PRE GAME ⚾️
Welcome back to Balls on Film! 👋🏻
It’s Opening Week of another baseball season, and I’m ready for another 7 month long toxic relationship with my New York Yankees. It’s always a rollercoaster, but the ups and downs are all part of what makes baseball season so special. Opening Day is all about hope, new beginnings and the days getting longer. It’s my favourite time of year. I’d love to know which team you root for, so let me know in the comments.
I also thought that this anime-style hype video that MLB put out for Opening Day was pretty cool!
With Opening Day last night, and baseball season now in full swing, it felt only right to return to the sport for this week’s review with Major League - especially after a number of you mentioned how you’d have loved to have seen Dennis Haysbert reprise his Pedro Cerrano role in Mr. Baseball a couple of weeks ago. That would have been awesome indeed.
Let’s get to it!
FIRST HALF ⚾️
What I love about Major League is that it’s a movie that just wants to have fun. On its surface, it reads like a lot of other sports movies with the same typical scrappy underdog team overcoming the odds plot that we all know too well. But Major League foregoes leaning too hard into sentimentality and opts for all out fun instead, with one of the best cast of characters ever assembled in a sports movie and some of the most quotable lines too. You’d be hard-pressed to find a better movie to watch to celebrate Opening Day.
The story revolves around the Cleveland Indians (now the Guardians in real life), a team so bad that losing becomes part of the plan for ownership. New owner Rachel Phelps (Margaret Whitton) who has inherited the team, wants to move the franchise to Miami, but to trigger the relocation clause, the stadium’s attendance has to tank. Her solution is to assemble the worst team of players imaginable, and drive the fans away.
Does the plot sound familiar to anyone at all? Well, I’ll come back to that a bit later!
As I said at the top, the heart of Major League is found in the amazing cast of characters. Charlie Sheen gives what might be my favourite performance of his as Ricky Vaughn, a wild pitcher with a good arm and a lot of control issues. Then there’s Wesley Snipes as Willie Mays Hayes, who can run fast but can’t hit anything. Dennis Haysbert brings the weird as Pedro Cerrano, who’s strange and mysterious aura and pre-game rituals keeps the other players on their toes. Tom Berenger is great as Jake Taylor, the worn down and battle-tested veteran catcher who’s trying to hold all of others together whilst chasing one last shot at glory - and his ex girlfriend, Lynn (Renee Russo). Then there’s James Gammon as Lou Brown, the team’s gruff, no-nonsense manager who’s underestimated by Phelps, and probably by himself initially. He’s one of my favourites here - the type of manager just about anyone would love to play for in real life. Finally there’s Harry Doyle - the team’s colourful announcer, who’s just as big a character here as any of the players and maybe even the best in the whole movie.
Major League is about the team owner trying to hoodwink the players and fans, but peeled back, it’s a story about redemption. Each character is fighting for something outside of winning on the field, and it’s what makes the characters so much fun to cheer for. Vaughn’s journey from nobody to trusted closing pitcher is joyous, and it culminates in the fantastic ‘wild thing’ scene that’s probably the movie’s most memorable moment. Jake’s pursuit of his ex and the whole romantic subplot adds some depth to his character, but it’s tied to his character’s journey of trying to prove that he’s still got something left in him (side note, I love that Lynn, who is a librarian, has car plates that say ‘READ’. All of the subtlety of a 100mph fastball there!). Even the more minor character journeys like Cerrano trying to hit anything that isn’t a heater and the manager trying to pull everyone together are given time to develop, and each individual story eventually comes together to push the main one forward. It’s often easy for some characters to feel lost, or like a bit of an afterthought in these big ensembles, but it’s never the case here.
I mentioned the plot feeling familiar to some earlier. Until this week, it’d been quite a long time since I watched it, and I was amazed this time to see just how much inspiration that Ted Lasso clearly took from the movie. From the whole premise of the team owner trying to purposely tank the team for her own selfish reasons, to her chief of operations who doesn’t support the idea but is too scared to speak up, Jake Taylor being the veteran with the nagging knee injury like Roy Kent, and even down to the “win the whole f’n thing” line, you can tell that the creators of Ted Lasso are huge fans of the film.
