This is probably the first sports movie on the show. It’s really great, though, and it’s called The Sandlot. There are a lot of great moments and a lot of great actors and a lot of great stuff and a lot of great balls of fire! No, that song actually doesn’t appear in the movie but I’m just riffing here. Just padding this paragraph. I’m not sure what to say. I let all of this intro stuff kinda hang out in the podcast. Nothing really to say here but even Roger Ebert liked this shit.
I do talk about spoilers for some things in this podcast including.. The Sandlot (this movie) and “IT” the book by Stephen King. Why did I super spoil “IT”? Listen in and find out, I guess. There are plenty of things I didn’t talk about in this movie, though. I didn’t talk about a lot of other baseball movies–I mention several in passing that were released close to this one but I didn’t talk about my favorite baseball movies. If you want me to do some favorite baseball movies send me some tweets @coolmark because I have a few. The Sandlot is maybe in the top 3 of my baseball movies but, now being an adult, I may need to rethink that a little bit. I actually, in retrospect, don’t think that take is super hot. Maybe sports movies, in general. Let me know what you’d like.
I had spent a couple of minutes looking up the song “Benny and the Jets” and pretty much stopped when the timeline didn’t line up with the movie but, in retrospect, I’m pretty sure it’s super about drugs. “Bennies”, a name for Benzedrine pills that I’ve actually heard somewhere (where?), are the first legit drugs that contained amphetamines which is a stimulant that makes you fast, man. But don’t do drugs. But yeah, the wikipedia page for Benzedrine confirms it.
This image (above) is possibly the only “game ball” I ever got. I’m not certain. I thought I had another one but that one might be at my parent’s house. The “game ball” was given, essentially, to the MVP of the game. It was signed by the whole team. This was actually from the first season I ever played baseball. As I recall it I just had a really good game and, since I super sucked as my friend liked to remind me, it was a big deal. We won that game. If memory serves we had Little Caesar’s pizza afterwards. Little Caesar’s was actually one of my favorites at the time. Before they fully cut quality and went for the bargain basement of pizza because market research is like “even if it sucks people will still buy it if it’s cheap”. This ball is on my desk all the time. Right there it’s resting in my /dev/mug, which I also got from another friend.
The List of Adjacent Baseball Movies
Rookie of the Year (1993)
Little Big League (1994)
Mr. Baseball (1992)
A League of Their Own (1992)
The Babe (1992)
Cobb (1994)
I’ve not seen The Babe or Cobb yet.
Runtime 1hr 41m Budget no info on that. Opening Week $4,000,000 Domestic Box Office $32,000,000 Home Video $76,000,000 (est)
A cool article from David Mickey Evan’s blog
http://davidmickeyevansblog.blogspot.com/2012/07/from-sandlot-archives-and-special.html
A Time interview with Tom Guiry
https://entertainment.time.com/2013/04/09/20-things-we-learned-about-the-sandlot-after-talking-with-scotty-smalls/
Some papers on Performance-Enhancing Drugs in Baseball
https://scholarworks.unr.edu/handle/11714/567
https://education.ti.com/~/media/25B4D609A0644F07A3CEC0BF8D8FEAE1
And regarding the above–that’s the first time I remember seeing Jay Baruchel.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0882518/?ref_=ttep_ep8
I like Numb3rs. It was very….contrived in many ways–especially when it comes to the math–but the premise was fun and the actors and characters were pretty engaging.
Also, when I said “syntax error” in the podcast I meant “runtime error”. I told you I’m dumb.
Be nice. Wear a mask. Stay at home when you can. Black lives matter.