One day three decades ago, inside a treehouse in Utah, a child actor named Patrick Renna uttered one of the most iconic lines in baseball movie history.
Turns out it was actually a mistake.
Renna played Hamilton “Ham” Porter, a portly, red-headed catcher in “The Sandlot,” the cult classic released 30 years ago. Written by director David Mickey Evans and Robert Gunter, the 1993 film tells the nostalgic tale of a group of boys playing baseball and hanging out in the summer of 1962. The script, Evans said, attempted to capture a moment in time, including the slang of the late ’50s and early ’60s.
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So when new kid Scotty Smalls shows up to a treehouse sleepover and doesn’t understand what a “s’more” is, the script called for “Ham” to deliver a popular phrase from the time.
“You kill me, Smalls.”
But on the day they filmed the scene, Renna interpreted the script and improvised his own version.
“You’re killing me, Smalls!”
On the set, a supervisor turned to Evans. “He missed it,” the supervisor said.
Evans nodded. Yep. And it was way funnier.
If you re-watch the scene today, you’ll notice another boy in the back of the frame rummaging around the treehouse, his back turned to the camera. That’s Mike Vitar, the actor who played Benny Rodriguez, the group’s charismatic leader and star player. He wasn’t standing like that in the earlier takes, Evans said. Vitar turned his back because he couldn’t stop cracking up.
“Every time (Renna) said it,” Evans said, “everybody pissed their pants laughing.”
Thirty years later, an enduring charm remains with “The Sandlot,” a nostalgia as potent as the one depicted on screen. Hardly a runaway smash in the theaters ($34.3 million box office worldwide), it instead became a beloved hit on VHS cassette and television, a pop-culture staple of the 1990s. It is quotable (“FOR-EV-ER”), memorable (Wendy Peffercorn and PF Flyers) and re-watchable, something close to a children’s movie version of “Dazed and Confused,” another cult film from the same year that also was devoted to time and place and nostalgia.
“There is a real sense of magic with ‘The Sandlot,’” said Grant Gelt, who played Bertram Grover Weeks, the tall rebel of a second baseman with an affinity for chewing tobacco and, eventually, the 1960s.
If you’ve seen the movie, you know it hinges on a basic plot MacGuffin involving an autographed Babe Ruth baseball belonging to Smalls’ stepfather (played by Denis Leary), a giant Mastiff nicknamed “The Beast,” and a quest to retrieve the ball from the dog’s yard. But in reality, the story is secondary, as is, at times, the baseball. “The Sandlot” isn’t so much a story as it is a state of mind, a summer vibe.
“It’s a piece of time,” Evans said. “It’ll never be anachronistic. The entire experience of seeing that movie is never going to change. The experience of seeing the movie will give you that feeling.”
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Evans recently returned from Salt Lake City, where thousands of residents and fans had flocked to the movie’s filming location to celebrate its 30th anniversary. One girl told him the film helped her relationship with her stepfather. A mother told him the film taught her children about friendship. The stories are endless. Once, some cast members visited a minor-league stadium in Omaha, Neb., to celebrate the film’s legacy. According to Daniel Zacapa, an experienced character actor who played police chief Squidman Palledorous in the movie, they came across a Japanese pitcher who was pitching in Triple A. The pitcher’s father had given him one thing to bring to America when he left home: a copy of “The Sandlot.”
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“Nostalgia,” Evans said. “The word actually means a longing for home. So, define home.
“Is it just some big overarching wish or desire for a simpler time, or a time when my attention and all the parts of my brain aren’t pulled in a thousand directions at once every day? Maybe.”
The story of “The Sandlot” began in the early 1990s, when Evans, then a young writer and director, was fired as the director of “Radio Flyer,” a children’s film for which he’d written the script. Evans was replaced by Richard Donner, the legendary director, who offered a piece of advice: “Everybody in Hollywood gets a second chance, and nobody gets a third.”
Not long after being fired, Evans found himself stuck in traffic on the 405 freeway in southern California when he recalled a story from childhood in which his brother jumped a fence to retrieve a baseball for some neighborhood bullies down the street. Evans grew up in southern California playing park-league baseball. His family, by his account, did not have much money, and his childhood was less than idyllic.
As he recalled the story involving his brother and a baseball, he realized he had, in his words, “a time machine” to change the past. When he got home that night, he started writing.
