There are a lot of great stories out there still waiting to be called up to Hollywood’s major league stage.
“The Battered Bastards of Baseball,” a documentary that tells the story of the rogue minor league baseball team the Portland Mavericks, is a top prospect. Carren Woods, who served as the wily team’s general manager when the doc was shot between 1973 and 1977, says there’s been talk of turning the team’s story into a narrative film.
“I even believe the rights were purchased, but so far nothing has happened,” she told the Daily News.
Woods said that several years ago an Oregonian sportswriter who appeared in “Bastards” wrote a screenplay that’s still sitting on a shelf.
“The (documentary) does continue to touch lives,” she said. “I get emails or phone calls several times a year from folks who want to share about the impact of the movie on their lives.”
Woods’ favorite baseball film is 1973’s “Bang the Drum Slowly,” starring a young Robert De Niro as a catcher with terminal cancer. Roger Ebert called it “the ultimate baseball movie.”
One of the central figures in that film is former New York Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton, whose 1970 tell-all “Ball Four” humanized players including Mickey Mantle — and led to Bouton becoming a pariah among his fellow players for divulging clubhouse secrets. Before Bouton’s death in 2019, The News reported that he’d recently kicked around the idea of trying once more to turn that book into a TV or film project.
In 1976, CBS gave it a shot, but with no access to MLB trademarks, the short-lived comedy series turned into a farce Bouton later compared to the silly sitcom “Gilligan’s Island.”
