A bunch of Bull

The late 1980s were the heyday of baseball movies that starred or could have starred Kevin Costner. He was in both Bull Durham and Field of Dreams, of course, and couldn't you just imagine him playing the Tom Berenger role in Major League?

Well, it's a problematic heyday for me in certain ways. I had a major negative reappraisal of Field of Dreams a few years ago, I was never that warm on Bull Durham in the first place, and, well, Major League, which is my favorite baseball movie of all time and in my top 200 on Flickchart, does not actually feature Kevin Costner.

But a Bull Durham viewing has been brewing for a couple years as a possible choice to watch on the eve of baseball's opening day, as per my annual tradition. Even though it was never a favorite -- as evidenced by the fact that I have only seen it that one time in the early 1990s -- I did generally feel fondly toward it, and thought that its general vibe would be a perfect thing to usher me in to six months of baseball.

I did feel fondly toward it.

I said I liked Durham's general vibe, but the movie is more of a vibe than an actual story. And it turns out I don't like its vibe all that much.

Let's start with Costner as Crash Davis. In my memory, this was sort of a Han Solo of baseball, a wiseass who's flawed but charming, and has the best personality in the room. In fact, I found Crash to be a bitter asshole. He's not as funny as I thought, he doesn't have an instinct for kindness in his body, and he's not above the fray like a Han Solo, falling into an immediate petty rivalry with his charge, Tim Robbins' Nuke LaLoosh, getting into as many as three fights with him, at least two of which he bears the lion's share of the responsibility for starting. We are supposed to want Crash to succeed and to win the heart of Susan Sarandon's Annie, and the trajectory of the narrative and the development of Nuke is supposed to confirm that she was wrong to pair up with Nuke. Instead, I thought Nuke seemed like the more deserving suitor by the end -- a credit to Crash helping mature him, sure, but not something we are supposed to be thinking as the narrative reaches its end.

It occurs to me that rooting for the wrong person was actually a problem with both of these Costner baseball movies in the late 80s. Part of the reason I turned on Field of Dreams (you can read that post here) was because I realized the movie is trying so hard to make a villain out of Timothy Busfield, when in fact his pleading with them not to build a baseball field on their property is the most sane action by any character in the movie. I felt similarly toward Nuke here. Although I loathed him at first -- the movie makes it impossible not to -- I ultimately found Nuke easier to like than Crash, who reaches his bitter low point when he refuses to congratulate Nuke on his promotion to the majors, and then tries to start a fight with Nuke, throwing a billiard ball at Nuke with his back turned while Nuke is walking away. Classy.

And that makes a good transition into the many ways this movie gets baseball wrong. When Nuke gets his call-up to the majors at the end, he's skipping two levels of minor league ball in order to get there. The titular Durham Bulls are a Triple-A team today -- meaning the stop just below the majors -- but in the 1980s they were a Class-A team, which means that both AA and AAA stood between them and the majors as logical stopping points for players on their ascension. It's not unheard of for a major league team to call up someone in the low minors when rosters expand at the end of the season, but it would be pretty rare -- and certainly not immediately after a stinker of a game by the player.

So let's talk about that stinker of a game. As narrated by Annie -- and there is a lot of random narrating in this film that follows no pattern -- the game "got out of hand" once Crash was ejected for arguing a call at the plate. We see one of the fielders make three errors with his cursed glove (more on that later) and a number of other hits sprayed around the park against LaLoosh. And yet when she wraps up her narration of the game, she reveals that the Bulls lost the game 3-2. How is that game "out of hand"?

It would be one thing if we were supposed to believe that Annie just doesn't understand very much about baseball, which would be a bit sexist but at least would explain her sub par assessment of the dynamics of the game. But no, this is a woman who offers players advice on their swing and attends every game. It's writer-director Ron Shelton who doesn't seem to understand baseball, not Annie. (Which is a strange charge to make as Shelton made a handful of baseball movies, including the one I started the 2023 baseball season watching, Cobb.) 

