Fort Worth Little League team’s miracle run to World Series told in ‘You Gotta Believe’

An underdog Little League team pulling off a miraculous run to the World Series. The young players rallying around a teammate’s father who is dying of cancer. The story’s got all the makings of a rousing Hollywood sports film, but it’s true.

The year was 2002 and the Fort Worth Westside Little League All-Stars made history as the first team from the area to reach the championship since 1960. They had dedicated their season to their first baseman Robert Ratliff’s father, Bobby, who attended all their games despite battling cancer.

You Gotta Believe, a movie set to premiere in Fort Worth on Aug. 29 and to hit theaters nationwide Aug. 30, is based on the team’s World Series bid, which ended with a 2-1 semifinal loss in 11 innings to a team from Kentucky.

The film, starring Dallas native Luke Wilson as Bobby Ratliff and Greg Kinnear as the Little Leaguers’ head coach, Jon Kelly, grapples with fatherhood through the lens of sports. But it also poses existential questions around mortality and a life well-spent.

Robert Ratliff remembers his father as the sort of coach who treated every player equally. “If the kid was good or if the kid was bad, he still gave him a chance,” he said.

After his father’s death in 2003, months after the team’s World Series run, Ratliff continued with baseball for a few years, before taking up football.

“Each time I saw a bat or a mitt I’d tear up,” he said. “It was just too hard to play the game because that’s what my dad and I did together.”

To honor their father’s legacy, Ratliff and his brother launched the You Gotta Believe Foundation, which hosts baseball and football camps in Fort Worth and Jackson, Miss., where the brothers had attended the University of Mississippi.

Their foundation’s name borrows from advice their father frequently gave them.

“We were raised in a Christian home, and so it started with believing in God,” Ratliff said. “But then you can just apply it to everything in life.”

He continued: “It started with a simple, little message and now it’s going to be a movie.”

Director Ty Roberts learned of the Little Leaguers’ story through longtime collaborator and screenwriter Lane Garrison, who is a North Texas native.

The team’s Cinderella run resonated with Roberts, who traces his affinity for the underdog to his childhood growing up in West Texas.

“I like those small towns that come out of nowhere that are just tough, scrappy Texas boys,” he said.

He also found the Ratliffs’ story powerful from his perspective as a father. He thought about how a grave illness could impact a family and what good parenting would mean in the wake of the diagnosis.

This isn’t the first time Roberts has teamed up with Wilson on a Texas sports film about defying the odds. Their 2021 movie 12 Mighty Orphans tells the story of a 1930s high school football team from a Fort Worth orphanage that reached the state finals.

Much of the filming for that movie took place locally, while production for You Gotta Believe occurred largely in Canada because of budget constraints.

“Every dollar counted,” Roberts said, referring to tax incentives for filming in Toronto and the reduced cost of wages and rentals. Still, some exterior shots were taken in Fort Worth, including at the Stockyards.

As Ratliff’s father, Wilson said he channeled his past experiences with grief into the role. “It was so difficult for me when my dad died and I was in my early 40s,” he said. “These guys were just kids.”

“To have a family, a job, Little League games … it just doesn’t get any better than that.”