Music, movies, or TV? We recently tossed this question around at work, and I brought it up amongst my friends. For me, it’s that sequence, music at the tippy top, movies a few notches down but still high enough, and TV relegated to the basement. I need music, it is an integral part of my creative process. I truly believe my favorite albums have shaped my outlook on life and my own sense of self. But I’ve talked about music here before and I will again. Movies to me are another source of magic and inspiration as a writer and illustrator. Family drive-in nights, trips to the theater for birthday parties, and late night watches in our family room, the many ways I consumed movies were as significant as the stories themselves.
When I first saw The Sandlot, my sister and I were hosting one of our many middle school basement sleepovers. We had it on DVD for some reason and popped it in out of curiosity. I remember all of us girls, fellow soccer and lacrosse players from our onslaught of travel and club leagues and sleepover regulars, all watching it for the first time and loving it. We watched it again the next morning.
As young athletes, maybe we saw ourselves in the group of boys playing ball, working on their game out in the summer heat every day. We found it funny, relatable, and I personally loved the setting. The many characters were great and unique in their own way. The dialogue was realistic, everything just felt fun and real. But the movie wasn’t really about playing a sport. I realized that then as a kid, sure, but it became clearer to me much later in life what The Sandlot was about at its core.
Nostalgia is a funny, overused concept in media. It bothers me that it’s become such a cash grab in Hollywood because real longing for a previous life is actually beautiful and sad, and it means a lot to me. I was flipping through the channels a few days ago, a steamy July evening that seemed to sink from a burnt-sun dusk to a starry blue blanket of a night sky in minutes. The Sandlot was on ABC, a network owned by Disney known for its source of family-centered programming. I don’t know if it still brands itself as that sort of network, but I noticed the movie was starting at 8pm on a summer Sunday. And that in turn unlocked another childhood memory of The ABC Sunday Night Movie, a bygone cable phenomenon featuring family-friendly films airing on the ABC channel specifically on Sunday nights.
My sisters and I would watch whatever aired on the network during the Movie Night, sometimes with our parents or maybe grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, seeing movies like Annie and The Sound of Music for the first time. It went through some name changes, but a version of the channel’s movie night seemed to still exist that summer Sunday night I tuned into ABC to watch The Sandlot, my first time watching the movie in years (probably since those middle-school viewings). I couldn’t believe how good it was and how much I loved it now as an adult. I was a kid all over again. But how did this little movie about a new kid on the block playing backyard baseball make me feel that way?
The Sandlot taps into a particular brand of nostalgia unlike the typical sentimental fare. As simple as the story is, kid moves to a new neighborhood and learns how to play baseball with a bunch of scruffy boys, the movie does a great job at extending to the friendship and closeness we have with our peers back in our school-age days. The Sandlot is a little slice of Americana, a summer story that speaks to kids for its humor and play. But it also has a lot to say to the adults watching.
In the movie’s closing scene, we see a grown-up Smalls commentating for the LA Dodgers. He cheers on the pinch hitter making a break to steal home, and we viewers can see that the player is none other than Benny The Jet Rodriguez, the very kid who brought Smalls into the Sandlot all those years ago. The two smile at each other and the camera moves to a bunch of baseball memorabilia Smalls has pinned to the wall in his commentary booth. The camera lingers on a photo of the Sandlot boys, and the movie ends.
The movie shows us that we were all kids once, hopefully playing with friends, having fun in our community, and passing time in summer by getting into all sorts of trouble. Then we grow up and some of those friendships fade, we move away, things change. We don’t stay in touch with everyone we once knew as kids, although some of those friendships may stick through to adulthood. And the friends we had in our youth, the neighborhoods we grew up in, the memories we created playing in the backyard or goofing off, are still a part of who we are and still hold some meaning to us. Our childhood’s ran rampant with imagination and play, and The Sandlot reminds me how cozy and wonderful that part of my life was.
I watch The Sandlot and my memories of that playfulness come flooding back. Time and memory are what I write about the most, and movies like The Sandlot help me keep remembering those times. The story that I’ve been working on for the past few months has some subconscious parallels to The Sandlot, I’ve realized. I guess I really missed this movie, and it was a delight to finally revisit by stumbling upon it on TV (I also miss finding gems on cable) and enjoy all over again with a newfound appreciation and a sense of familiarity of my own youth.