And let's also talk about Crash's ejection. It takes ages to happen. While arguing an out call at the plate -- which he does to try to fire Nuke up -- Crash is nose to nose with the umpire for minutes of intimate shouting before he's thrown out. He even bumps chests with the umpire early in the argument, to which the umpire lamely responds "Don't bump me!" (Physical contact with an umpire is an automatic ejection, and likely suspension, today, but even back then it would have been unusual and warranted an immediate response.) Finally only after the umpire baits Crash into calling him a cocksucker does he get thrown out. No self-respecting umpire would put up with that much crap before ejecting a player.

It's clear that Bull Durham does not fancy itself a conventional sports movie building toward a conventional climax. I mean, it is the anti-Major League in that way. The loveable losers in that movie work their way up to winning the big game -- not the World Series, but the single game that decides who is going to win the A.L. East, which is still pretty big stakes. The loveable losers in this movie have a winning streak that's underpinned by Nuke's abstention from sex -- as though Nuke might pitch every game the team plays, another misunderstanding of how baseball works -- but then I don't even remember if we find out what becomes of that season. The movie sees fit to end on Nuke getting promoted and Crash getting released, with post scripts that have to do with Crash trying to set the minor league home run record on a different team (a big deal, you'd think, but the movie considers it an afterthought) and with him finally bedding Annie.

I know these are different times, but if a player were about to take the all-time lead for minor league homers -- a dubious honor, of course, because it means you're just good enough for a lot of at-bats in the minors but few if any in the majors -- it would be celebrated and the player's pursuit would be monitored. Instead, the Bulls release Davis even though he's having an indisputably good hitting season. We know he needed 20 homers at the start of the season to set the record, and you don't release a player who is having that sort of productivity at the plate. Especially because you want to "call up" a young catcher. Um, Class-A is pretty much as low as it gets, though technically, rookie ball is one step lower. 

The movie views Crash Davis as some great tragedy, because Crash views himself as some great tragedy. I didn't feel sorry for the guy in the slightest. He's a jerk to everyone and he had a minor league career in which he hit 247 homers. In a season in which you've already hit 20 homers, there would be no reason not to keep playing next year. Instead, the movie makes it seem as though he has no other option than to consider a coaching gig the following season. I'm sorry, any player who can hit 20 homers is going to be wanted by somebody.

But Vance, you say. It's just a movie.

Yes, I'm probably doing it wrong if I am scrutinizing every detail of a baseball movie. But a baseball movie needs to be good enough in the other things it's doing to make me relax my tendency toward this sort of scrutiny. I'm sure there are things about Major League that don't add up, but they don't distract me the least from my love of what that movie does. Here, I'm muttering and distracted constantly.

Even if Bull Durham wants to be more of a hang-out movie than a sports movie, it needs to do that better. The "fun" sequences don't even strike me as such because I don't care much about the main characters and they didn't do much to introduce me to the supporting cast, another way this falls short of what Major League accomplishes. 

I was frankly shocked at how labored this script is. I can't remember any examples off the top of my head, but there were moments here where a dialogue exchange goes on for any number of words longer than it should have because Shelton failed to excise clearly superfluous material, like little semantic exchanges about what someone said, or needless repetitions of things not heard properly. If the semantics are the point, a good script can make that funny. This script is not good, from the overall story structure to the inconsistent use of voiceover to the details of the dialogue. 

I don't want to say I hated Bull Durham. That's too strong. I do enjoy certain isolated parts of it, though I don't ever think it's funny. I think it thinks it's funny, which is really unbecoming.

Oh I mentioned earlier that I was going to come back to the fielder who thought his glove was cursed and made three errors, a guy named Jose, played by Rick Marzan. This guy is always rubbing beads on his bat and is a believer in voodoo. I thought that was funny because the character of Pedro Cerrano in Major League, played by Dennis Haysbert, is basically an expanded consideration of this plot. While that would sound as though Bull Durham finally has the advantage over Major League on something, again I can spin this in Major League's favor. Major League takes something that was ventured tepidly by Bull Durham and makes it big and richly comedic, if probably a little culturally insensitive by today's standards. What's more, it's another example of how we know the characters better in the later film and better appreciate their specific traits and foibles. We don't know anything about Jose. Heck, we barely even know anything about Crash.

