South Park Baseball Episode
Rachelle Shriver
"The Losing Edge" is the fifth episode in the ninth season of the American animated television series South Park, and the 130th episode of the series overall. It originally aired on Comedy Central in the United States on April 6, 2005.
None of the boys playing for the South Park Cows, the town's Little League Baseball team, enjoy the sport at all. They find it boring and play only because of their parents' enthusiasm for it. When they win their final game, they are overjoyed at first, believing that the season is over and they can now enjoy the summer. To their horror, they discover that since they have finished first in their division, they must participate in the post-season playoffs. At a "celebration" meal, the boys discuss plans to lose on purpose without getting in trouble with their parents.
During the playoffs, they learn that the other teams also want out, and have actually trained to lose games. The Cows end up winning again and again against opponents whose efforts at throwing games are more successful, and they reach the state championship. If they win, they will have to spend their entire summer playing baseball on the national circuit.
Meanwhile, Stan's father Randy has taken up trash-talking as a hobby, getting drunk and acting obnoxiously at the games in order to start fights with the fathers of other teams' players. This behavior leads to him being arrested multiple times. While training to be the best fighter he can be, Randy becomes terrified when he meets the Denver Little League team's "Bat Dad", who wears a purple Batman cowl and cape, and who is both heavier and more misbehaved than he is. Randy decides not to attend the championship game in fear that he is not good enough.
The game is played at Coors Field; like the Cows' other opponents, the Denver team does not want to win either. The Cows have drafted Kyle's nerdy cousin Kyle Schwartz, who is terrible at all sports, in the hope of ruining their chances to win. However, the Denver team is the best yet at intentionally losing. Just as the Cows find themselves on the verge of winning, Randy appears in the stands and provokes a fight with the Bat Dad that spills onto the field; the officials warn the two men that the next one who acts aggressively will get his team disqualified. Though Randy gets knocked down, the boys' cheering, combined with a hallucination of a crowd including Mickey Goldmill and his wife Sharon (who had previously stated he could simply choose not to fight if he didn't want to) cheering him on, inspires him to stand up and continue fighting before finally knocking out Bat Dad, resulting in the Cows' disqualification and Denver's victory by default. Randy feels dejected at having cost the Cows the championship as he is placed under arrest, but Stan lifts his spirits by thanking him for doing so. He ends the episode leaping for joy while under police custody.
The episode's idea originally came from series co-creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone thinking that the children of South Park would look cute in baseball uniforms. Parker and Stone also were not fans of baseball themselves so it made sense to have the boys hate baseball. The choice to go ahead with a baseball-themed episode did create some problems animation-wise, however, as most of the children look nearly identical wearing the same uniforms. A lot of time was spent on ensuring that each character was distinguishable from each other. For example, Butters Stotch and Stan Marsh look identical with the same attire. To rectify this, Stan's hair is more prominent than Butters' and Butters has a speaking line early.[1] Additionally, Kenny appears with his hat slightly covering his face, making this one of Kenny's most visible episodes. The episode's plot was originally going to be used in Best Friends Forever but was put on hold when they came up with an episode based on the Terri Schiavo case instead.
According to the DVD commentary, "this was a really, really hard episode to do" because sports episodes in general aren't easy but also because the teams are trying to lose. Because they are trying to lose on purpose, new rules are needed which makes it different from any actual sport. The character of Bat Dad made it easier for Parker and Stone, however, as if it got too difficult, they could cut to Bat Dad.[1]
The boys of South Park, involved in Little League, play the game due to the enthusiasm of their parents despite their hatred for the sport. After winning their final game they begin to celebrate the season being over, but then discover that they have to continue playing in the state championship. Since the tournament is single elimination, the boys decide to throw their next game to have their summer free to enjoy. Unfortunately, every other team in the league shares their hatred for baseball and is trying to do the same thing. Despite the boys' best efforts to lose, they continue to win, defeating every other team until only South Park and Denver remain.
