The Eli Sports Network “Now Showing” Theater is open!
Well not exactly a theater but at least twice a month (and maybe more) the ESN “Now Showing Theater” will link or tell you where you can find a sports based movie, documentary, film or some sort of interesting movie that fits with a current event. We will list them as Nominations as we grow each category.
The idea is not to simply find big motion pictures that most folks already have seen or know but to try and find some other interesting movies or shorts films that has caught the attention of one of our on site movie and film critics. There will be some big movies that are recommended to re-visit or share with the younger generation that have not seen something like “Hoosiers” or “Rocky” for example.
The movie that jarred this idea was a little documentary on Netflix about a forgotten Minor League baseball team in Portland, Oregon. So with that, let’s get started with our first feature, “The Battered Bastards of Baseball”!
Below are the categories we have a movie listed and the categories will grow as we add nominations.
Categories
Documentary Baseball
Nomination #1
“The Battered Bastards of Baseball”
Rated MA (strong language)
This is a documentary movie about the little known “Portland Mavericks” minor league baseball team. It is a fascinating story about a bigtime Hollywood family saving minor league baseball in Portland, Oregon. You do NOT need to be a baseball fan to be entertained or enjoy this movie. It is superb and is filled with video clips from the run of the team from 1973-77. Being 10-13 years old at time of this team and living in Tumwater, WA I was stunned to watch this movie and can’t believe that I never heard of them or had any recollection of this team.
I asked other friends and family members and none of us recall the “Portland Mavericks” ever existing. This was a time when the daily newspaper sports page covered EVERYTHING and you could read the box score of any pro sport in the country, along with minor league standings and more.
But there was such a divide between Seattle and Portland media that this story never caught on in the Puget Sound area. I searched newspapers.com history and the closest paper to Centralia, Olympia, Tacoma and Seattle to run anything about the Mavericks was the Daily News in Longview, the Kitsap Sun and the Everett Herald.
We are pretty sure folks from that era will love this movie and for all others it is worth the watch on the old “how it used to be” perspective. Enjoy it!
The Battered Bastards of Baseball is a 2014 documentary film about the Portland Mavericks, a defunct minor league baseball team in Portland, Oregon. They played five seasons in the Class A-Short Season Northwest League, from 1973 through 1977. Owned by actor Bing Russell, the Mavericks were an independent team, without the affiliation of a parent team in the major leagues
The film was directed by Chapman Way and Maclain Way, grandsons of Russell,[2] and features Russell’s son Kurt Russell, who played for the Mavericks and worked as a vice president.[3] It also includes batboy Todd Field, Frank “The Flake” Peters, Joe Garza, Jim Bouton, and Joe Garagiola.[4][5] The film premiered to a standing ovation at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival on January 20, 2014.[6][7] Netflix, initially one of several interested buyers, acquired the rights to the film and premiered it as an Original Documentary on July 11, 2014.
Trailer 0n You Tube
Link to Netflix
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