Review: The Battered Bastards of Baseball (2014)

Back in 1973, TV actor (and father of Kurt Russell) Bing Russell grew tired of Hollywood and moved his family to Portland, Oregon, where he purchased a defunct baseball franchise and started the only independent baseball team in the minor leagues, the Portland Mavericks. The Battered Bastards of Baseball is the story of the Mavericks, who played in Portland for five seasons and were an unlikely success story, cobbling together a bunch of fringe baseball players from across the country, including former prospects, talented amateurs, and one notable disgraced big leaguer. The players were shaggy and unkempt, and the fans in Portland grew to love them, as if the unrefined but lovable rogues represented their own ethos of authenticity and rebelliousness.

Directed by Maclain and Chapman Way, who made the popular 2018 television documentary Wild Wild Country, about Osho and the Rahjneeshi cult in the late 1980s, The Battered Bastards of Baseball tells the story of the sudden rise and fall of this Portland phenomenon through archival photographs and footage and interviews with the men who played for the team or helped it operate behind the scenes, including Kurt Russell, who helped his father and even stepped into the plate as Designated Hitter for a few games as well. Much as with Wild Wild Country, the story is well known to people in Oregon and another example of the Way Brothers chronicling esoteric Oregon history. But for those of us sports fans who are either too young or were too far from Portland to appreciate the story back in the 1970s, the film provides an uplifting distraction in this age of isolation and no sports.

The filmmaking itself is relatively straightforward. There are talking head interviews set against pure white backgrounds, and sometimes audio narration made up to sound like old radio broadcasts. The archival footage and still photos of the games, including their playoff runs, are well selected, but rarely revelatory. It’s occasionally a shame that there’s no footage of some of the most outrageous stories of the Mavericks, but the conventional approach does little to detract from the appealing story, which personifies the charm of Portland as a city and Bing Russell as an individual.

Maclain and Chapman Way are grandchildren of Bing, so the film is as much a tribute to their grandfather as an objective recounting of the story of the Mavericks. But the nepotism of the project does nothing to detract from the earnest warmth of the filmmaking, and if anything, it gives the brothers easy access to interview subjects who would probably be hard to get otherwise, such as their uncle, Kurt Russell. As well, the story of the Mavericks has plenty of the underdog charm that is like catnip to sports fans, and so no matter the film’s subjective nature or modest ambitions, The Battered Bastards of Baseball proves about as winning a sports doc as you’ll find on streaming.

7 out of 10

The Battered Bastards of Baseball (2014, USA)

Directed by Maclain and Chapman Way.

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