Children of the 90s: The Sandlot

No matter how tough we claim to be, most of us are suckers for a heartwarming sports movie. It's just embedded somewhere deep within our sentimental DNA. We want to resist the urge to tear up involuntarily at hackneyed plot twists and deliberately corny character triumphs, but resistance is generally in vain. It's best to just give in and enjoy the tearful ride.

In The Sandlot, it doesn't matter that the story meanders all over the place and that major chunks plot hinge on rescuing a valuable autographed baseball from the drooly jaws of a giant anonymously evil dog. Wether or not you as an individual enjoy the sport of baseball, you can't deny the charm of a warmhearted baseball movie. There's something sort of old-fashioned and timeless about a ragtag group of perpetual losers who grow together as a team and eventually excel against all odds at their chosen sport. Yes, it's just like Bad News Bears, or The Mighty Ducks (If The Mighty Ducks was about baseball, I mean), or any other number of coming-of-age sports movies, but the underdog story seems to get us every time.

The movie opens on our less-than-heroic child protagonist Scotty Smalls moving to his new home in Los Angeles in the early 60s. Smalls is a hopeless ball player and a self-described egghead, which doesn't seem to bode to well for him socially as the new kid. Though his stepfather Bill is a big enough fan to own a baseball signed by Babe Ruth, he seems generally uninterested in helping Scotty improve his game.

Smalls stumbles upon a junkyard sandlot and meets up with a motley crew of neighborhood boys playing baseball. Smalls joins in and is, of course, terrible, and faces mocking from his fellow players until star player admirable Benny comes to his defense. Under Benny's tutelage, he quickly becomes one of the gang in a way that's only possible in movies. Five minutes later, it seems that the sandlot crew couldn't function without Scotty's significant contributions to the team. Your heart feels warmer already, doesn't it?

In typical coming-of-age movie fashion, we get to see all sorts of humorous anecdotal firsts for our sandlot boys. The Sandlot shows us the world through the eyes of childish wonder and mischief in a time when summer was a time of freedom and playfulness. Our gang engages in first crushes, lusting after the red-suited teenage lifeguard at their municipal pool. In typical movie magic more, Michael "Squints" Palledorous fakes drowning to receive mouth to mouth from the object of the affection, Wendy Peffercorn. As the adult Scotty's voice-over describes it, Squints' action was simultaneously sneaky, rotten, and low...and cool:

Our heroes also manage to scare an entire generation of 90s kids out of using chewing tobacco in what is possibly one of the grossest and most memorable puking scenes of our collective childhoods. If you, like our sandlot friends, ever entertained the idea of chewing tobacco to be like your baseball heroes, simply subject yourself to the sordid scene in which the boys celebrate by hopping on some fast-moving carnival rides. The image of this incessant vomiting all over the ride, the passerby, and the boys themselves was enough to ensure I'd never touch the stuff. Lucky for all of you innocent bystanders, I couldn't actually find a clip online of the kids throwing up all over everything. Perhaps people found it to be in bad taste, though I can't imagine why. Regardless, here's the precursor to their stomach-turning shenanigans:

The boys' lighthearted antics are offset by a darker force lurking behind the boys' beloved baseball diamond. As the new friends bond, the regulars clue Smalls into the legends of the sandlot. They explain that he should never hit a home run past the fence for fear of encountering The Beast, a vicious mastiff who purportedly eats both baseballs and people on a recreational basis:

After Benny maims the group's last baseball with a strong hit, Scotty saves the day by replacing the ball with one from his own house. He fails to realize that the ball is a prized collectors' item, his stepfather's ball signed by Babe Ruth. Scotty hits the ball into Beast territory and is stricken to learn that he jeopardized the fate of such a valuable item. It's pretty priceless when his teammates berate him for losing a ball signed by Babe Ruth, and Scotty muses, "Who's she?"

After a number of elaborate schemes to retrieve the valuable keepsake, the Great Bambino comes to Smalls in a dream, the kids regroup and manage to snatch the ball of The Beast. But, as this is a coming-of-age movie, they can't do it without learning a bunch of lessons, making a new wise friend, and getting a new, better signed ball to replace the mangled one. As we see what becomes of our pals as they grow into adulthood, we just can't help but be moved by the naked sentimentality of it all.

The Sandlot draws us in because it truly gets what it means to be a 12-year old kid in the middle of the summer where all that matters is making friends, getting girls, and playing sports. It's completely devoid of any adult-driven moralizing and worrying. Instead, it gives us the kid-centric world in which imagination runs wild and all that matters is the here and now. The movie doesn't present kids as superheroes or extraordinary individuals; it just allows them to be kids. Oh, and it also gives us a great opening to quote "You're killing me, Smalls!" if any of our friends appear clueless in the art of chocolate/graham cracker/marshmallow artistry. Seriously, you should use it sometime: