In 1979, CBS tried to squeeze a couple of extra innings out of “The Bad News Bears,” a sports comedy movie that had already spawned two sequels. The TV show featured Corey Feldman in one of his first major roles, but the series struck out after two seasons. The original 1976 film starred Walter Matthau as a former minor league pitcher who becomes the cranky coach of a youth baseball team. The show premiered on March 24, 1979 and shared the same general premise as the movie. Oscar-nominated Jack Warden led the show as Morris Buttermaker, a man tasked with coaching the worst Little League team to avoid legal trouble.
Feldman played one of the boys on the team. At this point, the young star had only appeared in a few episodes of a ’70s series nobody remembers today called “Eight Is Enough” and “Alice.” The actor would go on to become a major star in the ’80s, appearing in movies like “The Goonies” and “Stand By Me,” but before then, he was merely Regi Tower. “[Regi] was the shortstop on the baseball team,” Feldman said in the book “Happier Days: Paramount Television’s Classic Sitcoms 1974-1984.” “He was the one who always got hit with the ball. I got hit with a lot of balls. And it was sometimes painful.”
Line drives aside, Feldman did look back on his time making the show as a “great experience.”
The Bad News Bears show was the victim of schedule changes
“The Bad News Bears” was – as Corey Feldman put it in “Happier Days” — “one of the [few] children’s prime-time shows.” Charming, with life lessons in every episode, and an upstanding moral center, the show found an audience. Unfortunately, audiences soon had trouble finding it.
“The Bad News Bears” originally premiered at 8 p.m. on a Saturday night. In September, CBS pushed back the show’s time slot by a half hour. In June of the next year they moved it back to 8:00, only to revert to 8:30 once again the following month. Audiences weren’t sure when to catch the televised ballgame. It didn’t help that the series aired on Saturday, which Feldman called “a terrible night because “nobody wants to watch TV. You want to go out. You want to do stuff.”
CBS canceled “The Bad News Bears” when it was three episodes into its second and last season. The three final episodes never aired on the network. The unintentional finale, “Double Play,” aired on July 16, 1980. We’ll never know if it could’ve eventually become one of the best sports TV shows. The franchise would eventually take the field again. In 2005, Billy Bob Thornton starred in the movie remake, and in 2022, CBS announced it was developing a female-led reboot of “The Bad News Bears.”