The Sandlot Is A Better Movie Than Little Big League

20th Century Fox. Shutterstock Images.

Don't get me wrong. Little Big League is a very good movie. It's a smart movie that is well casted. Other than Miracle, I don't know if there are many movies with more realistic sports sequences. What Little Big League does right is it takes a ridiculous premise but surrounds it with absolute realism everywhere else. You won't get much Little Big League slander from me. Having said that, The Sandlot is the better movie.

Little Big League is focused on baseball but The Sandlot is more focused on friendship and nostalgia. Baseball is the bond that brings these guys together but it's not what drives this movie. The reason it's resonated more then Little Big League both when it came out and even now is the relatability of guys hanging out and just being guys.

If you didn't have a childhood where you and your buddies met every day in the summer and just hung out, I honestly feel bad for you. It was great riding a bike to to go play whiffle ball with my friends. We'd eat bad pizza from the local store or maybe jump in the lake to cool off. We'd play until the street lights came on and then make our way home. We'd do the same thing the next day. It was awesome.

The strength of The Sandlot is the casting. Each of the kids are perfect in these roles. It's not even being a great actor but more that they were being realistic and playing each specific character perfectly. Even the adults are great. I absolutely believed Karen Allen as the caring Mom and Denis Leary as a distant stepfather. Leary especially had a difficult role as showing he does care about Scotty but doesn't quite know how to show it. He's not a bad guy at all, he's just not comfortable around kids.

Roger Ebert said when The Sandlot came out that he respected that in a weaker movie, it would come down to a "big game". That's not the case with this movie,. There is a game but it's a blowout and happens in the middle of the movie. It's not shown to create a dramatic plot point. When they blow out the kids playing organized ball, it's showing how good these Sandlot kids actually are.

The Sandlot isn't a perfect movie. The third act gets bogged down by way too many attempts to get the ball back from The Beast. But even with all of that, I loved the stuff with James Earl Jones. I guess you could say it was all a little convenient that the person that had their baseball was an ex-baseball player. It's a very fair critique but by that point, I'm too bought into the characters to care.

In conclusion and as always, Brandon is wrong. In this episode of DOUBLE PLAY, Brandon Walker and I do have the Sandlot Vs. Little Big League debate. You can watch the whole episode below or click HERE to listen: