The Bad News Bears follows the season of a rag-tag California Little League baseball team coached by Morris Buttermaker, a former minor-league pitcher (being paid under the table by the father of one of the boys on the team). Buttermaker, who's a drunk, at first can't be bothered to actually coach the kids, but they slowly start to grow on him, and Buttermaker eventually starts to put effort into coaching and turns the kids into a winning team who can hold their own in the league's championship game.

The plot of Hardball consists of a Chicago man named Conor O'Neal (Keanu Reeves), a gambling addict, agreeing to coach a baseball team for kids in the projects for his friend in exchange for money to pay off his gambling debts. At first he is only in it for the money, and even tries to quit, but ultimately comes back to finish the season and coach the kids to a winning season because they have become more important to him than his gambling. Through his coaching the kids, Conor works through his problems and gets his life straightened out.

So outside of the settings and the specifics of the coaches' situations, we're pretty much talking about the same movie here. At least it seems that way at this level. This is a good example of why it is important to look beyond simply what happens in a movie if you are going to analyze it, becuase once you start looking deeper, even at things that are still part of the films' logos, you see that these two films are dramatically different.