Major League and the Comedy That Cleveland Needed

David S. Ward's 1989 film Major League followed a terrible baseball team that rallied to win the pennant through grit, humor, and one very fast pitcher who couldn't see. Ward set it in Cleveland, and the real Indians' decades of futility needed no exaggeration.

The premise was that the Indians' new owner, a former showgirl played by Margaret Whitton, deliberately assembled the worst roster in baseball to drive down attendance and justify moving the team to Miami. The players, upon discovering the scheme, decide to win out of spite.

Ward shot the film partly at Milwaukee's County Stadium because Cleveland Municipal Stadium was unavailable. Charlie Sheen played Ricky "Wild Thing" Vaughn, a convicted felon with a 100-mph fastball and no idea where it was going, until he got glasses. Tom Berenger played the aging catcher Jake Taylor. Wesley Snipes played the speedy outfielder Willie Mays Hayes. Corbin Bernsen played the vain third baseman Roger Dorn. And Bob Uecker, the real-life broadcaster, played radio announcer Harry Doyle in what became the most beloved performance in the film.

Uecker improvised many of his lines. His call of a wild pitch early in the season, "Juuuust a bit outside," became one of the most quoted lines in sports comedy. When asked later how he prepared for the role, Uecker said he just did what he always did.

The film grossed $49.8 million on an $11 million budget. It spawned two sequels, neither of which matched the original. But its lasting significance was in Cleveland. The real Indians were terrible throughout the 1980s, and the film's central joke, that the team was so bad it could only be explained by a conspiracy, resonated with a fan base that had been suffering for decades.

When the real Indians finally became competitive in the mid-1990s, making the World Series in 1995 and 1997, fans adopted elements of the film as rallying cries. The team held a "Ricky Vaughn Night." The song "Wild Thing," Vaughn's entrance music in the film (a cover by the band X of the Troggs' original), became a genuine stadium anthem. Ward had intended Major League as a comedy about a fictional team. It became, for a generation of Cleveland fans, the story they told themselves about their real one.