Cru Jones Society

 

Every Wednesday between now and the end of baseball season the Cru Jones Society brings you a new baseball movie examined for both overall entertainment value and treatment of our favorite game. To suggest a film, email us at staff [at] crujonessociety.com. Otherwise, pour yourself an $8 beer, crack some shells, and let’s play ball.

Date Released: April 9, 1993
Box Office Total: $ 32,434,006
Team Featured: The Sandlot All-Stars

“Man, this is baseball. You gotta stop thinking. Just have fun.” – Benny “The Jet” Rodriguez

Baseball has been called the thinking man’s game, but Benny’s right. Most of the time, you’ve just got to grip it and rip it. I like the idea of this quote because as Benny and the rest of his sandlot friends try to get Smalls’ autographed Babe Ruth ball back from the clutches of The Beast, they spend the entire movie overthinking the problem. And all it really takes is a simple baseball solution.

Plot Synopsis

Scott Smalls is a poindexter. His parents move him to California with only a couple of weeks left in the school year leaving him “zip time” to make friends before summer. Not that that would have done any good since Scotty is as socially awkward as they come and spends most of his time building Rube Goldberg devices with his dorky Erector set. With the encouragement of his mother, Scott asks his stepdad to teach him to play catch who proceeds to bean him in the eye with a throw better-suited for one of his work softball buddies than someone who looks as natural wearing a baseball mitt as a girl does itching her balls.

Scotty sits dejected on his front stoop thinking he’s doomed for another summer alone with his nerd toys when neighborhood baseball god Benny Rodriguez approaches and exhausts Scott’s excuses for not joining him and his friends at their local sandlot for a little baseball. Despite embarrassing himself in front of everyone when he doesn’t know who Babe Ruth is, the group reluctantly allows Scotty to join them mostly out of need for another player after their last guy moved to Arizona. Naturally, Smalls is terrible and can’t even catch a pop fly or throw it back to the infield. Benny gives him a shot of encouragement and the most basic of tutorials, and suddenly Smalls passes as a baseball player.

We then see the guys proceed through the trials and tribulations of a typical youth summer – dealing with the godforsaken heat of Los Angeles’s insufferable valley, squaring off against the pretentious little league assholes and kicking the crap out of them, trying chaw for the first time and throwing up after an ill-fated trip on a carnival ride, and getting banned from the pool after Squints puts the ballsiest move on the hot lifeguard any 12 year-old would ever dream of. We arrive at the crux of our problem as Benny busts the guts out of a ball, and to keep playing Scott steals his stepdad’s Babe Ruth autographed ball. Since Scott brought the ball, he’s up. And defying all odds, hits it over the fence into the yard of the fabled “Beast” who ate one kid already.

Scott finally understands the gravity of the situation as the guys slowly and painfully explain to him who Babe Ruth is. They all know they have to get that ball back, and they devise a series of increasingly contrived solutions to do so ranging from rigging vacuum cleaners to lowering “Yeah Yeah” in a sling to retrieve it to the ultimate Erector set project. None of them work, and after getting visited in the dream by none other than Babe Ruth himself, Benny knows he has to pickle The Beast. Is he successful? I’ll leave that up to the reader in case you’ve somehow missed this movie over the last 16 years, but I will say that we see The Beast’s yard, meet his scary ass owner Mr. Myrtle, and see where the now legendary Benny Rodriguez ends up.

Treatment of Baseball/Quality of Baseball Scenes:

This is a tough question to answer since we only see one game the guys play. In that game, they manhandle the little leaguers in their nice tidy uniforms like every group of ragtag underclass kids should. With that said, the scenes are basically okay. The action itself isn’t much to write home about, but the baseball environment created by The Sandlot is top-notch.

Admittedly, some of the baseball looks like crap as Hamilton’s supposed homerun into The Beast’s yard would have been a pop-out to first base, Squints throws like a girl, and most of the baseball scenes are limited to the guys executing practice drills. Practice drills aren’t even that much fun to participate in, and generally less entertaining to watch.

But the trash talking makes this movie. Hamilton’s heckling from behind the plate is about as good as you can expect from a PG movie. Sure, it’s fairly innocuous stuff, but who didn’t laugh when Hamilton needles the opposing guy by asking him, “Is that your sister out there in left field? Naked? She’s naked.” And the opposing batter’s frustrated, “Shut up, Porter!” after a swing and a miss. He does all the things a good catcher should in trying to get into the heads of the opposing batters.

The rest of the players aren’t so good, but they’re kids, so you cut ‘em a break. I always felt bad for the DeNunez character who gets lit up like Antonio Alfonseca all movie. He always talks about his “heater” but Hamilton, Smalls, and Benny all put it over the fence at various points. Not much of a heater really – more of a Jack Parkman-approved “masturbator.”

Annoying Romantic B-Story/Stifling Spouse?

None. Glorious.

The only romantic element in this movie is Squints putting the moves on lifeguard Wendy Peffercorn, and that’s played for laughs. Thankfully the filmmakers didn’t try to wring some idiotic romantic tension out of Smalls’ parents’ marriage, and just let this movie be about baseball, kids, and the lengths to which they will go to avoid trouble. It stands on its own without any interference from a tacked-on love story.

Final Thoughts

I suspect it’s impossible to dislike this movie. I not only have yet to meet a person who dislikes it, I have yet to meet a person who hasn’t seen it doesn’t unabashedly love it. From a baseball standpoint, many movies are better, but this one captures what it feels like to be a kid and love baseball better than any other. All of the interactions the kids have with each other ring true and become totally quotable. Hart and I used to say “Whadja say, crapface?!” to each other all the time just like Hamilton when we lived together. And who doesn’t love Ham’s exasperated declaration to Smalls after unsuccessfully offering him a s’more?

“You’re killin’ me, Smalls!”

This movie could live on forever based on the strength of that one line alone. Perfect timing, perfect inflection, perfect line. And everyone knows exactly how they should feel when it’s said to them. It’s only the one of the most flawlessly delivered lines in the history of cinema, and you’ve probably heard it at least once in the last month just in the course of natural conversation.

This isn’t the best movie you’ll ever see, but it’s the one you’ll likely feel the best after watching. There’s not a lot to say about it because if you were a kid when this movie came out, you already likely know every line by heart, pause on it for at least a few minutes every time you surf channels on a lazy weekend, and somewhat irrationally still want a pair of PF Flyers. No one has ever had a bad time watching The Sandlot, ever. Highest recommendation.

Ruling from the Scorer: This one’s over the fence and into The Beast’s yard.

edagger@crujonessociety.com