The Sandlot and the Summer That Wasn't

David Mickey Evans sold the screenplay for Radio Flyer to Columbia Pictures in 1989 for $1.25 million. He was 27 years old, and the deal was supposed to launch his career as a director. About 10 days into production, the studio fired him. Richard Donner, who directed Superman and Lethal Weapon, took over and told Evans afterward, "Everyone gets a second chance in Hollywood, but nobody gets a third chance." Radio Flyer cost $35 million to make and earned $4.6 million at the box office. Evans kept the writing credit and nothing else.

Evans needed something clean, something he could control, something small enough that a studio would let a fired director try again. Driving home on the 405 one afternoon, he thought about his little brother Scott, and the day the neighborhood bullies sent Scott over a backyard fence to retrieve a baseball. A dog named Hercules was waiting on the other side. It bit Scott's leg badly enough to require stitches. "That's a movie," Evans thought. "Just a kid, going over a fence to get a baseball and there's a big bad dog back there. Sometimes that's all you need."

The Childhood He Wished He'd Had

Evans was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in 1962. His mother moved him and Scott to the San Fernando Valley when Evans was about five. They were poor, white, and new to a neighborhood that didn't want them, and the older kids on the block beat them up and refused to let them play baseball. Evans and his brother spent their childhood on the outside looking in.

The script he wrote, originally titled The Boys of Summer, took that rejection and inverted it. In Evans' version, the new kid gets welcomed. The neighborhood bullies are a rival Little League team across town, not the kids on your own block. The dog is still terrifying, but it turns out to be friendly. The old man behind the fence isn't a threat; he's a former ballplayer with stories to tell and a signed baseball worth more than any of them understand.

"It wasn't the way my childhood was," Evans told the Times Leader in 2018. "It was the way I wish my childhood was, the way it should have been."

The title needed to change because Roger Kahn's 1972 book about the Brooklyn Dodgers was already called The Boys of Summer, and Kahn's representatives made clear they'd sue. Evans renamed it The Sandlot.

The Production

Evans and co-writer Robert Gunter sold the script, and 20th Century Fox gave them $7 million and the director's chair. Evans chose to shoot in Utah for the tax incentives, filming in Midvale, Salt Lake City, and Ogden during the summer of 1992 even though the movie is set in the San Fernando Valley in 1962.

The original script was written for nine and 10 year olds. Evans cast kids that age, brought them into a rehearsal room together, and realized immediately that they were too young. He recast with 12 and 13 year olds, which gave the film its particular energy, kids old enough to have distinct personalities but young enough that the world still felt enormous.

The casting process reshuffled the roles repeatedly. Chauncey Leopardi originally read for Yeah-Yeah and was upset when Evans asked him to read for Squints instead. Marty York originally read for Bertram. Grant Gelt read for Smalls. Evans kept moving actors around until the personalities fit. Tom Guiry, who was 11 at the time, went through six rounds of auditions before landing the lead as Scotty Smalls. Mike Vitar, a kid from Los Angeles with no professional acting experience, got Benny Rodriguez.

The line that would follow the film forever, "You're killing me, Smalls!" was written by Gunter. Evans said he fell out of his chair laughing when Gunter put it in the script. Patrick Renna, who played Ham, needed coaching on the inflection and nine takes to get a usable version because the other kids kept breaking up every time he said it.

Denis Leary played Smalls' stepfather, a role far quieter than anything he was known for. Karen Allen, who played Marion Ravenwood in Raiders of the Lost Ark, played Smalls' mother. James Earl Jones played Mr. Mertle, the blind former ballplayer who lives behind the fence with the dog.

Jones previously appeared in one of the great baseball films, playing the reclusive author Terence Mann in Field of Dreams in 1989. The summer The Sandlot was released, Jones performed a spoken word version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" at the All-Star Game in Baltimore. Between Field of Dreams, The Sandlot, and his Tony-winning turn as Troy Maxson in August Wilson's Fences on Broadway in 1987, Jones became the most prominent actor in baseball cinema despite never having played the sport himself.

