Summer, ‘The Sandlot’, and the Legends That Never Die
The Scoop features personal essays on movie-centric topics.
By Justin Bower
I wore my baseball cap backwards, pointing far higher in the sky than my adolescent arms could lift a baseball. My Chuck Taylors were dusty, Atlanta Braves shirt sweaty and dirt-stained. My brother stood sixty feet from me, a worn-out baseball—seams splitting from grounders hit hard on Carolina clay—gripped between two split fingers, ready to send it down main street.
I swung.
A crack! rang out as I saw the baseball fly high over my brother’s head, into the tall grass of the makeshift baseball diamond near our house. Neighborhood friends lined up in pursuit of the ball and poised to relay it home. In that moment, all that mattered to me was the play, my friends, and the feeling of never growing up.
Making Mischief and Memories
That’s what summer is all about, isn’t it? The movie that confirmed my suspicions was The Sandlot. The 1993 flick captures everything nostalgic and wild and free about summertime: a rag-tag group of friends spending all day together, playing baseball, camping out, falling in love (or at least having a laughably unrealistic crush), going to the fair, and making memories that last a lifetime.
Scotty Smalls (Tom Guiry) opens the nostalgic classic with an emotional recollection of the summer of 1962: “It was the greatest summer of my life,” he muses. “We never kept score, never took sides. The game went on forever.” Clearly, Smalls wasn’t strictly speaking of the game; riddled throughout the film is Smalls’s endearing storytelling about the summer in which, despite a difficult home life and being the new kid on the block, he “made the team.”
There are many moments in The Sandlot that make it an iconic sports film, from the makeshift team beating the bullies on a “real” baseball team to Ham’s (Patrick Renna) unforgettable, “You’re killing me, Smalls!” retort. More than that, the film holds up as a surprisingly deep experience.
The most profound element in The Sandlot isn’t Benjamin Franklin Rodriguez’s (Mike Vitar) knock-the-leather-off-the-ball home run swing. It’s not when the gang plays their yearly night game on the Fourth of July—fireworks like flickering stadium lights above their glistening eyes—or when Squints (Chauncey Leopardi) lands a kiss with his crush Wendy Peffercorn (Marley Shelton). It’s not when Smalls makes progress in his relationship with his stepfather, though all of those scenes are irreplaceable.
The most profound aspect of The Sandlot is its portrayal of summertime as the best days of our lives, when we all decide to never grow up, to “play the game” forever.
To Grow Up and Remember
I grew up playing, watching, thinking about—breathing—baseball.
My brother and our neighborhood friends used our own sandlot (terrifying beast-like dog notwithstanding) as a sanctuary much like the misfits of the movie did. It was a place where, despite our family struggles or petty personal arguments, we came together to play America’s favorite pastime everyday throughout the best three months of the year. We were dead set on never growing up.
Yet, much like Scotty Smalls, I tell this story as a diehard baseball fan who, despite all my adolescent intentions, did grow up. (Imagine my shock.) I have to reckon with that somehow, and I fear we all do. I suggest we turn to Smalls’s words at the end of The Sandlot. As their group grew up and moved on, they fought to keep the sandlot alive. Their numbers waned, but they didn’t fill a vacancy: “We just kept the game going like he was still there.”
If the movie ended there, it would be quite sad. But it doesn’t stop with an empty sandlot. Scotty learned that if they never grew up, the best wouldn’t have come. Squints, surprisingly, married Wendy Peffercorn. Timmy (Victor DiMattia) and Tommy (Shane Obedzinski) became millionaires after inventing mini-malls. Benny became a legendary Los Angeles Dodgers player. And Smalls called every game for him, cementing their friendship and the memory of the sandlot for decades.
It’s just like Babe Ruth told Benny in an odd dream: “Heroes get remembered, but legends never die.” Either way, we have to grow up to tell our stories.
Cementing Summertime Memories
Watching The Sandlot no longer convinces me that summertime lasts forever, or that “the game” will never end. It conjures memories of never wanting to grow up, and even all the fun I had in the best summers of my life.
But what matters the most when I think about The Sandlot is the choice we all have: refuse to grow up, or spend every day getting older, adamantly cementing our summertime memories—telling the legendary stories of our childhoods. When I think about those summers spent with my best friends, basking in the summer heat and making young fools of ourselves, I believe, once again, that Scotty Smalls was onto something.
Justin Bower is a cinephile, horror fan, and avid reader. You can find him writing at Loud and Clear Reviews or on Instagram @jtalksfilm.