The Sandlot Is One of the Best Baseball Movies Because It's Not About Winning

You're killing me Smalls!" When Hamilton Porter first utters the most iconic line of dialogue in The Sandlot, he abruptly ends a futile exchange over campfire snack wordplay. To this point, Scotty Smalls (Tom Guiry) doesn't belong inside a baseball movie, and certainly not inside a close-knit group of kids that must teach him what a s’more is. He shows up to his first practice with dress pants, a buttoned polo shirt, and an oblong fishing hat. He can’t catch—not with the plastic mitt his mother has given him—and he definitely can’t throw, evident when he embarrassingly returns his step-dad’s tosses by jogging across the backyard and placing the ball back into his glove.

Maybe most importantly, Smalls has never even heard of Babe Ruth (The Sultan of Swat! The King of Crash! The Great Bambino!), the baseball hero to the peers he so desperately wants to impress.

But Porter (Patrick Renna), his patience nearly expired, continues anyway. “First, you take the graham,” he says, detailing the precise way to create his messy concoction. Despite Smalls’s extremely parted hair, general naiveté and complete lack of baseball skill and history, he’s new to town and offers a ninth body to the team. He’s a project in the outfield, sure, but Benny “The Jet” Rodriguez (Mike Vitar)—the rag-tag team’s unquestioned leader and most prolific player—sees his potential to fill out the lineup and has convinced his teammates to open their hearts. He extends Smalls an invitation (much like Porter extends him marshmallow and chocolate), teaches him how to catch and throw, and turns his otherwise lonesome summer into the best one of his life.

The Sandlot celebrates its 25th anniversary this week, and for anyone that’s ever played on a diamond as a kid—or just enjoyed spending June, July, and August outside with friends—it has undoubtedly remained, in my mind, the seminal coming-of-age baseball movie. It has no real stars (a late cameo from James Earl Jones adds some gravitas); its baseball scenes aren’t filmed particularly well (there might not be a single wide shot of a ball hit in play); there’s no final big game to drum momentum and tension (the movie opts for a third act dog chase instead). It throws a proverbial curveball at convention, relying instead on baseball’s ultimate companion—nostalgia—to pluck its emotional and memorable strings.

This operates on a number of levels. The movie was released in 1993, takes place in the early 1960s, and focuses on the generational obsession with a baseball player whose career ended in the 1930s. Its plot only begins halfway through the movie, when Smalls steals his step-dad’s prized baseball, autographed by Ruth, and hits it over the fence.

The horrifying calamity of this event is due to “The Beast,” the monstrous English Mastiff, chained to the other side of the wall, whose murderous legend is retold in melodramatic detail. Scared beyond their wits, but without a choice, the kids plan to get the ball back, to face their collective fear and finish school vacation in a pickle with man’s best friend.

A grown-up Smalls narrates the plight of this hot and dusty summer, a narrative device that invokes Jean Shepherd describing Christmas in Indiana. The voice-over framing (performed by the movie’s director and co-writer David Mickey Evans) of this Rockwellian portrait helps put the golden-hued era into sharper relief. Within this insular, timeless world, each day belongs to baseball—starting with a shout from the cul-de-sac and a skip over to the vacant green lot—with no real finish or beginning, just the continuation of “an endless dream game.”

There’s no mention of the country’s racial discord, no parents organizing games or yelling at umpires. There’s not even a coach! In fact, this movie is largely void of adults or any kind of authoritative figures to impose rules and punishment. This is important, mostly because it captures an environment arbitrated purely by the whims, wisecracks and bedtimes of its 12-year-old protagonists. They grab gloves and bats, relishing each moment in the sun before the ends of their adolescence, before middle school begins, before autumn returns reality.

The movie relishes these moments, too, and that’s precisely why characters, scenes, and lines of dialogue have become ingrained into pop culture. It’s why you remember everyone’s name—Porter, Squints, Yeah-Yeah, Kenny, Bertram, Timmy and Tommy, Benny, and Smalls—and their iconic facial expressions, most notably when Squints flashes a pearly smile right before planting a kiss on lifeguard Wendy Peffercorn in the midst of mouth-to-mouth CPR at the local pool. It’s why I have to listen to Ray Charles sing “America the Beautiful” on the Fourth of July each year and why I’ll never try chewing tobacco, especially not before a carnival ride. It’s why, to this day, Major League teams such as the Yankees and the Brewers have recreated specific moments from the movie as their own promotional commercials. It’s why everyone knows the greatest insult—at least among a pack of immature boys—is telling a rival that he plays ball like a girl.

In his affectionate review of the movie, Roger Ebert noted that “these days too many children's movies are infected by the virus of Winning, as if kids are nothing more than underage pro athletes, and the values of Vince Lombardi prevail: It's not how you play the game, but whether you win or lose.” His words are prescient, but mostly an indictment of screenwriting and parenting. Pick any other classic kid baseball movie—Bad News Bears, Rookie of the Year, Angels in the Outfield—and each sprints for home with some moral tied to winning and losing. This doesn’t necessarily invalidate them.

Sports, of course, are inherently tied to results. But movies too often limit the scope of their storytelling by leaning on the bankable dramatics that finish a game, a season or a championship run.

Which is why it’s so refreshing that the only real competitive game that occurs in The Sandlot comes at its halfway point. The group has been challenged by a pack of bike-riding brats dressed in Little League uniforms, but they offer little intimidation. Benny and his crew handle them with ease. Everybody smacks the ball, comeuppance is served without argument, and this self-regulated exhibition turns into a wipeout. In any other movie, this would be the final act, the ninth inning serving justice to the underdogs. Instead, it’s a laugh and a footnote.

That’s not an easy story arc to sell, but it’s the reason why The Sandlot continues to exude the spirit of the game with every watch. It captures that specific moment, when kids grow up and fences fall down. When beasts are just pets and their scary owners are just in search of conversation. Eventually, the greats, like Benny, make their dreams a reality while the less skilled, like Smalls, broadcast those dreams from the press box. Through it all, baseball remains the same and binds them together, reminding us of its numerous lessons and providing unforgettable summers, ones that—like the game’s legends before it—will never die.