If I ever meet beloved character actor Joe Mantegna, my first question will be to ask him about his iconic role as mobster Fat Tony on “The Simpsons.” But after that, I’ll ask what it felt like to be one of the great American diplomats in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union. 

Lost to the dustbins of time – but available on YouTube! – is the film “Comrades of Summer,” which starred Mantegna as the irrepressible Sparky Smith, superstar player-manager of the Seattle Mariners. 

When Dusty Rhodes-style hard times derail Sparky’s career, he has to take a job no one wants: coaching a ragtag group of terrible players in search of some sort of success. Along the way, he learns some valuable life lessons, falls in love, manages to turn the team of scrappy underdogs into a team of winners and has his heart changed along the way.

It’s cookie-cutter stuff, even for the peak baseball movie era, except for one thing: that scrappy bunch of underdogs is the Soviet Union.

Debuting on HBO in July 1992, “Comrades” arrived just months after the Soviet Union dissolved in late December 1991. In the context of the film, the Soviet Union still exists, but it reflects the Cold War thaw of the USSR’s final years (though, unsurprisingly, not exactly culturally sensitive in its portrayal of many Russians).

The film comes full circle at the end when Sparky’s Team CCCP visits the U.S. and to play several MLB teams in exhibition games, including the Mariners. With Sparky’s mind on revenge, his squad comes oh so close to a win over Seattle but falls short in a heartbreaker. (Of course, the real winners were Sparky and the comrades he made along the way.)

While not based directly on a true story, it did parallel real-life events — with an eccentric billionaire twist.

Just as in the film, the Soviet Union team was formed in response to the announcement that baseball would become an official Olympic event for the 1992 Summer Games in Barcelona. After all, it was new ground to dominate the U.S. on the field of athletic battle. 

While “Comrades” plays the team’s ineptitude and inexperience for laughs, the general state of things in reality was, actually, pretty damn close. In August of 1987, shortly after springing to life, the Soviets lost their first-ever game to Nicaragua by a blowout score of 22-0, according to a report by the L.A. Times. Things wouldn’t really improve much over the ensuing few years.

But then, enter Ted Turner. Stay with me.

After the USA and USSR exchanged Summer Olympic boycotts over the Cold War — the U.S. skipping the 1980 Summer Games in Moscow, the Soviets returning the favor during the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics — the eccentric Turner proposed one of his cracking ideas: the Goodwill Games.

The Goodwill Games were a series of sports competitions that brought the Americans and Soviets together — alongside 50 other countries — for a TV-ready spectacle in sportsmanship. 

So, like the Olympics. Except totally not the Olympics. 

Moscow hosted the first Goodwill Games in 1986, the event shifted to Seattle in 1990, and not a boycott was found. (For whatever it’s worth, there were no further Olympic boycotts beyond 1980 and 1984.)

Baseball was absent from the 1986 Goodwill Games but was added in time for the 1990 edition — including the Soviet team, which was chugging and struggling along.

Which brings us to Friday, July 27, 1990, and the Superpower Showdown in Tacoma between the fledgling Team USSR and Team USA, a collection of college players (including Aaron Sele and future “Moneyball” focus Scott Hatteberg) coached by Jim Morris, who had a spectacular college coaching career at Georgia Tech and the University of Miami but looks nothing like Joe Mantegna.

But for all the political undertones, there wasn’t really much drama to how things unfolded on the field. Just as the “Comrades” version of the team got shellacked by a few MLB teams, this real-life Soviet club was on the receiving end of a fairly pedestrian 17-0 drubbing that was called in the seventh inning due to the mercy rule. (Did this blowout speed along the Soviet Union’s downfall? Probably not. But maybe!)

Writing on the game for the Washington Post, legendary journalist Christine Brennan was succinct in her opening assessment: “It could have been worse.” 

Try as I might, I couldn’t locate a box score for the game from a cursory Internet search, though a half-hour of “highlights” of the game, with Russian-language commentary, is easily available on YouTube.

What is known is that the Soviets didn’t fare much better in the rest of the tournament, losing 9-1 to Mexico and being mercy-ruled again by Japan, 14-0. But they would get a small bit of revenge on the Americans courtesy of their Cold War ally, Cuba, which trucked the Americans 16-2 in the semifinal round. Team USA would settle for bronze while the winless Soviets took in a Seattle Mariners game before returning home. 

While the film leaves the Olympic fate of Sparky’s Soviet ballers up to the imagination, the real-world Team USSR failed to qualify for the Barcelona Olympics prior to its dissolution. (For the record, Cuba continued its dominance with the gold medal win.)

Since then, international baseball has been on a journey from which Russia has largely been absent. The Goodwill Games were played a handful of times, the last being in 2001 (a winter and summer editions scheduled for 2005 were canceled). Turner, who died earlier this year, once blamed his mega-merger partner, Time-Warner, for the games’ demise.

And, of course, Russian-U.S. relations have gone through a number of dramatic cycles with the pair of global powers now in, if not a new cold war, at least a very chilly situation. Even if Team Russia is off-limits for any American coach, a number of former Soviet states have national teams that are part of the World Baseball and Softball Confederation.

As for Olympic baseball, it was eventually removed as an Olympic event (2005) but returned in 2020 and will be played again in 2028, possibly with MLB stars.

Taking up the mantle for international baseball has been the MLB-led World Baseball Classic, which has been played six times since debuting in 2006. Played in March, the WBC boasts something Olympic baseball never did: MLB stars, something that’s helped the tournament explode in popularity over the last few iterations. 

As for the fate of the former Soviet Union on this world stage, the closest a former Soviet state has come to success wasn’t even a full member of the USSR. The Czech Republic, formerly Czechoslovakia and seen as a USSR satellite (and reportedly beat Team USSR in a series of games in the fall of 1987), managed to capture the attention and hearts of the baseball world at the 2023 WBC.

It was a scrappy team, largely made up of players who held full-time jobs in other professions, many of whom were blue-collar workers. A global coming-out party, the unheralded Czechs defeated China 8-5 in their first game, a feel-good underdog story not unlike Sparky’s team from “Comrades.”

While the team wouldn’t win another game, it did provide a number of memorable highlights, including Ondřej Satoria’s strikeout of Shohei Ohtani. The squad returned in 2026, but the magic had faded as the team went 0-4, scoring only 5 runs while giving up 39; the team will now have to requalify if they want to make the next edition of the WBC, more a bitter ending than a bittersweet one.

Still, they’ve made a splash and maybe, just maybe, this is the first step to a bigger step.

Sparky’s dream, then, remains unfulfilled, but the possibility of a brighter baseball future from the shadows of the Cold War lives on.

This piece is in Recommend If You Like The Baseball Issue Summer 2026. You can find physical copies in bars, cafes and stores in Chicago and Washington, D.C. The newspaper is available for purchase here. 

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