“And another thing, just wait till next year!” This is the last line of dialogue in the greatest baseball movie of all time, 1976’s The Bad News Bears. Timmy Lupus, the team’s bottom-of-the-roster right fielder, shouts it at the Yankees players just after profanity phenom Tanner Boyle tells ‘em where to shove their trophy and just before a bunch of 11-year-olds triumphantly pour Coors Banquet all over themselves.
Directed by satirist Michael Ritchie, BNB arrived as a New Hollywood-adjacent counterpunch to the sanitized, sentimental Americana commonly associated with postwar sports. Its title has since become cultural shorthand for inept misfits who will win your heart if nothing else. This Wednesday, the Cult Film Collective—a South Minneapolis-based organization dedicated to preserving and exhibiting film on film—will be celebrating MLB’s Opening Day and the start of a new Twins season by hosting a special 16 mm screening of BNB at the Trylon Cinema.
I should mention that I help run the collective, and likewise coach a little league baseball team with the Trylon’s programmer—but receive no remuneration for any of the above. And after recently inspecting our print of the movie, as we rewound the film reels, I couldn’t help but think: This is how the past two years have felt for Twins fans, like watching The Bad News Bears in reverse, from competency to chaos, minus the charm.
It Wasn’t Even About Winning
The 2023 Minnesota Twins season was legit movie magic. Three key examples I happened to see live:
- When Joe Ryan pitched his first career shutout on June 22, the final out wasn’t even the most exciting moment of the game. Heading into the ninth, the Twins were up by six and Ryan had already thrown almost one hundred pitches with the top of the Red Sox batting order on deck. Would manager Rocco Baldelli keep him in? From the stands, just seeing Ryan run out of the dugout with the chance to pitch an increasingly rare complete game felt even more electric than actually witnessing it minutes later. With that win, the Twins climbed to .500 and never looked back.
- Kody Funderburk made his major league debut on August 28 mere hours after being called up from the Saints. He emerged from the bullpen, hair and mustache first, like he’d walked out of 1976 itself, threw two perfect innings with three strikeouts, one batter after another, then disappeared into the night. Oh, Royce Lewis also hit his second grand slam in two straight games that day. The fact that both players have been backsliding ever since matters less to me than the fact that I’ll never forget those two innings. My friend’s 11-year-old sons still call their sandlot team the Fundercats (ho!) whenever we play. That’s how you create lifelong fans.
- October 4, Game 2 of the AL Wild Card, top of the fifth, the Blue Jays were having trouble hearing their base coaches over the Target Field crowd noise and Carlos Correa called for a pickoff attempt at second. A whip-fast move from Sonny Gray and Correa laid down the tag on Vladimir Guerrero Jr. The play quite possibly decided the series.
The Twins snapped a historic 18-game playoff losing streak and won their first series since 2002. When they lost the ALDS to the Houston Astros afterward, the season still felt like a triumph, the ultimate “just wait till next year” high. (It bears repeating regularly that the Astros cheated their way to a 2017 World Series victory by electronically stealing signs and banging on a trashcan to tip off batters—an absurd blend of high-tech espionage and sandlot cozenage—and all culpable players should be roundly booed in perpetuity, even ex-Twin Carlos Correa.)
It Isn’t Even About Losing
Then what happened? In 2024, ownership slashed payroll by $30 million, raised concession prices, and installed self-checkout kiosks at beer coolers. Stadium attendance, which neared the league average in 2023 at just below two million, dropped by 22,508. The Pohlad family failed to negotiate a new regional sports TV deal, resulting in a loss of roughly $54 million in revenue. The trade deadline came and went with zero acquisitions. And the team missed the playoffs after a crushing season collapse.
But then what happened? Ownership slashed payroll again in 2025, reported an accumulated debt of $500 million borrowed against the team’s value, put the organization on the market for 10 months, failed to sell, and tanked attendance again by another -182,888 (the lowest full-season turnout this century, and I’m no economist, but…) before the team went 70-92.
The worst part, however, was the Friday Afternoon Fire Sale when, at the deadline, the front office traded 11 players off the 40-man roster, including Jhoan Durán, a generational closer; Harrison Bader, the closest player we had to a Kelly Leak (Jackie Earle Haley), the leather-jacketed, Harley z90-riding Bad News Bears centerfielder; and Carlos Correa, who agreed to waive his no-trade clause only for the Houston Astros (who, I’d like to remind you, cheated their way to a World Series victory and should be forever booed, especially Carlos Correa). After which the organization fired Baldelli as manager then hired Derek Shelton, former Twins bench coach and recent Pirates manager who, over six years in Pittsburgh, never won more than 76 games in a single season.
In The Bad News Bears, Coach Buttermaker (Walter Matthau), the constantly pickled and washed-up former minor league pitcher, reluctantly begins his road to redemption by getting the Bears a sponsor, Chico’s Bail Bonds, and some uniforms so the kids can feel like a team, and recruits two ringers, Kelly Leak and pitcher Amanda Whurlitzer (Tatum O'Neal) to give his team at least a fighting chance. By comparison, Minnesota ownership’s salary dump last year was so cynical that Rocco should’ve taken the Twins’ uniforms with him when he left.
My point is this: I love some but not many things more than baseball. But I hate buying game tickets, brats, and absurdly priced beers to help subsidize debt-drenched billionaires (nepo-billies at that) asking players and fans to settle for less so they can try to get more. Because it’s only fun to shout “just wait till next year!” at the end of the season. It loses its defiant nerve when you find yourself saying it before the season even begins.
Or, like Coach Buttermaker warns his players after they vote to disband the team: “This quitting thing is a hard habit to break once you start.”
The Bad News Bears
When: 7 p.m. Wednesday
Where: Trylon, 2820 E. 33rd St., Minneapolis
Tickets: Sold out!
