened to be from whatever new out-group was showing up in the sport: Italian-American players in the pre-integration days, college players from Baby Boom generation such as Bill Lee, and Black and Latino players later on.
Rickey Henderson might have been the last Flake. For what will not be the last time, the John Olerud helmet story is a fabrication.4
However, scolds and the stodges are in charge. They live for Pyrrhic victories that are no more significant than beating the 2023 Kansas City Royals. Baseball has probably been in an endless cultural tug-of-war since the invention of the fielder’s glove. Any comment section confirms that today’s players disrespect the game with how they wear their caps, jerseys, pants, and baseball and non-baseball accessories. Never mind that they have invested more hours, and had more money invested in building and maintaining skills, than any prior generation. Somehow the Respect Police seldom notice. Odd, that.
In the ’70s, the panic about presentation involved Charlie Finley putting his Oakland A’s players in gold and green uniforms and paying them to grow mustaches. The contrast between the A’s and the baseball Establishment was such that their 1972 World Series matchup against the Cincinnati Reds — who had a beard ban that almost made it to the millennium — was called “Hairs vs. Squares.”
To this day, the New York Yankees still ban facial hair BECAUSE TRADITION. Oddly enough, that does not preclude putting a sponsorship patch over their sacred pinstripes.
The Mavericks were all but flipping the bird to such conformity. And the Way brothers wisely let their material, including troves of archival footage, speak for itself. The Portland experiment drew so much attention that Joe Garagiola, the longtime commentator on the NBC Game of the Week, made two trips to the city to file features on the Mavericks. Generally, the alumni and journalists who appear on camera just have a glow that reads as if they are attuned to know they were part of something irreplaceable and totally illogical.
As Kurt Russell explains, Bing Russell treated picking players like he was casting a movie or play: “The movie always has one key scene… you never know who is going to come up with it.” Also, you need background actors who build the atmosphere. There is an easy hoary analogy about how baseball is like that, too.
A team cannot call a timeout to draw up a special play for a superstar. The decisive moment might rest on the backup shortstop with the .233 on-base percentage. Bing Russell got that, and he gave the fans options to identify with vicariously. In the doc, Kurt explains his father kept a larger playing roster than he needed, just so fans could have more options for finding a relatable player.
It is important not to over-idealize an era you did not live in. As a Xennial, I definitely get a little too carried away with dropping into that period from just before I came into the world. As an old farmer told me once, there were no good old days.
But the Mavericks did shake up baseball. There were also several “firsts.” Infielder Jon Yoshiwara became the first Asian-American general manager in the minors. The Mavericks also had a female GM, Lanny Moss. Carren Woods, who is now a pastor in Portland, was the assistant GM across the team’s five-season run. A lefthanded catcher, the late Jim Swanson, ran a successful comedy club in Seattle.5
Jim Bouton might not have even been the best writer on staff. Larry Colton, a righthander who pitched one MLB game before an injury scuttled his major-league viability, has written five well-received nonfiction books.
Bouton (1939-2019) came since he needed somewhere to pitch after getting released by the Double-A Knoxville White Sox and by a team in Mexico. His minor celebrity definitely helped with credibility, and he got all the whimsy, wryness, and most of all wanderlust that pushed men to stay in the game when, by all logic, they should have been hanging it up. The last line in Ball Four is more widely quoted than the first, but the opener is killer self-awareness too: “I’m thirty years old and still have these dreams.”
And, as noted right off the hop, sometimes dreamers are doers. Out in the bullpen one day, Bouton and fellow pitcher Rob Nelson (a lefthander, natch), inspired by batboy and future film director Todd Field, came up with the million-dollar idea to create Big League Chew. That is one part of the legacy.
Battered Bastards of Baseball affirms that someone who never takes a chance seldom has a chance. What I got out of it is that, although the Ways wisely pull their punch in saying it directly, a sport stays vital by being aspirational and flexible to new ideas and new money. It cannot just be the protected profit centre for the same 30-some gazillionaires, megacorporations, and the 99th-percentile players who cycle through the 800 or so roster spots available at any one time.
As an introvert, and as a born outsider, baseball got me as a kid. Blue Jays and Expos telecasts on over-the-air TV almost 40 years ago showed a slightly wider and different world, with different faces and voices. The Jays in that era, Black and white, represented many crannies of North America — Jesse Barfield and Lloyd Moseby from these exotic places called Chicago and Oakland; Dave Stieb the confident Californian who became Cooperstown-worthy dominant after he only reluctantly became a pitcher in his early 20s; Tony Fernández and George Bell from the Dominican Republic; Jimmy Key and Tom Henke were tough on the mound but betrayed Southern-boy shyness in TV interviews.