So Bull Durham did not really psych me up for the season, which is my stated reason for this little Cerrano-like ritual of mine over the past decade or so. (My wife even referred to it as a ritual last night.) But that does not matter, because baseball itself psychs me up for itself. 

Happy opening day, everyone. 

Major League bookends

My fantasy baseball draft was this past Sunday morning, back to its usual late March date after being diverted to July for hopefully the only time ever. It's always my favorite day of the year, even if the 90 minutes it currently takes to do it online pales in comparison to the ten-hour in-person auction I used to enjoy in the late 1990s/early 2000s.

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." 

Rick Vaughn was a recovering alcoholic

And another happy baseball opening day to you!

It's just a few games on Sunday, but we'll be at it for real on Monday. And to celebrate the start of another baseball season, not only did I watch The Battered Bastards of Baseball on Wednesday night (enjoyable), but I also quit the belly-aching and did what I should have done a few years ago: buy Major League.

A year ago I wrote a post about how I wanted to start the 2016 baseball season by watching one of my favorite baseball movies, and one of my favorite sports movies period, but that I couldn't get it on Australian Netflix. This year, I just stopped messing around and added it to my collection. The $4.99 purchase price from iTunes was only a dollar more than a rental might have been, and I've recently cleared up about 20 gigs of free space on my hard drive, so I figured, now was the time.

Good decision. I enjoyed it as much as I ever do.

But it's often the case, when rewatching a favorite movie, that you discover something new about it each time. My first Major League viewing in five years was no different.

Namely, I discovered that Charlie Sheen's Rick Vaughn, the visually impaired pitcher with a devastating fastball who gets nicknamed "Wild Thing," is a recovering alcoholic.

There's nothing in the dialogue about it. Nope, it only appear in shots of what he drinks, or does not drink.

Namely, when Vaughn goes out for a fancy dinner with Tom Berenger's Jake Taylor and Wesley Snipes' Willie Hayes, to celebrate the start of the season, he toasts with a glass of Coke, while they each raise a flute of champagne. When he goes to a bar later after setting an American League record by throwing four wild pitches in one inning, he's seen drinking a Coke again while Taylor downs a beer.

It's only when he's at his lowest, after not being selected to start the playoff game intended to settle a tie in the standings with the Yankees, that we see him at a bar actually drinking a beer.

I'd describe it as a bit of a visual shorthand to show his inner emotional state, much as a director will shoot a sad person through a window pane streaked with rain to symbolize his or her tears (to provide a very broad and cliched example). Except that because his alcoholism is never spoken of, it takes a viewer to find it like they would find Easter eggs, something I'm only just now doing on what is probably my sixth or seventh viewing of the movie.

There may have been a scene in which his alcoholism is addressed, and it was just too heavy-handed so they left it on the cutting room floor. That's often the explanation for otherwise extraneous plot details such as this. But I like to think it was just part of the back story of his character, an additional detail of Rick Vaughn that brings him dimension and allows the actor to understand the character more fully. "You're not really going to use this explicitly," the director, in this case David S. Ward, might say. "But just so you know, this guy is a recovering alcoholic."

If you want to get all moralistic about it, you could say the movie is trying to suggest that only when he goes back to booze does he make "mistakes" like the one he makes that night, when he sleeps with the wife of one of his teammates (Corbin Bernsen's self-involved prick, Roger Dorn, who develops a soul as the movie goes on). Then again, Dorn's wife targeted him as a revenge plot against her own philandering husband, so even if he had one beer, he's still more a pawn in her personal marital chess game than a sexual deviant further freed of his inhibitions by the contents of a little brown bottle.

I just love that this low-key sports movie with modest ambitions cared enough to flesh out its world, even in ways we were only seeing tangentially, and only if we were watching closely, perhaps for our sixth or seventh time.

I'm looking forward to my seventh or possible eighth viewing, to see what other little detail the movie is generous to give us that I may have missed.

