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Buttermaker (Matthau), an alcoholic ex-professional baseball player, becomes the coach of a cellar-dwelling Little League team. By recruiting a couple of unlikely prospects—one of them (O'Neal) being the daughter of his sometime girlfriend—and sheer inspiration, he turns the team into a winner.

The film was notable in its time for the amount of vulgarity (including profanity and ethnic slurs) placed into the mouths of the various child-actors who played the principal roles. However, all of the questionable dialogue was used for comic effect. There is also a now-scandalous scene where an inebriated Buttermaker drunkenly drives around a carful of kids—without seatbelts—in his open-top convertible.