Jason Bateman To Star and Direct Series Adaptation Of Esquire Article ‘Daddy Ball’ For Netflix

According to Deadline Netflix and Aggregate prevailed in a bidding war to secure rights to writer David Gauvey Herbert’s 2021 Esquire magazine article “Daddy Ball.” They will find a new title, but the source material will be developed as an eight-episode limited series that Ozark‘s Jason Bateman will both star in and direct. Bateman, Michael Costigan and Roxie Rodriguez will be co-executive producers for Aggregate. David Klawans is also attached to produce the dark comedy limited series. There were eight offers on the table, but Netflix won it in an outright buy for an undisclosed number commensurate with the demand.

The article starts the way most dad-on-dad youth-sports rivalries do. 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.

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.