What makes Major League one of the greats is its pretty perfect balance of humour and heart. I mentioned Ted Lasso taking a lot of inspiration from it, and you could argue that it drew inspiration from that element too. Ted Lasso takes the formula and heaps on wholesome vibes aplenty, but the basic formula is still here. The training montages, the on-field disasters, the big personalities and the endlessly quotable one-liners are what make the film so much fun. And while I said that the film never veers into schmaltzy territory, beneath the comedy is still a genuine underdog story about how sometimes just believing in each other is as important as talent itself.
*taps on ‘Believe’ sign above the door*
Major League is a great baseball movie that captures and joy and magic of the sport on the field. But It’s also just a great comedy, period, and it remains endlessly rewatchable. It’s a film about defying expectations as much as it’s about sports, and much like the beginning of a brand new season of baseball, revisiting Major League feels comforting and familiar, with just the right amount of chaos. Other than perhaps wishing that they’d made the Rachel Phelps character even more villainous, there’s pretty much nothing I’d change about this one.
Major League is available to rent or purchase on most digital platforms in the US. Oddly, the film is not available digitally in the U.K. A DVD copy was used for this review.
HALFTIME 🍿
Did everyone watch the Severance finale last week? I thought it was one of the most gripping episodes of television I’ve seen in a long time. A near 80 minute episode felt like it went by in the blink of an eye. I love that Severance isn’t one of these shows that just continues to ask more and more questions without giving any answers. There’s no prolonged wait for payoffs here, and the show answers just as much as it asks new questions. I already can’t wait for season 3, and I just hope it doesn’t take another few years to get here.
Also, I enjoyed this pop up marketing event in London earlier this week.
Streaming now on Apple TV+
I’ve also been watching the new season of The White Lotus. I didn’t warm to it initially in the same way that I did the others, but five episodes in now and I’m fully on board. I thought it would suffer without Jennifer Coolidge, but I love the ways in which they’ve managed to keep her spirit alive in the new series and put in just enough to keep us firmly in the same world. Patrick Schwarzenegger has been great as the very douchey Saxon, and Parker Posey’s accent absolutely kills me every time. I’m excited to see where it goes. I do miss the season 2 theme song though. This one just isn’t the same!
Streaming now on MAX / Sky Atlantic & NOW TV in the UK.
As usual, let me know what you’re watching or what you’re planning to go see. Let’s get back to Major League!
SECOND HALF ⚾️
Let’s jump into some awards and bonus content.
BEST SCENE 🏆
You know I had to pick the Wild Thing scene. Charlie Sheen with the awesome closer entrance.
BEST LINE 🏆
Harry Doyle: “JUST a bit outside.”
MVP AWARD 🏆
I have to award this to the late, great Bob Uecker, who sadly passed away in January. With his effortless charm and perfect line delivery, he adds so much joy to the movie with a ton of laugh-out-loud moments. Even beyond the laughs and the silliness he brings, there’s something ever so real about Harry Doyle. He’s that voice of every fan who’s ever suffered through a losing season, masking his frustration with humour - and booze in this case!. “Juuust a bit outside” might be the line of his that everyone remembers, but it’s the way Uecker adds a warmth and relatability to the part that makes me love the character so much.
TRIVIA HIGHLIGHT 🏆
Per IMDb:
According to David S. Ward, Wesley Snipes was not very skilled at baseball in real life, never having played much before. Ward said Snipes was so awful at throwing a baseball that they had no scenes of him throwing a ball.
BEST LETTERBOXD REVIEW 🏆
I felt the pain in the words written by this poor White Sox fan.
BONUS FEATURES 💿
Here’s a great little Making Major League documentary from YouTube:
And Corbin Bernsen on being a part of the movie:
And here’s a really wonderful and moving tribute to the late, great Bob Uecker from MLB:
POST-GAME ⚾️
It’s my birthday next week, and I’m turning the ripe old age of 41. I’ve got quite a few fun things planned and have the whole week off from work, so I’ll be taking a break from the newsletter for the week and normal service will resume the following Friday, April 11th.
For our next movie, I thought we’d go to ice hockey again, but I’m going to turn the decision over to you guys. There’s a few ice hockey movies that have been on my list, so what should we watch?
I’ll see you back here again next time, a year older but hopefully feeling every bit as young - unless the stress of baseball season ages me even more over the next couple of weeks!
See you next time! 👋🏻
~James
Love this movie.
I do think the perfect mood-setter is that elegiac opening set to Randy Newman's "Burn On" as the full credits play. Really gives you a sense, before there are any jokes and gags, that this is a movie that's going to care about it's setting, about the characters, and that behind the funny stuff, there's going to be a backbone based in reality.
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