Nothing about The Bad News Bears stands out as being especially believable or unbelievable. The kids are pretty realistic in the way they talk and treat each other, though, and that is what many people cite as being one of the strengths of the film. A lot of the things that stand out as unrealistic to us now, such as Buttermaker sitting in the dugout and drinking beer and even offering beer to the kids on occasion, could perhaps be attributed to its being made about thirty years ago when people may have been more tolerant of that kind of thing. It is believable that the team could improve as they do over the course of their season through the recruitment of two very good players, Amanda Whurlitzer and Kelly Leak, and through Buttermaker's coaching of them -- he is a former minor-leaguer and knows a lot about baseball.

The whole point of Hardball seems to be that it is true to life, especially to the life of kids living in Cabrini Green, the housing project in Chicago. Like the kids in The Bad News Bears, these kids say things that seem shocking, things we don't usually hear kids in movies say. They know every cuss word in the book. Additionally, the kid actors in the movie are almost all from the Chicago area, and all were cast for their ballplaying abilities in addition to their acting abilities. What you get through this is a realistic setting and baseball scenes that are authentic because the kids really know how to play.

Plot-wise, the movie is fairly believable, as well. I have no doubt that this is a pretty realistic portrayal of what life is like for kids in the Chicago projects. I also have no doubt that working with kids, as Conor O'Neal does in the movie, has the power to change even the most screwed-up life. The only place where I see the movie falter slightly in the believability category is how the team inexplicably improves from being the worst team to the best. The Kekambas lose their first game horribly, then Conor -- who has no apparent knowledge of baseball outside of what he has absorbed through his obsession with betting on sports -- actually coaches them a little during practice and tells them to stop yelling at each other and cutting each other down, and then, all of the sudden, they are winning. However, as pointed out in the "plot" section before this one, the point of the movie is not baseball but people, so too much focus on baseball at this point would have distracted the audience from the true focus of the movie.

The believability of the ball-playing in these films is the equivalent of special effects, set design, costumes, etc. in other films. Filmmakers have to do everything they can to establish an absolute reality in their films. If a film is set in the past, the costumes and sets should be historically accurate. If there are supposed to be dinosaurs, like in Jurassic Park, those dinosaurs better look accurate and better look like they are actually there.