dragonphan

After becoming a huge fan of the HBO series First and Ten, I had been waiting a long time for a TV show to air that was based on a professional baseball team. Alas, Fox decided to air a new series called Hardball, a sitcom about a struggling major league baseball team named the Pioneers, that had hired a new manager (his name was Happy)to try to shape things up in the clubhouse and on the field. They had a stupid looking mascot named Hardball, who never left his uniform (it was a copy of Mr. Met, one of the worst mascots in sports history). Basically, this was a premise that I really looked forward to seeing on TV.

Unfortunately, the show was terrible. It turned out to be a typical videotaped, low budget Fox sitcom with terrible low budget acting and terrible low budget writing. I wondered if the writers had ever seen a major league baseball game. They had no idea how to write a show about baseball.

There was one episode where the Pioneers' manager had a rivalry with a manager from another team. In the game, the rival manager switched a Pioneer bat with an illegal bat. A Pioneer player used the illegal bat to hit a game winning home run. The rival manager told the umpires that the bat was illegal, and the umpires ruled the batter out, and the Pioneers lost. The players just calmly accepted the loss and mopped into the clubhouse. Now if that really happened in Major League Baseball, there would be all kinds of fights and protests (remember George Brett pinetar incident). The players would never just accept a loss like that.

This was the best example I could come up with to show just how stupid an unfunny this show was. I totally understand why it didn't last very long.

The premise for this show was good. Beans was a popular teenager in Kansas with a hot girlfriend, his father (so he thought) was a local mailman. In the pilot, Beans got word that his father was transferred to Washington DC, and the family would have to move. Right after moving to DC, Beans saw his father's mailtruck get blown up and he and his family thought that dad was killed. Beans somehow found out that his father was not killed, but was actually a secret spy who was kidnapped by an evil organization and his mailman occupation was really a cover. Beans asked to get involved in trying to find his father. His mother and little brother knew nothing and still thought that his father was dead. While in DC, Beans started dating a hot foreign girl. But a few episodes into the series, his old girlfriend from Kansas moves to DC to be with him.

The writing on this show turned out to be pretty poor, which really hurt the success. Fox cancelled the show before Beans was able to rescue his father.

The series "Safe at Home" aired on WTBS during the daytime, and I believe that it was produced by Proctor and Gamble. There were two other series: Down To Earth, and Rocky Road that were also aired on TBS around the same time. It seems as though I am the only person to watch any of these shows.

This is what I can remember from the show....it took place in Chicago "Hello Chicago, you're gonna be my new home...Safe at Home" as mentioned in the opening theme song. There were two different girls who played the lead character Amy. From what I can remember, Amy left her mother to live with her older brother and brother in law. Later in the series, Amy had a "bad-ss" boyfriend named Ace and Amy's brother/guardian did not want her dating Ace. This storyline had similarities to Malory's relationship with Nick on Family Ties, which aired about the same time.

This series along with the other two TBS sitcoms disappeared one day and never returned to the air.