The story centers on the arrival of fifth-grader Smalls — played by Tom Guiry — to a neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley, where a group of kids gather daily at a local sandlot to play baseball. In the original script, Evans set the film in California in 1962, the year the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Maury Wills stole 104 bases and broke Ty Cobb’s major-league record of 96. The idea was that the character “Squints” (Michael “Squints” Palledorous, played by Chauncey Leopardi) would spend the summer listening to Vin Scully on a transistor radio, while Benny tried to keep pace. It was eventually cut, but the time period proved to be a rich tapestry.
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To Evans, the story of the baseball was always secondary. When the studio and other crew members worried about casting kids who could master the baseball scenes, he pushed back. He just needed kids who could catch, hit and throw.
“What I didn’t need was a bunch of kids who all belonged in the Little League World Series because they’re so good,” Evans said. “First of all, I wouldn’t believe a word of that, because why wouldn’t they be in organized sports?
“Little League was a massive thing in the early ’60s, so it wouldn’t have made any sense. But it does make sense if one of them was a five-tool player, and that was Benny. But he was just such a loyal, devoted dude that he can do anything, but he chooses to play here — where it’s important.”
To make sure the kids could catch and throw, Evans enlisted the help of Zacapa, who had grown up playing competitive baseball in the Bay Area. Zacapa would go on to have a role in the David Fincher film “Seven,” as well as a cameo on “Seinfield,” but he was first hired to be the film’s “baseball technical advisor.” Unofficially, he was the head coach.
Before filming began, the cast held rehearsals at Sportsmen’s Lodge and baseball practices at a field down the street. Zacapa taught basic fundamentals and then dolled out positions, using the 1960s San Francisco Giants as his template. The character “Squints” had a Giants cap, so Zacapa put him in center field and taught him the Willie Mays basket catch. The character Alan “Yeah Yeah” McClennan (played by Marty York) happened to be smaller and slender, which reminded Zacapa of former Giants shortstop José Pagán. The group’s pitcher Kenny “The Heater” DeNunez (Brandon Quintin Adams) was given a Kansas City Monarchs cap and a big leg kick, à la Juan Marichal.
And then there was Shane Obedzinski, who played Tommy “Repeat” Timmons. One day during practice, Obedzinski took a ground ball to the, uhh, midsection.
“Next day, we all had to wear cups,” he said — and Zacapa decided he would be best in right field.
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The most talented players, according to Zacapa, were Benny (Vitar) and Ham (Renna), who each had experience playing baseball. There was one character who had a position from the start: Ham Porter. Renna’s character would become famous for his trash talk against a team of elitist Little Leaguers, but he was always the catcher.
“He knew how to play ball,” Zacapa said.
When the cast finally moved to Salt Lake City for filming, the kids had already grown close. Over the next 42 days, they would embark on the idealized America summer: carnivals, fireworks and afternoons at the neighborhood pool. Some days, Evans would hover within earshot of the boys hanging out off-camera. He’d then take one of their lines and slide it into the script.
“He would have a bullhorn, and he would just be yelling different things that he had overheard,” said Victor DiMattia, who played Timmy Timmons, Tommy’s older brother.
It’s probably safe to say that nobody really realized the kid’s baseball movie they were working on would turn into a classic. But there was something about the set and characters and the props and how everything felt so idealized yet familiar. (Most of the authentic baseball touches are credited to the film’s prop master, Terry Haskell.)
“You either were one of those kids, knew one of those kids or wanted to be one of those kids,” Evans said.
The film culminates with Benny donning a pair of PF Flyers — shoes guaranteed to make a kid run faster and jump higher — and jumping the fence to retrieve the baseball from “The Beast.” Evans viewed the scene as a metaphorical coming-of-age moment — to jump the fence was to pass into adulthood — and it ended with an encounter with the dog’s owner, Mr. Mertle, a former Negro League baseball player (played by James Earl Jones) whose career ended with an errant pitch and who owns a vast collection of baseball memorabilia. Jones’ time on set was limited, but as he ate breakfast one morning, York approached and asked if he was Darth Vader. Jones replied no.
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“I am your father,” he said.
The magic of “The Sandlot” is that it never feels old. It’s always the summer of 1962. Scotty Smalls is always the new kid. Benny Rodriguez is always the star. The game is always on.
It could have felt cornball, but its charms are genuine.
“Those kids were right on the money,” Evans said. “I got very lucky with all of them.”
(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; photos: Brace Hemmelgarn / Minnesota Twins / Getty Images; 20th Century-Fox / Getty Images; Rick Kern / Getty Images)