A Bunch Of Fun And Good Advice

The flutterball style of The Baseball Bunch, a syndicated half-hour show for kids that was first aired on May 2 and will be shown every weekend until Labor Day, found a comfortable groove when host Johnny Bench smacked a Tug McGraw pitch into a neighboring solar system.

"I guess my changeup didn't fool you," said McGraw.

"Changeup!" said Bench. "I thought that was your Peggy Lee fastball."

"Is that all there is?" the Reds' catcher croaked in a cigar-butt imitation of Miss Lee's torchy ballad. "Is that all there is? Then let's keep swinging."

That's about the way hardball is played on The Baseball Bunch, a cross between a Pee Wee league clinic and vintage Saturday morning Bullwinkle. Bench heads a pickup team of sandlotters consisting of a large, slightly manic Chicken and eight kids who are cheerful beyond all belief. The Chicken, for some obscure reason web-footed, is a goofball. He mugs and crashes around the field and trips over foul lines—in short, a target for a tranquilizer dart.

In one early show the Chicken threw a strike past a plucky Pete Rose. "Now you're cooking, Chicken," said Rose, looking as irascible as a schoolboy who's just had his lunch money swiped. The Bunch bit on that line and found it mighty tasty. When the Chicken fouled off a McGraw fastball, Tug ran through one of his batty routines.

"That's a Chicken dance," he told the Bunch.

"What?" they asked.

"A Chicken dance is a fowl ball."

Screwball humor like Tug's makes the show pop, when the jokes are working. When they're not, the show is about as flashy as a Double A utility infielder. But that's not so bad, for the heart of The Baseball Bunch is inside baseball, taught by the guys who really know it. Rose shows the Bunch how to execute a belly slide; Tom Seaver demonstrates how a pitcher covers first base; Bucky Dent teaches them how to break in a glove with shaving cream. Even home-run king Sadaharu Oh is scheduled to appear later in the summer to talk (through an interpreter) about the art of hitting and the Zen of Japanese baseball.