Baseball, America’s greatest pastime, has been documented in thousands of movies; however The Sandlot and The Bad News Bears capture the most memorable aspects and cruel realities of little league and backyard baseball before the sport became a hollywood enterprise. The Sandlot shows baseball in its purest form, a group of neighborhood boys playing a never ending game and playing for the love of the game. The Bad News Bears represents the pains of little league baseball, from learning what a baseball is, to finding a select few athletes who take over the team to win at all costs. Both movies are classics in the baseball genre of film and are alike, yet so different that they are entertaining for all.
The Sandlot directed by David Evans was released in 1993 and has become a baseball classic (rogerebert.com). The movie breaks away from the theme that winning is the only things that matters and allows “kids to be kids” as stated by Roger Ebert in his review of the movie on his website rogerebert.com. The movie starts with a young boy moving to a new neighborhood who desperately wants to fit in but cannot find a way to do so. He hears about an eight man team that plays on a sandlot and he believes that he could be the ninth player to make a full team. There is just one
…show more content…
In all reality the only aspect that The Bad News Bears and The Sandlot have in common is that they both deal with baseball. Directed by Michael Ritchie The Bad News Bears was released in 1976 intended to be a comedy is about a little league team that was forced on a town, with an alcoholic for a coach that is absolutely terrible (rogerebert.com). The theme can be connected vaguely to that of The Sandlot, because it is that winning is not the sole purpose of sports and that there are consequences for cheating and and being dishonest to