Randy, Stan's father, gets drunk and trash talks the opposing teams, inciting fights with other fathers at every game. While everyone else sees Randy's fights as obnoxious and distracting, he views them as the most important part of the game. Randy continues to fight through all the drunk and obnoxious fathers with confidence until he meets a father of one of the Denver players; "Bat Dad". Bat Dad, who wears a purple Batman cowl and cape, intimidates Randy with his larger size and aggressive attitude. Randy decides not to attend his son's game against Denver.
Fearful that if they win they will have to play baseball the whole summer in the national circuit, Cartman suggests that they find the worst player possible to join their team to ensure defeat. The South Park team drafts Kyle's stereotypically Jewish cousin, Kyle Schwartz (distinguished in a previous episode as "Kyle One") to join their team, knowing he is terrible at every sport. This fails to work as the other team has practiced and became "really good at sucking" and can even "bat themselves out" by hitting South Park pitches directly into the fielders' gloves.
Just as it seems the South Park team is sure to win, Randy shows up and begins harassing Bat Dad. The two get into a fight, which Randy nearly loses, and the announcers and umpires declare that if they continue to fight their teams will be disqualified. Stan and his team, who want Randy to force their disqualification, begin to chant for him. Due to this encouragement, as well as some from other illusionary people in his head (including Mickey Goldmill from Rocky), Randy keeps fighting and the South Park team is disqualified. As he is led away in handcuffs by the police in his underwear, Stan tells his father, "You're the greatest". Hearing this, Randy jumps for joy as the song "You're the Best" plays, and the episode ends in a freeze-frame.
I rarely get to mention this here, because so little of the show ever touches on baseball, but I have been a huge South Park fan for many, many years. The show tends to direct its satire more towards politics and popular culture, rather than sports, but the makers did include one episode in its ninth season that revolves around Little League baseball.
What the boys did not count on, however, is that every other Little League team in the area also hates the game and wants to lose as much as they do. Each game, therefore, becomes a competition not to win, but to play worse than the other guy. The South Park boys, it turns out, are too good at baseball, and keep advancing through the finals.
I'll admit I was a little worried. The preview had it all set up to be about football, and frankly, there are few things in life I know less about than professional sports. But, "South Park"'s previous entries into the sporting world, including one of my favorite episodes, the baseball classic "The Losing Edge" from Season 9, have still been enjoyable for a non-sports person like myself. This episode was no different.
The episode started off with South Park Elementary getting rid of kick-offs for the football team, which infuriated Randy. At the next PTA meeting Randy suggested that they might as well just make a sport where all the boys wear tin hats and bras and are nice to each other and hug and play with balloons.
Of course, the school thinks this is a great idea, and Sarcastaball is born. The craze soon sweeps the state, with Randy becoming the new head coach for the Denver Broncos Sarcastaball team. Seeing both the boys and the NFL teams dressed up in tin hats and bras and running around was quite the sight gag, especially as Randy continued to be more and more sarcastic about how happy he was that the country was starting to remove violence from football.
I got the point of the sarcasm bit, at least on some levels, but it would probably work better for someone more versed in the NFL. Is everyone in football really that sarcastic? Are they really in that much denial that football can cause head trauma? (Interestingly enough, I was in the U of R's recent football head-injury study as a non-football-playing control). It wasn't until the end of the episode, when Randy and his doctor exchanged, sarcastically, that putting money that should be used to research real diseases into researching something that people chose to do to themselves is a good idea that the real point of the whole thing came out, and even then it seemed like a lot of build up to a no-brainer conclusion that didn't really come down all that hard on anybody. (But maybe that was the point, we are talking concussions here after all.)
Butters. Butters tends to steal episodes, and this was no exception, with most of the laughs and shock humor coming from the loveable (and clueless) straight man himself. Butters becomes the star of the South Park Sarcastaball team, inspiring his fellow students with speeches about finding that gooey and happy place inside of yourself and sharing it with others in a nice and positive way and using it to get to victory.
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