Comic relief for steroid era: HBO lampoons the entitlement of athletes

For all those who've recently felt betrayed, angered, disappointed or even repulsed by a baseball player, does HBO ever have a show for you.

Danny McBride plays former star relief pitcher Kenny Powers in the new comedy "Eastbound & Down," debuting at 9:30 p.m. Sunday on the premium-cable channel.

It's so funny, irreverent, bawdy, over-the-top and above all politically incorrect, it will remind you why we love these louts in the first place.

Well, wait a minute. Baseball is a beautiful sport, and we admire those who play it beautifully - all the more so when they're good, stand-up guys who can see beyond their own skin, along the lines of a Jim Thome or Mark Buehrle or a Kerry Wood or Derrek Lee.

Yet there's no denying there's something about those blissfully oblivious naturals who see the ball and hit the ball or see the mitt and hit it with a knee-buckling curve, without ever being troubled by the niceties of actual conscious thought.

Although it can be unpleasant when they reveal themselves to be louts, there's also something charming in it, too: Like...

• Rookie Brian Anderson talking about how he did it all for the "honeys" (a remark he's still trying to live down).

• Newly arrived South Korean Hee Seop Choi suffering dehydration after overdosing on Mountain Dew.

• Pascual Perez missing a start because he got on the circular interstate bypass of Atlanta and couldn't figure out which exit to take to get off.

At first glance, Kenny Powers is far, far less charming. An insufferably egotistic player when he was a star reliever - famous for shouting the profanity, "You're (frigging) out," after finishing the World Series with a strikeout - he has yet to accept anything resembling a comeuppance, even though he's down, out of baseball and back in his old hometown, living with his brother, his sister-in-law and their three kids.

"Sometimes when you bring the thunder you get lost in the storm," he says. And if that qualifies as insight, it's of the barely self-aware variety that makes Jim Bouton's "Ball Four" such a consistent hoot.

For all that, he hasn't lost his unerring sense of privilege, and that's what drives the comedy in "Eastbound & Down."

The guy who makes it work, though, is McBride. Hot off playing two key comedic supporting roles in last year's hit movies "Tropic Thunder" and "Pineapple Express," he comes into his own as a comic leading man as Powers.

Having made even a rat of a drug dealer somehow endearing, you better believe he glories in the role of a bloated, bare-chested, fully entitled baseball has-been, complete with mullet, mustache and goatee.

"I'm the man with the ball. I'm the man who can throw it faster than (you know what). So that's why I'm better than anyone in the world."

That's from Powers' own self-help inspirational tape from the days when he was on top, and he's still listening to it for answers in his pickup truck as he prepares to teach phys. ed. at the Jefferson Davis Middle School.

This could easily be played for tragedy, as in "The Wrestler," but with McBride starring and writing - he know doubt knows his own self-obsessed character so well he gets credited with his own lines - it's played for abundant laughs.

Make no mistake, like "Ball Four," it's not for everyone.

This is premium cable, with a little frontal female nudity and abundant profanity, much of it uttered in front of children (between his PE classes and nephews and niece).

I'm also not sure it has the side characters to be a week-in, week-out hit - Kenny has a bartender druggie pal and an old flame who's a teaching colleague, engaged to the sycophantic, jock-sniffing principal - but I do know that the pilot ends on a brilliantly ironic note of triumph that fully implicates the viewer.

There is something we love about these louts, and twas ever so.

In his oblivious self-absorption, Kenny Powers is really just a modern-day relation of Ring Lardner's Jack Keefe in "You Know Me Al."

So I make no apologies for finding this hilarious - yes, even the jokes about steroids.

Remotely interesting: Ernie Banks and Billy Williams talk about their lives as black players in the turbulent 1960s as part of Comcast SportsNet Chicago's Black History Month programming on "SportsNite" at 6:30 and 10 p.m. Monday.

For those who care, NASCAR returns to Fox with the Daytona 500 at 1 p.m. Sunday on WFLD Channel 32. ... And the NBA All-Star Game takes place at 7 p.m. Sunday on TNT.

End of the dial: George Ofman and Jesse Rogers begin their fifth season of the baseball program "Hit and Run" from 9 a.m. to noon Sunday on WSCR 670-AM.

"The Afternoon Saloon's" "Movie Madness" has to be one of the stupidest ideas I've heard on an all-sports station - and that's saying something - although I do have to cheer "Bull Durham's" upset of "Jaws." Still, it's only hindering Carmen DeFalco's efforts to establish himself as a legitimate afternoon-host heir to Dan McNeil.

- Ted Cox