The adult Benny Rodriguez in the film's final scene was played by Mike Vitar's older brother Pablo, who was a police officer in real life. Pablo died of colon cancer in 2008 at the age of 41.

The Part the Film Chose Not to Say

Mr. Mertle tells the boys he used to play with Babe Ruth, that he would have broken all of Ruth's records if a pitch hadn't taken his sight. The film shows a photograph of Mertle with his arm around the Babe (Evans' crew superimposed Jones' head onto Jimmie Foxx's body for the shot). Mertle gives the boys a baseball signed by the 1927 Yankees' Murderers' Row lineup, one of the most valuable objects in the history of the sport if it existed.

Any viewer with a basic knowledge of baseball history would recognize what the film leaves unsaid. A black man playing alongside Babe Ruth in the 1920s and 1930s would have been playing on barnstorming teams, not in the major leagues. Mr. Mertle is a Negro Leagues player, and the film lets that fact pass without comment, without mentioning segregation, without asking why a man that talented ended up living alone in a house on the edge of a sandlot instead of in the Hall of Fame. The movie is narrated by an adult Smalls looking back through the soft focus of nostalgia, and it treats the past the way nostalgia always does, by leaving out the parts that complicate the feeling.

Whether that's a flaw or a deliberate choice depends on what you think the movie is trying to do. Evans wrote a children's film about a lost baseball and a scary dog, not a meditation on race in America. But James Earl Jones spent a career playing black men whose baseball talent ran into the wall of segregation, from Leon Carter in The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars in 1976 to Troy Maxson in Fences. His presence in The Sandlot carries that history whether the script acknowledges it or not.

The Box Office and the VHS Tape

The Sandlot opened on April 7, 1993, and earned roughly $34 million at the domestic box office against its $7 million budget. The reviews were decent but not overwhelming; Rotten Tomatoes currently shows a 66% critics score. By Hollywood standards it was a midlevel hit, the kind of movie that gets a modest theatrical run and fades from memory. But The Sandlot went to VHS and cable and became something the theatrical run never suggested it could be, a generational touchstone. Estimated worldwide VHS and DVD sales reached $76 million. It became a sleepover movie, a movie for sick days, a movie that parents put on for their kids and then watched the whole thing themselves. Cable networks ran it constantly throughout the late 1990s and into the 2000s. "You're killing me, Smalls" entered the language so completely that people who've never seen the film use the phrase. Target and Forever 21 were still selling Sandlot merchandise to customers who weren't alive when the movie came out.

A former classmate of Evans named Michael Polydoros sued 20th Century Fox in 1998, claiming the character Michael "Squints" Palledorous was based on him and caused him embarrassment. Two sequels went straight to video, The Sandlot 2 in 2005 and The Sandlot: Heading Home in 2007. Evans directed the second film, and Jones returned as Mr. Mertle. Neither sequel found anything close to the original's audience. A Disney+ sequel series that would have reunited the original cast was in development before being cancelled during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes.

Why It Survived

The Sandlot uses baseball the way Stand by Me uses a dead body, as the excuse for the movie's real subject, which is the feeling of belonging somewhere for the first time and knowing, even as it's happening, that it won't last. The narration by adult Smalls gives the entire film the quality of a memory being polished in the retelling. The kids play pickup ball on an empty field with no coaches, no parents in the bleachers, and no league standings. There's just a diamond, a single taped up baseball, and the agreement that everyone shows up tomorrow.

Evans wrote the movie about the childhood he never had, for the brother who went over the fence and got bitten, and for every kid who stood at the edge of a sandlot waiting to be invited to play. That the film found its real audience not in theaters but on living room floors, watched by kids sprawled on carpet with the VHS rewinding to the pool scene for the third time, is probably exactly where it belonged.