The Bad News Bears is a 1976 American sports comedy film directed by Michael Ritchie and written by Bill Lancaster. It stars Walter Matthau as an alcoholic ex-baseball pitcher who becomes a coach for a youth baseball team known as the Bears. Alongside Matthau, the film's cast includes Tatum O'Neal, Vic Morrow, Joyce Van Patten, Ben Piazza, Jackie Earle Haley, and Alfred W. Lutter. Its score, composed by Jerry Fielding, adapts the principal themes of Bizet's opera Carmen.
Released by Paramount Pictures, The Bad News Bears received generally positive reviews. It was followed by two sequels, The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training in 1977 and The Bad News Bears Go to Japan in 1978, a short-lived 1979–80 CBS television series, and a 2005 remake.
Plot
In 1976, Morris Buttermaker, an alcoholic pool cleaner and former minor-league baseball pitcher, accepts an under-the-counter cash payment from a lawyer to coach his son's youth baseball league expansion team, the Bears. The team is made up of misfit players, formed as a settlement to a lawsuit brought against the league for excluding such players from other teams. Shunned by the more competitive teams (and their competitive parents and coaches), the Bears are the outsiders, and the least talented team in the Southern California league.
Buttermaker makes little effort to help the boys improve, accomplishing nothing before their first game except finding a sponsor to provide uniforms. He forfeits the opening game after the Bears allow 26 runs without recording an out.
With the entire team wanting to quit due to the humiliation of their first loss, Buttermaker begins to take his coaching more seriously, teaching basics like hitting, fielding, and sliding. In addition, he recruits two unlikely prospects: sharp-tongued Amanda Wurlitzer, the 11-year-old daughter of Buttermaker's former girlfriend and a skilled pitcher (trained by Buttermaker when she was younger); and the local cigarette-smoking, loan-sharking, Harley-Davidson-riding troublemaker, Kelly Leak, who also happens to be the best athlete in the area, but has been excluded from playing in the past due to his juvenile delinquency. With Amanda and Kelly on board, the team starts gaining more confidence, and the Bears begin to win. A subplot reveals the strained relationship between Buttermaker and Amanda as the team improves.
Eventually, the Bears make it to the championship game opposite the top-notch Yankees, who are coached by aggressive, competitive Roy Turner. As the game progresses, tensions rise between the teams and the coaches, as Buttermaker and Turner engage in ruthless behavior toward each other and the players in order to win the game. But when Turner strikes his son, the pitcher, for ignoring his orders and intentionally throwing at the batter's head, Buttermaker realizes that he, too, has placed too much emphasis on winning, and puts his benchwarmers in to allow everyone to play. The Bears lose in the end, but despite Buttermaker's move, they nearly win the game. Buttermaker gives the team beer, which they spray on each other in a field celebration as if they had won.
Cast
Top billed, shown in opening credits, were Matthau, O'Neal and Morrow.
Adults
Walter Matthau as Morris Buttermaker, coach of the Bears: A drunken, loud, ex-professional baseball pitcher and part-time pool cleaner, who drives a rundown green Cadillac convertible Vic Morrow as Roy Turner, coach of the Yankees who is competitive and aggressive. Joyce Van Patten as Cleveland, league manager who favors Roy and the Yankees. Ben Piazza as Bob Whitewood, city councilman and lawyer who sued the league to allow the Bears (in particular, his son) to play and who convinces (and pays) Buttermaker to coach the team.