Matthau, Madison, and Buttermaker

In the 1976 movie The Bad News Bears, Walter Matthau plays Morris Buttermaker, a former minor league ballplayer with the unenviable task of managing a team consisting of loudmouth Little Leaguers.  Matthau’s rumpled persona matches the Buttermaker character like...

Greg Brady vs. Danny Partridge

In the first half of the 1970s, two clans ruled Friday night television—The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family.  Both shows aired on ABC. Dodgers legend Don Drysdale met the Bradys in the episode “The Dropout” as a client of Mike Brady, America’s...

Rob Reiner and Baseball

Baseball is a never-ending source for popular culture storytellers whose tales tap a range of emotional veins in fans of the National Pastime. We cry when Gary Cooper reenacts Lou Gehrig’s “Luckiest Man” speech in The Pride of the Yankees. We cheer...

“Let Them Play!”

Baseball is a beautiful game, largely because it has no clock determining its end.  An NFL team has 45 seconds to execute an offensive play.  An NBA team, 24 seconds.  But baseball has no time limit. The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training illustrated this point with...