Baseball Movies & Me
How my cousins stole second and my innocence
It has been a while since we’ve been here. With bated breath, I’m here to provide an update on how baseball changed my life.
I don’t think I’ve mentioned I write about baseball because it matters to me, only to amount to relative insignificance to the general public.
Let’s not pretend that the NFL hasn’t become America’s Pastime. People laugh at how baseball exists today.
When I was younger, baseball movies were Topps. I’m talking Rookie of the Year, The Rookie. You can even throw Little Big League into the mix as a staple of the rear-seat entertainment system in my mom’s Volvo.
I loved baseball movies more than baseball, which may not be some epiphany, but the ’90s did a great job of highlighting kids’ around my age having a massive impact in the baseball world.
I truly believed that I was one shoulder separation away from actually pitching for the Chicago Cubs.
There was always something so humble about baseball. I loved it.
Enter my cousins.
A little background. As the youngest sibling, my mother had the youngest children. Do you know what that made us? Targets.
We didn’t have a bruiser group; no one hurt us. My cousins played in the psychological space.
In between sitting us down for another airing of The Labrinryth (check it out, young Jen Connelly), exposing us to the claymation of nightmares, goblins in the toilet, and Jurassic Park posters, they introduced me to Major League.
Throughout my years, I had never seen baseball in such a debasing light, and I loved it. That day in South Jersey, I became conscious.
Hearing Wild Thing, to this day, reminds me that baseball CAN be cool. It just chooses not to.
Those years I spent on those childish baseball movies was wasted. I associate Major League with a loss of innocence and a moment of growth.
Sort of a sour-yummy moment. Need a saying for that.
I didn’t know comedy until I saw how horrible Corbin Bernsen could be at pretending to be good at baseball.
I love the juxtaposition of how pure baseball should be with how filthy it can be.
I could go without the Renee Russo thing, but that movie opened my eyes.
Being that young and seeing edges to something that I believed was so smooth made me think. Maybe a little too much.
You spend years trying to figure out how to either be funny or not be funny at all. Either way, you fail. The funniest things you ever say might be unintentional.
That’s how I feel about baseball today. The MLB doesn’t know if they should be funny or serious. The most amusing stuff is Bryce Harper signing with the Phillies and telling the media he cannot wait to bring a championship back to Washington (and then the Nats won the World Series).
You spend your life believing things can be as smooth and polished as baseball to an eight-year-old. All it takes is a movie like Major League to make a nine-year-old normalize the F-word when mom and dad aren’t around.
So I need to thank my cousins for exposing me. I was the oldest of three; I didn’t have an older brother to show me everything I shouldn’t have seen.
Everyone needs older siblings to show them all the things they shouldn’t see a little too early.
