Walter Matthau is an ex-Minor leager slumming it as a coach of the worst team in the local Little Leagues. Like many sports films, this is about creating some kind of unity among a bunch of outcasts, and going on to have a tilt at the championships, except this film has kids swearing.
There’s very little to add, most of the cast have the usual redemptive moment, including the coach himself. The only real difference between this and a clutch of other similar films is the trash talking kids, most of whom get the best lines. Chief among them is Tatum O’Neal, as the daughter to Matthau’s old sweatheart, who throws a wicked curve ball and carries a lot of the emotional weight of the film. There’s also a somewhat serious sequence at the end as the bad coach shows his nasty side which plays as a sort of moral lesson for the audience; sure Matthau is a drunk reprobate, but sometimes that’s better than being a jerk.
Naturally, the binary nature of the genre (either they win or they lose) and the need for everyone to resolve their issues in a single season of baseball is never going to help raise such films to great heights, but within the restrictive boundaries of such genre fare, it makes a good fist of offering something slightly different.
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