The Bad News Bears Meet The 1973 Mets

Rating: 10/10 (25 August 2005)

In the last three games of the 1980 seasons, the Mets played the Pirates, and set a record for lowest home attendance for a three-game series, at slightly over 5,000 tickets. Three of those were mine. The Indians from this movie were about as bad, and the stadium about as empty.
The plot: a stripper's husband dies on their honeymoon, and she wants to move the Cleveland Indians, whom she inherited, to Miami. To do this, she compiles the worst collection of players she can find while still appearing to try to win.
Like the Bears, who were court-ordered because everyone had to get a chance to play, these Indians are "owner ordered" because their mission was to lose games. Neither team would have existed otherwise.
The "Buttermaker" role in this film, Manger Lou Brown (a tire salesman), is played stereotypically well by James Gammon. "Englebert" (catcher Jake Taylor) is played by Tom Berenger, with Rene Russo as his annoying ex-girlfriend that he inexplicably still wants. "Amanda" in this movie is "Wild Thing" (played by Charlie Sheen), the no-nonsense ex-con with the killer fastball. "Kelly Leak" was divided in half, with the delinquent half incorporated into Sheen's character, and the slugging half to political exile Pedro Cerrano, a Cuban national who fled Castro's persecution over his practice of voodoo. Corbin Bernsen (now a very bald John Durant on General Hospital) is Roger Dorn, the prima donna third baseman who refuses to give even 50 percent for this farce of a team. Wesley Snipes is Willy Mays Hayes, a gate-crasher at Spring Training who literally runs his way onto the team.
The season starts off predictably, but the owner (Margaret Whitton) is not pleased because the team isn't as bad (16-25) as she had hoped. When they reach .500 at 60-60, only nine games out of first, she goes ballistic and cuts the team's legs out from under them, forcing them to train with poor equipment and travel in an old chartered plane that put the fear of God into the team. When the Bear-I mean the Indians, find out why they were hired, they have that coming-of-age moment when they decide to rise up and "win the whole thing." Like the 1973 Mets, who came from 11.5 games back at the end of August to pass five teams and win the division, these Indians play hard, even Dorn gets into the act and plays like it's a contract year, and the movie climaxes on the final day of the season with the Indians and Yankees in a playoff for the title.
The subplots are well-acted and the casting was superb, as the future careers of many actors in this film testifies to.