The 1957 Little League World Series team from Monterrey, Mexico is facing another David and Goliath story this weekend. This time it doesn’t happen on a baseball diamond, but at the box office. The Perfect Game is based on the true story of a poor Mexican Little League team’s improbable road to baseball immortality. How will these boys fare against an 11-year-old foul-mouthed, blood-spattered vigilante named “Hit Girl” – one of the featured killers in the indie comic book-based Kick-A**? The answer will say a lot about the kind of culture we inhabit, and what it considers “entertainment.”

Children as Innocents

As cultural critic Neil Postman noted in The Disappearance of Childhood, the idea of childhood as a protected time from infancy to adolescence has its roots in the concept of innocence. Children were to be protected from the corrupting influences of the adult world until they could gain the chronological maturity necessary to understand and protect themselves. Postman explained, “One might say that one of the main differences between an adult and a child is that the adult knows about certain facets of life -- its mysteries, its contradictions, its violence, its tragedies -- that are not considered suitable for children to know: that are indeed shameful to reveal to them indiscriminately.”

The Perfect Game presents children as children. Little League in 1957 was not beset by many of the problems associated with the professionalizing of the sport today. None of the children look like roided-out Mark McGuire wannabes. Sandy Koufax is a hero to them, but they are not concerned about scouts in the stands; they just want to make their families and their country proud of them – and to play ball.

The kids are not rubes. They have experienced their own share of tragedy. One of the boys has lost his brother. All of them live in a poor town – they have to make their gear out of things they can scrounge. When Angel, the team’s pitcher, finds a real baseball out in a field, the kids think it is a gift from God, so they ask Him for a bat. The team also faces racism on the road. The film does not sugarcoat the prejudice that existed alongside the Leave it to Beaver suburban ideal of the 1950s.

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