Following a Sundance Film Festival premiere, the acclaimed sports documentary The Battered Bastards of Baseball is getting a noteworthy release next month. Picked by Netflix, it’ll exclusively debut on their streaming platform in early July and today they’ve unveiled the full trailer which tells the story of an unexpected minor league baseball team finding their own definition of success.
We said in our review it’s a “well-made though thinly told tale about the Portland Mavericks, a minor-league baseball team that operated independent of Major League Baseball’s rules and regulations. Owned by Bonanza star Bing Russell, father of Kurt, the Mavericks found unbridled success in the mid-70s, revitalizing a once-defunct baseball town. Directors Chapman and Maclain Way don’t dig much into the specifics of the story, relying on the memories of those close to Bing (Kurt Russell especially) and not much else. In short, the story exceeds the documentary, which is just enough to entertain.”
Check out the trailer and poster below:
The jaw-dropping true story of a real-life “Bad News Bears,” this inspiring documentary recounts the history of the Portland Mavericks, an independent professional baseball team that briefly broke attendance records in 1973 with a roster that included a blacklisted former Yankee pitcher, a left-handed catcher, the sport’s first female general manager, and young movie star Kurt Russell, whose actor father Bing was the scrappy team’s owner.
The Battered Bastards of Baseball hits Netflix on July 11th.