Talking on the phone to my brother Chris this evening, he pointed out that after my Will Smith entry nearly a year ago (!) I haven’t made good on my promise to produce any further Defining Moments posts. So here I go with one that’s long been stewing in my brain, and it’s a big one.

I’m a huge nerd, and I always have been. But for two mercifully brief years in late elementary school, I tried my hardest to be as cool as possible. I signed up for little league, begged and pleaded to get into it, even though the ballpark was a solid 20 minute drive away and I was certifiably horrible at the sport.

Seriously, horrible. My first season, I didn’t connect with the ball once, though I did actually set the seasonal record for being hit by the pitcher the most times (at least once a game).

My interest in baseball stemmed from a lot of things – its unique role in American society, cemented in my mind by watching the entirety of Ken Burns’ stunning Baseball miniseries. I had been given a book a year or two prior by a family friend filled with historical baseball trivia the likes of which no third grader should know: Rogers Hornsby has the second-highest career batting average of all time! Cy Young holds the record for Most Games Started. I mean – why do I know this, even now? What ultimately significant knowledge – knowledge which one day may save my life – has been lost because there’s a knot in my brain devoted to the history of the Honus Wagner T206 card?

And oh yeah, it stemmed from the glut of baseball movies that came out in the early 90s: A League of Their Own (which I saw at the Santikos Embassy with my dad), Little Big League (same), The Sandlot (Santikos Northwest, with my sister), and A League of Their Own.

A motley assortment of films – at least one of them immediately dropped off the radar of film history upon its release (I was stunned – stunned! – to see that Little Big League had opened at a puny #10 its first week. How could these people have missed out on the movie of the summer?) Another one is perhaps best known now as an early film for one of the stars of American Pie (who since has gone on to a nothing career). But the two that stuck out then are the two that continue to stand out now.

The Sandlot is of course one of my generation’s cherished cult items – in a decade, the amount of Sandlot references in popular culture will approach Goonies level. Ignored at the theaters, the movie caught on in a massive way on home video and television rebroadcasts, but home viewing really doesn’t capture the beauty of this film. It’s a wonderfully imaginative, achingly nostalgic film about the last summer before children begin to grow older, beautifully shot in Cinemascope by Anthony B. Richmond and directed by David Evans, who did the similarly nostalgic fantasy Radio Flyer. It’s got enough visual imagination for three films, a pitch-perfect ear for non-diegetic music (that scene where the gang watch the fireworks during the night game brings me chills), and a genuine love for every character on screen. But what I want to talk about with The Sandlot is its dialogue.

Ham Porter: Hey, Smalls, you wanna s’more?
Smalls: Some more of what?
Ham Porter: No, do you wanna s’more?
Smalls: I haven’t had anything yet, so how can I have some more of nothing?
Ham Porter: You’re killing me Smalls! These are s’more’s stuff! Alrite now pay attention. First you take the graham, you stick the chocolate on the graham. Then you roast the ‘mallow. When the ‘mallows flaming… you stick it on the chocolate. Then cover with the other end. Then you stuff it! Kind of messy, but good!

There’s a precision to this sort of classic comic non-sequitur. It’s a natural outgrowth of vaudeville, of course, but it’s so perfectly integrated into character that it’s an inconceivably perfect little moment. There’s something almost Mametesque to the precision the writers give to the rhythms of the dialogue, the naturalness of the affect.

You see, baseball was ultimately not for me. Today, I don’t even really follow it – when asked if I support the Mets or the Yankees, I shrug. What was for me was the movies, and was writing, and when I was first coming to terms with the notion that movies were written, by people in rooms (and not improvised by the actors on the set), it occurred to me that some grownup somewhere wrote The Sandlot and was able to tap into the psychology of a certain age and era of American Youth. The Sandlot endures among my generation’s viewers not because of their own nostalgia for their youth, but because it’s an excellent little movie, and its immaculately constructed characters are honest reflections of the mythology of American boyhood.

And now for the other film. A League of Their Own is a lot of things – former HBO (and current TNT) staple, archetypal late-model women’s film (in the Molly Haskell sense of that phrase), ridiculously overstuffed star vehicle (Hanks! Davis! Madonna! O’Donnell! Petty!). Unlike the other three films, I didn’t see A League of Their Own in the theaters – it starred adults, focused on themes like alcoholism, war, sexism, lookism. Its biggest stars were Tom Hanks, who hadn’t become Jimmy Stewart 2.0 yet, and Madonna, whom I best knew as That Devil Woman who Wrote an Evil Book. It’s about baseball, yes, but it’s about women playing baseball, and it’s set even farther back than The Sandlot – the 1940s. They didn’t even have rock and roll then!

But Oh God – this movie was good. Though so much of the material flew over (or straight through) my head, I couldn’t help but love it. The comic timing of the actors was pitch perfect, the period details fascinating, and the drama – especially the sororal dischord between Davis and Petty at the center – uncannily real. I combed through the newspaper’s weekly TV Guide supplement to make sure I didn’t miss any of the many reairings. I checked out a book from the local library, some stuffy small-press published mindfood about the women’s baseball leagues. (God, I must have looked strange to that librarian.) Unable to succeed at youthful sport of baseball, I found myself turning to film, an ‘adult’ interest. Here, in a sense, was what my 9 year old mind could comprehend as a ‘mature film’ – this is what adults watch, and as such, my instinctual sensibility as a storyteller is inescapably indebted to this film.

Over the summer of 1993, I probably watched A League of Their Own about 20 times on TV. And I never once grew tired of it. Its subtle blend of comedy into the classic five-hanky formula beat me into emotional submission every time. At that climatic moment when a Western Union boy has to deliver a notice that one of the players’ husbands has died at war, there’s a moment where the camera (or was it the pan-and-scan?) suddenly turns to reveal the woman break down. It’s a daring, disruptively unsubtle move, informed by the best John Stahl and Irving Rapper movies, and it’s a suckerpunch every time.

Hopefully it’ll be shorter between now and the next time I post one of these entries - I can talk about my complex relationship to Forrest Gump as well as early exposure to music video (the world’s most visible medium of experimental art) as a form.

Here’s a taste:

[youtube]NtILxBszyf8[/youtube]

• BROWSE / IN TIMELINE
• « On the Lot, End of the Road.
• » Superbad; or, WHAT THE HELL AM I DOING WITH MY LIFE

• BROWSE / IN Defining Moments
• « Defining Moments #1
• » In Other News