Richard Linklater’s 'Everybody Wants Some!!' is a love letter to baseball

Toward the end of Richard Linklater’s delightful “Everybody Wants Some!!,” a film that straddles the line between sending up and celebrating the macho ridiculousness of the short-shorted, pre-PC, early-1980s men comprising a baseball team, Finnegan, the spiritual heart of the squad, distills to its essence what it means to play baseball.

“We all take turns being chumps around here,” he tells his teammates.

In between the drinking and philosophizing, the shaking hips and school-record bong rips, “Everybody Wants Some!!” is a love letter to the power of a unified team. Whatever unifies it – be it cans of Lone Star or competitive ping-pong or a mosh pit or mud wrestling or any of the other scenes of college debauchery Linklater depicts with glee – matters not. Just that the sanctity of the team supersedes all.

Even though the movie is set in 1980, so many of its basest elements continue to exist in modern Major League Baseball clubhouses, which themselves can be cauldrons of depravity. Linklater hasn’t been around the game for decades, since he played college ball for two years at Sam Houston State, years that inspired almost every scene in the movie. The baseball culture remains almost unchanged since then, though, and no film has captured the constant one-upping and ever-flapping gums as well as “Everybody Wants Some!!”

The truths then are the truths now. “I hate pitchers,” says Glen McReynolds, the team’s star player, to a freshman pitcher he just met in the opening scene. “You and me are gonna be teammates. We’ll never be friends.” The hitter-pitcher divide in baseball is still palpable, as is the natural follow-up to the gauntlet McReynolds’ laid: “Not a lefty, are you? Those guys are always so [expletive] weird.”

Linklater’s characters fulfill the litany of baseball archetypes without backsliding into rote stereotype. There’s Jake, the freshman around whom the film’s world revolves, and McReynolds, whose pro future is so good a teammate yanks him aside during a bar fight to ensure he doesn’t get hurt. Finnegan is the worldly smooth talker who reads Kerouac and Willoughby the stoner and bong owner who meditates naked visualizing strike threes. There’s a compulsive gambler, a redneck everyone calls Beuter Perkins because it sounds more redneckish than his given name and Niles, the manic – and maniacal – pitcher set on making the big leagues, played by Los Angeles Angels closer Huston Street’s brother, Juston.

Even if “Everybody Wants Some!!” is at its heart a party movie – there really is no plot beyond trying to get their share of Some!! – Linklater chose baseball for a reason. Though he grew up in Texas, he preferred baseball to football, and it allowed him the perfect backdrop to write for the ‘80s what his “Dazed and Confused” was for the ’70s.

“Baseball doesn’t ever give you what you want,” Linklater told Yahoo Sports. “It’s a one-way relationship. I even used that line in 'Bad News Bears.' You can love baseball, but it doesn’t always love you back. It’s a beautiful game, but when you’re in it, it’s tough. It was nice to look at the game from afar.”

After an injury ended his college career, Linklater took nearly two decades off from following sports. Much as he roots for the Houston Astros today and appreciates how the Kansas City Royals play, his connection to the game is best seen through the memories he puts in the movie and the swings he still takes on occasion.

“I had some land and a clearing and said, ‘I’m gonna get a pitching machine,’ ” Linklater said. “Guys would come out. We’d take batting practice. I love the purity of the act. I always could hit. I just enjoy a ball coming in and taking it the opposite way. I found it very simple and wonderful.”

It was him and old teammates and a bat and a ball, and as he says in “Everybody Wants Some!!,” sometimes that’s all you need. It’s how he pulled off the collegial vibe portrayed so deftly in the movie. The 12 principal actors all went to Linklater’s house for a training camp of sorts. Together, they played a little ball, chatted a lot, got to know one another. He had recruited a team, so to speak, and he wanted it to act like one.

The movie contains only one scene on a baseball diamond, and it’s nothing more than batting practice. And yet the team’s aspirations of winning a national championship feel genuine because the chemistry is laboratory-grade. It’s a movie like “Everybody Wants Some!!” that makes you want to shake PECOTA and yell: “How they get along matters!”

Of course, there is no way to quantify that, and it’s impossible to say how this fictitious team would’ve done if the film didn’t begin on a Thursday and end 48 booze-soaked hours later. You never get to see the team play. Only their reputation. And it’s romanticized in four words: “He’s a baseball player.”

A baseball player is just a baseball player, a guy who can go sliding down a staircase on a mattress into a pile of empty beer cans or split a ball in half swinging an axe. A baseball player is a chump. Stick a bunch of chumps together, though, and it’s something altogether different, dangerous in all the right ways, mystical and powerful. That’s a team, and few teams are as watchable and enjoyable as Linklater’s.