Which should be all the easier to do, now that I own it.

The Major League viewing that wasn't

It's baseball season again. As this is one of the more cinematic sports out there -- and also my favorite -- I feel compelled to call attention to opening day on my blog every year. Twenty sixteen is no different.

But I did want to more explicitly combine the start of the baseball season with movies this year by scheduling my first viewing since 2012 of the 1989 classic (I'm not kidding) Major League, about a week or two back.

Unfortunately, I was frustrated in that attempt by Netflix's very successful and apparently unbreachable lockdown on the use of VPNs in foreign countries.

I had already both encountered Netflix's tighter security policy, and written about it here, a couple weeks earlier when I attempted to watch Clueless (and actually did watch it on a competing streaming service). So I shouldn't have been surprised when it was only available on the U.S. version of the service, especially since baseball is not particularly big in Australia to begin with. (I'd say it's tiny, except that someone thought Australia was an audience primed for baseball by scheduling two regular season games between the Dodgers and the Diamondbacks in Sydney to start the 2014 season.)

I guess somehow I figured that would make it slightly more likely to appear on the Australian Netflix, not less. I mean, if nobody wants to watch the movie anyway, why not have it available, just because?

That of course operates on the faulty notion that companies like Netflix dangle carrots in front of rabbits (their customers), only to snatch away the things they really want and provide them with a lot of bait-and-switch content they don't want. Giving that unwanted content essentially no value, and therefore no cost, in the free market. Well, that's certainly not the case. It's all about licensing fees and the like, and it probably makes little sense to license a film in a country where most viewers have no interest in watching it.

So my Major League itch went unscratched. Oh well. One could argue I should probably own this movie anyway, given my feelings for it. Maybe this is the impetus I need to do that. It'll have to be a digital purchase, however; finding it on the shelves here is going to be even more unlikely than finding it online.

I'll see if I can't schedule some kind of substitute tomorrow night, when I'll be home (unlike tonight), and when an entire day's worth of baseball games will have been played, rather than just the three that were played on this opening Sunday. (Which is an increase from the one game that has traditionally been played.) Tomorrow (their Monday, my Tuesday) is the real opening day in the old-fashioned sense of that word, and after poring over scores and stats all day, I'll have worked up a pretty big appetite for some baseball on celluloid. We'll see what I come up with.

Until then ... play ball!

Lady's choice: Play ball!

This morning at approximately 3 a.m. Los Angeles time, the Oakland A's and the Seattle Mariners played the first regular-season game of the 2012 baseball season.

No, it wasn't some kind of weird publicity stunt. Well, it was a publicity stunt of sorts, but not the kind you're thinking of. See, it wasn't 3 a.m. in Japan, where the first two games of the season will be played, as they have been a handful of times over the past decade.

The night before this first game, to celebrate the ceremonial arrival of spring that this first game traditionally represents, my wife and I watched Major League.

That probably wouldn't have been her choice -- but that's why our bi-weekly Tuesday night movie series is all about alternating who gets to choose. It's called Lady's Choice Movie Night, but as I've described in the past (and will probably have to again), I serve as the "lady" in this scenario once a month. It's really not worth going into. All you have to know is that it doesn't involve me dressing up in her clothing or anything.

But I wasn't just forcing my wife to watch something that would probably hold little appeal for her, because the ground rules of this movie series allow me to. She's not a sports fan, but she's a big fan of sports movies -- a much bigger fan than I am, in fact, so in that sense I was actually kind of throwing her a bone. (For a fuller discussion of my feelings about sports movies, see here.) "It's all about the human drama," she said last night, explaining the genre's appeal to her.

Well, there's plenty of human drama in Major League -- not to mention plenty of laughs, plenty of swears and plenty of actors who are still nearly as familiar today as they were back in 1989.

