Watching the film, Benny seemed unrealistically perfect:
Definitely the best baseball player on the team
The only one that the team's Jerk Jock rival respects
Baseball feats include hitting the ball straight into Scotty's glove and hitting a ball so hard that it breaks
Very handsome
Very nice and the only one on the team to welcome the dorky Scotty and defends him when the others protest
Becomes the big hero at the end when he steals the baseball from the beast and then outruns him across town
It all makes sense when you recall that the film is the nostalgic memories of Benny's best friend and Benny was the reason he became part of the gang. Of course he's going to view him through a Nostalgia Filter. Of course, the ending shows that Benny as an adult really is a Nice Guy and a great ball player; these things are why Scotty buys into his own nostalgia.
Smalls' stepdad went easy on him for getting a replacement for his ruined Babe Ruth baseball. The actor who played him, Denis Leary, is actually a Red Sox fan.
Why does The Beast like baseballs so much? Because his owner is a former professional baseball player.
Why does Benny care so much about Smalls, this dorky new kid? At 23 minutes into the film, Benny gives Smalls a hat. A Chicago Cubs hat, "...one of my old hats." Benny was the new kid once, and so he empathizes with Smalls.
What did the narrator mean when he said that Bertram "really got into the '60s and no one ever saw him again?" Well, considering that Bertram introduced the kids to tobacco at the carnival, it's likely that he got hooked on drugs and eventually died from a drug overdose.
Mr. Mertle comments that he was an even better baseball player than Babe Ruth, and would have gone pro had he not been struck by an errant pitch that cost him his vision. He claims that his signature move was crowding the plate to shrink the strike zone, and seems to imply that this technique got him hit by the pitch. However, given that Mertle is a Black man who played when baseball was segregated, there's a grim possibility that whoever threw that ball was deliberately aiming for his head. There are sadly many stories of white athletes purposely attacking Black ballplayers to cause career-ending injuries. Mr. Mertle may have been covering up that fact to keep the kids from having to deal with the real source of his blindness.
