Sammi Kane Kraft, whose baseball skills earned her the role of a youth league pitcher in the 2005 remake of "The Bad News Bears," died in a Los Angeles car crash. She was 20. Kraft was 13 when she was discovered on a Los Angeles baseball diamond and cast in her only film. She played Amanda Whurlitzer, a role originally played by Tatum O'Neal in 1976, the only girl on the misfit Bears team. "Amanda is such a character that you can't 'out-Tatum' Tatum O'Neal, so we wanted to get a real girl who could do it," the film's director, Richard Linklater, said in a 2005 interview with the Daily News. "I didn't want to keep cutting to some boy with a wig on who could throw."
