Read the arguments from Sports Geek and Loyal Homer about which sports movie is the best.
Inspirational sports movies are a dime a dozen.
Don’t get me wrong, they are very entertaining. I can sit down and watch Rocky or Hoosiers a hundred times over and never get tired of the respective stories. The problem with those movies, however, is that they are too formulaic. As a result, choosing between them to determine the best becomes difficult. It is like trying to decide which pizza is best. There may be subtle differences from one pie to another, but at the end of the day they are almost ALWAYS good. It is simply personal preference, rather than definitive criteria, that leads each person to their own choice of favorite.
Think about some of the “classics” – The Natural, Rudy, and Remember the Titans quickly come to mind as some of the greatest out there. While each makes for a great movie, they are all basically the same story. Each movie features some type of underdog who overcomes seemingly insurmountable odds to accomplish a goal or realize a dream of some kind. As a result, those movies are essentially no different from The Mighty Ducks or Ladybugs. The characters, teams, and sports are all interchangeable because the story remains the same.
There are movies, though, that defy the traditional logic of sports-movie formula. One such movie is The Sandlot. It is true that there are hints of underdoginess in the movie, but in no way should it be classified among the rest. The Sandlot is special.
Where most movies in the sports genre center around triumph over adversity, The Sandlot instead focuses on the purity and innocence of the game of baseball. Rather than separate good guys from bad, it celebrates baseball as an equalizer, allowing the game to transcend mundane competition. Instead of dividing the world into winners and losers, it glorifies those qualities in sports that we fell in love with when we were all children, such as participation and camaraderie. It doesn’t matter if you are the new kid in town, or the scary old junk-yard owner with The Beast as a pet. Baseball is a shared passion that brings young and old together as peers.
The sandlot was not a place for competition. In fact, before Smalls came to the town the kids at the sandlot couldn’t even field an entire team. Nobody kept score, there were no wins and losses, and there was no championship to be awarded. They simply got together and PLAYED baseball. Why? Because it was fun! When you think about it, that is really the reason that we all fell in love with sports in the first place.
The other unique feature about The Sandlot is that it is presented from a kid’s perspective, complete with such Oscar-worthy dialogue as “pee-drinking crapface” and “buffalo butt-breath.” While some movies may revolve around children’s sports teams, The Sandlot actually presents the story from the mind of a child, complete with all the overblown exaggerations and warped perceptions that come from the overactive imaginations of most kids. The story of the dreaded, man-eating Beast, who cruelly taunts the kids from the sandlot after they lose a baseball in the beast’s lair, is just one example of the cartoon-like camera that kids often view the world through BEFORE their perspective on life gets skewed by that pesky little thing called reality.
What makes The Sandlot the best sports movie ever is that it is not just a story about kids playing baseball, it is a field-trip down memory lane. It is an opportunity for all of us to become kids again and remember our own childhoods. The Sandlot represents everything that we all loved about sports at one time, and reminds us how to love them again today.