I could not verbalize that then, but I suppose baseball seemed to have a place for everyone, at least then. As one of the two sports I played throughout childhood, there was also not the same intensity that you got by osmosis in a hockey dressing room, even as a six-year-old in novice house league with your mother tying your skates. It forced me to be social but the inherent individualism of baseball tasks — you alone hit the ball, you alone catch and throw it — respected the skilled outsider.
This is what Bing Russell was when it came to organizing a colourful and winning ball team, even if a Northwest League pennant eluded Portland.
Portland is a character, alright
A half-century removed from the Mavericks’ days, and nearly a decade after Battered Bastards’ release, it is hard not to connect their saga to the relocation drama with the Oakland Athletics. The base principle is naïve but it is simple: fans should have their own teams to support, without being a servant to the needs of the big club.
Major League Baseball falls short of its prime deliverable. Six of the 25 largest combined statistical areas in the U.S. do not have an MLB team. All six have an NBA or MLS franchise. Portland has both. Those happen to be the leagues that North Americans under age 40 tend to care about more than baseball.
Oakland is surely as deserving as anyplace else. Yet, as you know, it could soon be left with nothing if the Athletics pull up stakes for Las Vegas. Some days, the sporting green might seem greener up in Portland, which has less history with the ‘big four’ leagues but has kept something for itself.
The site of the Mavericks’ home ballpark has been the launch point for athletic revolutions in three different sports. The Mavericks, however successfully, challenged the order in baseball. The old Civic Stadium was also the home of the Portland State Vikings of Division 2 college football, where Darrel (Mouse) Davis refined the run-and-shoot scheme that turned football into its eventual form as a passing game.
It is now a soccer ground called Providence Park, home of the Portland Thorns women’s side led by Canadian legend Christine Sinclair. The Thorns are more than just an on-the-pitch powerhouse, but also demonstrate how a team of sportswomen can bond with a town and move across societal lines. We have benefited that it does not have to be a male team anymore.
That vibe is hard to find in baseball, where MLB is now a US$11-billion industry. The Battered Bastards of Baseball captures how it was possible 50 years ago. The flick should be watched as a mood-setter sometime around late March before time begins anew on Opening Day.
Bing Russell, and his family, were and are well-connected to Hollywood. He was an outsider whose methods warned against the sport getting too corporate. It is not his fault that he was largely viewed in his time as a nuisance. Back then, the nuisances had the winning arguments, if not the clout to close out the win.
Baseball also did not listen to Charlie Finley after the reserve clause was struck down in 1975. Finley suggested making every player a free agent every year as a way to create a buyer’s market for each MLB organization each off-season. To the great relief of Marvin Miller and the players’ association, he was ignored, and that set in motion the chain for 1980s collusion to depress salaries, the 1994-95 proxy war, and the contagion of NFT (not effing trying) teams.
Well-informed outsiders who care are often the ones who often drive change. Of course, MLB wants no part of that, whether in 2023 or 1973. Maybe by 2043.
This is probably Great Man Theorizing, but this post needs a closer. The Battered Bastards of Baseball’s end notes point out the Mavericks sparked a rally for independent baseball. There are indy leagues and teams, and potential disruptors such as the Savannah Bananas, which remind us no one should own the concept of baseball. True, MLB used the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown to hostilely take over Minor League Baseball (MiLB) in 2021. In that restructuring, some indy-ball outfits did get upgraded to Triple-A status. Circle that on your scorecard as a win for Bing Russell.
30 March-14 July 2023
Hamilton, Ont.
Two books worth checking out for further detail: Michael Shapiro’s Bottom of the Ninth: Branch Rickey, Casey Stengel, and the Daring Scheme To Save Baseball From Itself (2009); and Rob Ruck’s Raceball: How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black and Latin Game (2011).
Jeff Labrecque, “Sundance 2014: Todd Field looks back on the ‘Battered Bastards,’ ” Entertainment Weekly, 22 January 2014.
From a Bouton appearance on Late Night With David Letterman, 16 March 1982.
Howard Bryant, Rickey: The Life and Legend of an American Original, pages 344-46. Published 2022 by Mariner Books.
Swanson, who died in March 2022, was credited with being the first comedy club promoter in Seattle to book Ellen DeGeneres, Jerry Seinfeld, and Cheech and Chong. His son Taylor Swanson is the major league quality control coach and catching coordinator for the New York Yankees. While he’s not allowed to have a beard, his No. 73 jersey corresponds to the Mavericks’ inaugural season.