Jason Bateman to star in, direct Daddy Ball series for Netflix

Jason Bateman to star in and direct series adaptation of Esquire article Daddy Ball about feuding youth-sports fathers for Netflix.

Now this sounds right up Jason Bateman’s alley. Deadline reports that Jason Bateman is set to star in and direct a series adaptation of David Gauvey Herbert’s Esquire magazine article Daddy Ball for Netflix and Aggregate.

Daddy Ball deals with dad-on-dad youth sports rivalries, but on the Long Island Inferno, two fathers, both with complicated pasts, took it all too far. There were claims of stalking, corrupt cops, and mob connections. Neither man was ever the same. Daddy Ball, which will be retitled for the series, has the potential to be exactly the type of dark comedy that Jason Bateman excels at.

Here’s Deadline’s description of the article: “Determined not to follow in his detached father’s footsteps, Bobby Sanfilippo found himself doing quite the opposite with his son. He became entangled in an epic travel baseball dad-on-dad rivalry with a man named John Reardon that led tabloids to call him ‘a Suffolk County Steinbrenner,’ ‘seriously sick,’ and one of the worst dads in youth-sports history. It starts in the world of little league baseball and expands into a BEEF-like war between two smalltime criminal fathers.  Both Sanfilippo and Reardon have rap sheets of their own, but what went down in the summer of 2012 at Baseball Heaven will define them and their families forever. Stalking claims, threatening text messages, and an unwarranted arrest later, at the heart of it all, it’s a story about the lengths fathers will go for their sons.“

Daddy Ball was the subject of a fairly intense bidding war. Deadline says that there were eight offers on the table, but Netflix emerged triumphant with an outright buy. Michael Costigan and Roxie Rodriguez will serve as co-executive producers for Aggregate, with David Klawans attached to produce the eight-episode series.

Jason Bateman was recently seen starring alongside Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in Air, a biographical drama that follows the history of sports marketing executive Sonny Vaccaro, and how he led Nike in its pursuit of the greatest athlete in the history of basketball, Michael Jordan. He was also featured in Charlie Day’s feature directorial debut, Fool’s Paradise.