But let's start with those swears. On this viewing in particular I appreciated how damn much the characters in this movie swear. They elevate profanity to an art form. That's undoubtedly accurate when you're looking inside the locker rooms of professional athletes, but that doesn't mean Major League would be made like this if it were made today. Made today, Major League would be PG-13 and might have a smattering of naughty words. But it probably would not have a single f-bomb. And in fact, as I was discussing on Facebook earlier today, nearly every classic line in the movie contains an f-bomb -- with the notable exception of Bob Uecker's famous quip "Juuuust a bit outside." Forthwith:

"Who's THIS fucking guy?"

"Nice catch. Don't ever fucking do it again."

"If you ever tank another play like you did today, I'm going to rip your nuts off and shove 'em down your fucking throat."

"I say 'fuck you' Jobu. I do it myself."

"Strike this motherfucker out."

You get the idea.

Yet what's so wonderful about this movie is that it's not the least bit mean-spirited. That's just how we've changed as a movie audience in the past 23 years. Major League probably has at least 50 f-bombs in it -- isn't it funny how I'm still saying "f-bombs" even though I just wrote out the word "fuck" five times -- yet it's incredibly light-hearted and fun. It seems hard for us to imagine that kind of balance today. Movies that relied on such profanity would seem to be showing off, or trying to emulate Quentin Tarantino. Unlike Major League, which is just plain realistic.

Okay, not entirely realistic. I could certainly quibble with parts of the movie. Like, how would Pedro Cerrano ever keep a starting job all year if word spread around the league that he couldn't hit a curveball to save his life? Or, in order to pull off his big move at the end of the movie -- spoiler alert -- Jake Taylor would have to show bunt on the brush-back pitch from The Duke that knocks him to the ground. Yet he doesn't.

These things don't matter, and you wanna know why? Because Major League also has one of the tightest scripts around. It's incredibly detail-oriented, yet the details are always there to show us more about the characters and the "inside baseball" (an appropriate use for that term) we're seeing on screen. They are never belabored, and there are numerous short scenes that tell us plenty without even any dialogue. My wife even said that watching Major League gave her ideas about how to make her own script, on which she's stalled around page 40, even tighter. It's a point A to point B to point C type of screenwriting that blows you away with both its efficiency and its unexpected depth.

Let's take Rene Russo's character, Lynn, for example. Stop and think about how many times she appears in this movie. She's in like five scenes. Five! Yet you know a ton about Lynn and her relationship with Jake, because each scene accomplishes exactly what it needs to accomplish. There's no way you get to the end of that movie and realize she may have only had ten minutes of screen time. She feels like a full-on co-star, a fully developed romantic lead. Credit that to David S. Ward, a name I don't really know, who is nonetheless both the writer and director of this wonderful movie.

I also enjoyed realizing how many stars were in this movie, and how they were truly the right stars, perfectly complementing each other in the truest sense of the word "team." You've got the ever-reliable Tom Berenger as the aging catcher with bad knees. You've got fleet-footed Wesley Snipes as the hot shot outfielder who invites himself to spring training. You've got Corbin Bernsen as the primadonna with the big paycheck who will no longer sacrifice his body. You've got Dennis Haysbert, much more famous now than he was then, as the voodoo-practicing slugger who defected from Cuba. And you've got one of the most notorious personalities of the past year, Charlie Sheen, as an ex-con with a bad attitude and a haircut that looks like he lost a fight with a weedwacker. This is to say nothing of the delightful Russo, the hilarious Uecker and James Gammon, the salty old manager, who will be sorely missed after dying in July of 2010. (Odd -- he was 70 when he died, making him only about 49 in Major League. He plays at least ten years older than that.)

Oh, and I said something about laughs. Yeah, we were laughing consistently. Both of us. And this was at least my fifth time seeing the movie.

More than anything, though, I was interested to see Major League again because the former host of the Filmspotting podcast, Matty Robinson, unabashedly touts this movie as his favorite of all time. Think about that for a second. He is (or was) the co-host of a highfalutin podcast where, for example, they spent a half-hour dissecting, analyzing and gushing about The Tree of Life. Yet this modest little baseball comedy from 1989 is his favorite movie of all time.

Last night's viewing reminded me that Mr. Robinson might not be so crazy.