Watchable, but ridiculous

Rating: 1/10 (16 September 2001)

Warning: Contains spoilers
This movie on first look seems like "Mighty Ducks" with black kids and baseball. It seems as if the makers knew this, and shyed away from it by having all of the little kids cuss ... alot. Some of it is funny, but the rest of it is out of line.
If you're going to it to see some baseball action, then prepare to be disappointed. The team starts off sucking, like you see in the previews. They suck at the first practice. I mean, they can't hit, throw, catch, field, or do anything right. This carries on to the first game, when they lose horribly. But the second game, they get a new pitcher ... and suddenly the team is the best players ever! There's a play in "61*" on HBO that the baseball commentators hail as one of the most amazing plays they ever saw, and these kids duplicate it like its nothing. They show no reason why the team suddenly gets good, except they get a new pitcher.
Speaking of unreal baseball, they make every event more "dramatic" with pointless dives that are, at some points, five feet away! In one instance, with the bases loaded and 2 outs, one guy hits a little blooper to the first baseman... the pitcher dives horrendously, and the ball goes OVER the pitcher as he dives. To make matters even worse, the kid gets to first base, and the ball lays there in the dirt, right where the first-basemen is supposed to be ... except that there is no first-baseman! They simply forget the fact that the ball was hit right to a position, so they remedy it by eliminating the player! In a real-time situation, the first baseman would easily had caught it, and gotten the last out of the inning.
It seems like, halfway through the movie, the producers were like "Hey! We forgot a villian!". For this reason, one of the opposing coaches, for no reason at all, suddenly becomes sporadically mean. No reason at all, and he's transformed into a giant dickhead. And so, the "climax game" as you see in sports is the pre-championship game against the dickhead coach's team. Naturally they win. Then they go to the championship, show Reeve's speech... and fade out to end. As the credits roll, you see pics of the team with trophies, as if to say "In case you were wondering, they won the big game, we just didn't feel it was important to show".
One last note, one of the kids gets shot. Hey, I warned you with the spoiler. Anyways, the bullet hole in his chest is like half an inch in diameter, but the only gun ever pointed even near his direction during the scene was a shotgun! Just another example of the unreal nature of this film.
This is a feel-good film, as long as you have no concern for cinematography, continuity, unreal moves, or anti-climatic nature. 3/10.