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Johnny Bench, the Chicken and an oral history of The Baseball Bunch

In the 80's, MLB treated kids to an instructional baseball TV show complete with skill drills, major league stars and some goofy guests.

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For baseball-loving kids of the early to mid-1980s The Baseball Bunch was a vicarious thrill. The charming half-hour children’s show ran from 1981 to ’85, mostly on NBC-syndicated stations. It almost always featured a major league player as a guest star, who would team up with host Johnny Bench and the San Diego Chicken to have fun and teach a team of kids the game’s fundamentals.