The best baseball memories are those when you were having fun, like in The Sandlot.
It just dawned on me that although my kids loved the movie The Sandlot, I only caught bits and pieces of it when they watched it. I had never watched the entire film. Today I did.
I am a big baseball fan, and I grew up playing the game. However, I must confess: I don’t like many baseball films because they often get something wrong. Sometimes, the actors appear as if they’ve never played the game, game situations can be unrealistic, and screenwriters aren’t always true to baseball history.
The Sandlot sinned in the last regard, and did so “right off the bat,” so to speak. The narrator, the adult Scotty Smalls, describes Babe Ruth’s famous “called shot” in the 1932 World Series as happening in the ninth inning with two outs, a full count, and the tying run on base. In truth, Ruth hit that home run to center field, and it came in the fifth inning of a tie game.
But I forgive The Sandlot for that transgression because they got so much else right about baseball, especially as seen through the eyes of young kids.
Wills in 1962 (photo, This Day in Baseball)
I immediately identified with the movie. Scotty Smalls had just finished fifth grade and was probably 11 years old when he moved to the San Fernando Valley in Southern California in 1962. That was the year LA’s Maury Wills broke the single-season record for steals.
I was nine years old that year, growing up playing baseball in sandlots and in Little League in Hackensack, New Jersey, a suburb of New York City. In the summer of 1963, we flew to Southern California to visit our relatives in the San Fernando Valley, where I played baseball with my cousins, Rich and Rob. We played in their backyard, which adjoined a schoolyard and was surrounded by a high chain-link fence. We would toss pop flies to each other against the wall and pretend we were robbing home runs from Major Leaguers.
That was the kind of impromptu baseball depicted in The Sandlot. Eight boys played baseball all day long on their neglected, unwatered field, and brought in newcomer Smalls to complete their team.
I loved some of the movie’s touches, such as pitcher Kenny DeNunez, the only black kid on the team, wearing the baseball cap of the Kansas City Monarchs, the team for which the legendary Satchel Paige pitched. The star of the sandlot squad, Benny “The Jet” Rodriguez, who wore a Los Angeles Dodger cap, is shown at the film’s end playing for the Dodgers and stealing home. Another sandlot kid wore the hat of the Los Angeles Angels, an expansion team that was established in 1961.
Another great shout-out was the scene where Benny meets Babe Ruth in a dream in Benny’s bedroom, and, as the Babe is leaving, he spots a baseball card of Hank Aaron, who, of course, was destined to break the Babe’s career home run record. The Babe says, “Henry Aaron. Can I have this, kid?”
And all the kids know how to play ball. Kenny throws like a real pitcher, and all the kids can swing the bat, slide, and play the field.
The drama centers on the boys’ attempt to retrieve a ball that Smalls borrowed from his stepdad’s trophy room – a ball autographed by Babe Ruth. Smalls hits the ball for a homer over the fence into the yard of Mr. Mertle, played by James Earl Jones, who owns an old junkyard dog named Hercules. The boys call Hercules “The Beast,” as he is purported to have eaten a kid who tried to retrieve a ball!
The movie brilliantly captures the fears all kids had who played ball in the streets, sandlots, or backyards, particularly when retrieving a ball from a neighbor’s backyard. Was the neighbor mean? Would the neighbor scream at them? Arrest them? Shoot them?
They discover that not only is Mr. Mertle, who they greatly feared but had never met, a lovely old man, but in a shout-out to the Negro Leagues, he shows the boys a photo of him standing between Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, probably during a barnstorming tour that the Yankees did in the off season. And, to replace the Babe Ruth autograph ball that Hercules had chewed up, Mr. Mertle gives Smalls a ball autographed by the entire 1927 New York Yankees team, which included Ruth and Gehrig. Benny correctly refers to “Murderers’ Row,” the first six hitters in the lineup—props to the screenwriters for recognizing that team as perhaps the greatest of all time.
For me and others of the Smalls’ generation, the nostalgia is rooted in the concept of sandlot baseball. I know it’s hard for young people today to imagine, but we would go down to our local worn-out field and assemble two full squads for a pickup game that would last for hours, and nobody seemed to care much about the score. Some of us also played Little League, but some didn’t. We just had fun.
I worry that perhaps the fun of baseball has been drained by parents exerting pressure on their kids to get college scholarships or Major League contracts. I distinctly remember that after completing Little League at the age of 12, I just wanted a breather from organized baseball. The feeling waned, and I went on playing Babe Ruth League and high school baseball.
But if I had that feeling, then what about other kids who spend their waking hours in batting cages and baseball camps? Sure, they can nail the technical skills, but are they losing the joy of the game in the process? Ninety-six percent of high school athletes never go on to play college ball.
The best baseball memories are those when you were having fun, like in The Sandlot.
Photo courtesy The Belcourt (Nashville, TN)
