The phrase “Bad News Bears” has permeated the culture beyond memories of the original movie, shorthand for both poor athletic performance and a family comedy subgenre. Lots of movies have run with the idea of a rough-around-the-edges kids’ sports team turned around by a reluctant coach. The idea has been reproduced so many times we forget just how rough the edges were – or what the movie said about winners and losers in the first place.

The movie opens on Morris Buttermaker (Walter Mattheau, sounding very much like the early Homer Simpson voice he inspired) who has taken an under-the-table deal to coach little league in between his freelance pool cleaning gigs. Buttermaker is a brazen alcoholic, always walking around the field with a beer in hand – he’s introduced in his convertible sloppily adding liquor to the can, so he’s even less sober than others suspect – and passing out during a pitching demonstration to the kids. The kids are prone to swears and fighting, but the punches aren’t pulled for the sake of cuteness. This is a time capsule both of suburban Southern California and the acceptable phrases and language in a 1970s PG movie.

I think a lot of people, especially around my generation, confuse the details of The Bad News Bears with its descendants, like the odious 90s family movie The Mighty Ducks. Both movies are about bad teams that learn to be better (a junior league hockey team in the case of the Ducks), but the Disney knockoff sands down the behavior of its child actors and pedals a message that celebrates the ends as just reward for the means. I’m not sure it’s general knowledge that unlike the Ducks – spoilers, I guess, for 1976’s The Bad News Bears – the Bears lose the big game at the end. This is a large difference on its own, but it’s especially relevant seeing the plight of the Bears along the way.

The dramatic appeal of sports, in real life and the movies, is the way it can definitively portray victory. You can wed winning to any sort of cause and make your teams score touchdowns against racism (ala Remember the Titans), row a boat in defiance of Hitler himself (ala The Boys in the Boat), or assert American superiority to that evil empire Iceland (those fucking Ducks again). The Bad News Bears has a more fundamental question than demonstrating your worth by winning – what does it mean to be on the playing field?

One of the foul-mouthed Bears describes the team with a flurry of slurs and deprecations that I wouldn’t dare reproduce in 2024 but suffice to say observes the team’s diverse ethnicities and masculinities. The Bears are only in the league because of a lawsuit (“It was bad enough when the courts forced us to let the girls in”). This sets up an important dynamic: the other teams don’t just want them beaten, they want this group of slurs out of the league. “What I want to see is every boy in America out on the baseball field, playing the great game of baseball” is the public announcement at the ceremonial beginning of the season. In contrast to this is the preseason lawsuit and Roy Turner (Vic Morrow), coach of the defending champion Yankees, who pressures Boilermaker to disband the Bears and avoid embarrassment.

Roy’s world is interesting both its depictions of middleclass polite society (Pizza Hut and matching sport coats) and a character who is clearly the baddie even next to a guy literally getting blackout drunk in front of children. Buttermaker may be a drunk, a louse, a deadbeat a washout and in his own way as dishonest as Roy. But he draws the line at rolling over and allowing his kids to quit the league, and that’s enough to make him our hero. Though he’s rarely kind or sober – not to mention he throws beer on the quasi-surrogate daughter he fat-shamed into joining the team – he only truly falters when he briefly buys into Roy’s exclusion philosophy, ordering the ringer Kelly to chase down every fly ball and benching the worst players. When he catches himself shouting down the kids he coached into the championship, he relents and allows everyone to play. The end of the game is exciting enough that it’s easy to forget this is the principled decision that costs the Bears the game.

After the Yankees beat the Bears in a play at the plate for the championship, the teams meet at the plate. The Yankees brandish an obscenely large trophy, the Bears hold brown bottles of beer Boilermaker gave them to celebrate. Now victorious on the field, the Yankees issue a condescending apology. The Bears respond with one of the best final lines of any movie: “Hey Yankees… you can take your apology – and your trophy – and shove ’em straight up your ass!” followed by the Bears chucking their much smaller runner-up award and promising to return next year. The camera moves back from the jubilant and defiant Bears over the outfield fence, revealing an American flag in the foreground.

This isn’t the first film made by director Michael Ritchie with some scathing, if complicated, thoughts on 1970s America. And the histories of America’s national pastime and its tendency to wall out groups from its highest levels of competition are intertwined. So while the action of the movie mostly centers on things of consequence to the field, it’s not a stretch to read into the class signposts along the way. Even one of the film’s funnier visual gags has some meaning. The Yankees’ uniforms are sponsored by the restaurant chain Denny’s, while the Bears are emblazed with the logo for Chico’s Bail Bonds. Aside form the extra race signifier in the name, it’s worth noting the presumed clientele for the “unacceptable” business, even though Chico’s Bail Bonds presumably provides a service while Denny’s sells greasy junk food.

Today, the cost of competitive sports for children gets higher and higher and the select league ages lower and lower. Some of this is good old American entrepreneurism making a quick buck off of competitive middle- and upper-class parents with money to burn. But some of it is entrenching networks of parents and coaches along paths to high school and college teams and access to dreams of playing in the Big Leagues.

Tonight, the World Series begins, in a battle between the New York Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers. Maybe the damn Yankees with their massive payroll and shallow outfield will win (and with their record-setting payroll, the Dodgers are basically the Yankees of the west coast anyway). But as long as that American flag waves in the outfield, there will always be other teams to root for, and the option to tell the Yankees to shove the trophy up their ass.