I wasn't going to watch my first baseball movie in 2021 until the night before the start of the season, as is my custom. But I wanted to do a last night of cramming on Saturday night, so I decided to throw on some background in the form of a baseball movie I know so well, I wouldn't have to pay particularly close attention to it. (I did anyway. It's what happens with movies we love.)
It wouldn't have otherwise been time for another Major League viewing so soon after my last one in 2018, which was very soon after my previous one just a year before that. But as background noise for fantasy baseball prep, it was perfect.
As with any favorite movie, you usually discover something new each time you see it, or an angle you hadn't previously considered. Yes, even with a comparatively shallow movie like Major League. It doesn't have to be Bergman for you to find those deeper layers.
The thing I harped on this time, though, was actually something that had always bothered me. So not quite as good a takeaway as I had last time, when I discovered for the first time that Rick Vaughn may have had an unspoken backstory of being a recovering alcoholic. (Check here if you really want to read about that.)
I was again struck by a simple question:
Why didn't Rachel Phelps just give up?
If you aren't familiar with the plot of Major League, Phelps (Margaret Whitton), the widow of the owner of the Cleveland Indians, decides she's going to run the team into the ground so she can move them to Florida. See, only if the attendance dips below a certain level can the team break the lease with the city, and she aims to do that. (What quaint times those were, when Florida was baseball-starved -- today, the state has two baseball teams, or actually three this year, as the Toronto Blue Jays will have to start in Florida for COVID reasons.)
It looks like a smart plan when she brings in a bunch of "has beens and never-will-be's," who are fit to lose most of their games and start off on that pace. Of course, our plucky band of misfits will pull together to prove her wrong, something that starts happening well before midseason. Never count out the human spirit.
The interesting thing about Phelps' plan is that it is a failure as soon as the team is not awful. Even very bad major league baseball teams have decent attendance most years; only when it's clear the owner is spitting in the eye of the players and the fans themselves do the fans stop coming. But even after 120 games -- in other words, three quarters of the season -- the team is 60-61, which is not a playoff contender but would be a better record than at least ten other teams at that point in the season. Making them more mediocre than awful, and definitely not a threat to attract a lease-breaking paucity of fans.
So why doesn't she just read the tea leaves and change course when she realizes her plan has no chance?
Well, she's a movie villain, that's why. Movie villains are more motivated by the opportunity for maniacal laughter than the successful outcome of a well-considered plan.
Still, once the Indians are loveable losers at worst and playoff contenders at best, wouldn't she realize that a better strategy is hope that her team wins, and therefore inflate the price to the point where she can sell to a new owner? Then it doesn't matter how much or how little she likes Cleveland, as she can take her money and lie on the beach in Boca Raton.
Then it occurred to me: I don't actually know what Rachel Phelps does after the team wins the division, much to her chagrin during her thousand-yard stare after the final out. Because there's a whole Major League movie -- two, actually -- that I've never even seen.
As I was pondering writing this post about Rachel Phelps on Sunday night, I also pondered how odd it was that I had not seen even the first sequel to one of my favorite sports movies of all time. I mean, bad word of mouth is something to consider, but when you really love a movie and its characters, don't you owe it a sampling of the sequel?
So I decided to rent it from iTunes and throw it on that very night, providing the second half of a Major League bookend to my fantasy baseball draft.
And I ultimately concluded: Yeah, there's a reason I didn't watch this before now.
I knew Major League II wasn't well-liked, but I couldn't have guessed that it would be quite this bad -- especially with most of the cast returning. The only one notably absent was Wesley Snipes, who was replaced by Omar Epps in the same role.
But boy is this movie not good. It's guilty of many common sequels sins, the kind you would guess without me enumerating them here. There's not one but two characters -- the aforementioned Vaughn and Pedro Cerrano (Dennis Haysbert) -- who have to get back their previous mojo to pull the Indians out of another predictable slump. Unfortunately, the movie never gets back its mojo, probably because it never had any to begin with.
I could go into depth about why Major League II fails, but I'll include only one minor thing that bothered me, rather than the many major things. The movie was made in 1994, five years after the original came out, but it's supposed to take place the very next season. Not only were Charlie Sheen and Haysbert already way too old for their roles -- and Tom Berenger looks more ancient than his 44 years -- but their character changes are too extreme for only a single offseason to have passed between this and the events of the first film. Then you've got the weird detail that while everyone else is significantly older, Willie "Mays" Hayes is significantly younger. When they replaced Snipes with Epps, they were selecting an actor 11 years younger, who was only 21 at the time he made the movie. Next to Berenger he looks like even more of a baby.
I guess I might have preferred not to know about the dispiriting adventures of next year's Cleveland Indians, but I don't regret watching the movie. I generally don't believe in keeping movies pure by avoiding their lesser sequels and remakes. I can just pretend the next season was Cerrano's prolonged hallucination after some spiritual journey involving ayahuasca.
The real question is: So what did Rachel Phelps do?
Well she sold the team to Roger Dorn (Corbin Bernsen), of all people, who isn't supposed to have been right on the verge of retirement the previous year. Which gives both he and Berenger the retirement subplot that only one of them should have had. Of course, Dorn has overextended himself and can't make payroll 40 games into the season.
Re-enter Rachel Phelps. She wants to buy back the team at a profit, because she realizes she shouldn't have walked away from a winner? No? Not quite. Because she wants to devise more ways to humiliate them and take her revenge on them.
Maybe I'm crazy, but a sports franchise is worth a lot more money the better it is.
As is a sports movie franchise. And there is one more I can watch, if I want to, which is Major League: Back to the Minors, which still utilizes some of the same cast four years later in 1998. Alas, it doesn't sound any more promising.
Not this year. Hopefully I'll get myself back on track with the traditional Opening Day Eve movie later this week, which will be finally removing one the most celebrated baseball movies of all time from my list of shame. Want to know which one? Tune in later this week.
It strikes me that this is a particularly good year to watch Major League again, after all, as this is a momentous season for the real Cleveland Indians. After 120 seasons in existence, the Cleveland Indians will no longer be known as the Cleveland Indians after 2021.
It's been a long time coming. Baseball has two teams whose names are insensitive to Native Americans -- the Atlanta Braves being the other -- and in the wake of social justice protests last year, the real team owner (Paul Dolan) announced that the team would not only drop its mascot, Chief Wahoo, but the actual team name itself. It's something Washington's football team, formerly known as the Redskins, has already done, going (only temporarily I think) by the name The Washington Football Team.
We'll see if the soon-to-be-former Indians come up with something better than that. It's not moving the team to another city, but I'm sure many of its fans are crying in their overpriced beers nonetheless.
To usher out Chief Wahoo et al, maybe this year's team needs to do what Berenger's Jake Taylor urges his team to do. When they collectively learn that they'll all be out on their ass after the season, Taylor stands up before the locker room and says there's only one thing they can do:
"Win the whole fuckin' thing."
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