Major League II picks up the year following the original movie. After winning their divisional title, the Cleveland Indians went into the playoffs and were promptly swept out of it by the Chicago White Sox. When we pick up at spring training, we immediately get the sense there’s something different about the ragtag crew that came out of nowhere to win the division and put the clamps on owner Rachel Phelps’s plans to move them to Florida. Roger Dorn, the aging star from the first Major League, has retired and bought the team from Phelps. But now that the Indians have been successful, all of the talentless characters from last year have decided they have to begin living the high life. There are some new faces on the squad: Jack Parkman, a slugging catcher who believes he’s the only winner on a team full of losers; Isuro “Kamikaze” Tanaka, a sensation from Japan; and rookie catcher Rube Baker, who has the ability to throw left in spite of aiming right.

Problems begin to abound with clashing egos, though. Willie Mays Hayes made a movie in the offseason, performing all his own stunts (and even doing some of his own acting) and spraining his knee in the process. He also has an entourage now. Pedro Cerrano underwent one of his trademark spiritual conversions, going from an aggressive form of Vodun (Voodoo) to Buddhism, and Buddhism, being more inner-peace-and-meditation based, is affecting his drive. Probably the most drastic change is by Ricky “Wild Thing” Vaughn, whose shoulder chip is now lifted, which is bad because he’s now a yuppie more concerned about his image and marketing potential than anything.

Since Charlie Sheen was nearing the end of what was ultimately the apex of his star potential by the release of Major League II, the movie is more centered around Vaughn than anyone. (While on the subject of big stars, Wesley Snipes, who had played Willie Mays Hayes in the original, was replaced by Omar Epps, Snipes having also become an A-list star.) Vaughn has a new girlfriend, Rebecca Flannery, who is high-class and concerned about her boyfriend/client’s PR. He’s ditched the Harley for a convertible, much to the disappointment of his old crew.

Major League II follows the same formula as the first movie. The team is bad until it’s suddenly good. In Major League II, the instigator of the turnaround is a big dugout fight and the eventual trade of Jack Parkman to the White Sox. (In this movie, who else would it be?) Even though Roger Dorn bought the team, the movie still creates room to put Rachel Phelps back in charge when Dorn prove to be supremely terrible at managing finances and has to sell them back. Phelps still has designs on the big move to Florida, which is a pretty disappointing development because Dorn’s financial mismanagement could have made a more compelling story and really given Major League II its own identity separate from the first movie.

Jack Parkman stands out as a great villain. Every time he pops up onscreen, you want to grab the nearest bat and take out his kneecaps. Hayes’s ego is at least used for good, but Parkman believes everyone else is a loser and isn’t shy about saying so. Even though Dorn spent a ton of money on him, manager Lou Brown still thinks it necessary to trade him to Chicago because of the clubhouse division he causes. So when Vaughn pitches him out at the end of the movie, it’s satisfying to see him eat his words, and yet also dissatisfying because no one clocked him.

Major League II takes a lot of crap for not being up to the standards of the first one, but since the day I first saw Major League II, I’ve been arguing that it’s actually better. I think the first Major League movie is overrated. Yes, it’s very funny, and there’s definitely a lot of effort obvious in it. The jokes are inspired, the writing is solid, and you can tell the people behind were, as they claim, diehard Indians fans sploshing one of their greatest fantasies all over the screen. But I had two huge issues with it the bogged it down for me: The first was the story of Roger Dorn and Jake Taylor having problems with their girlfriends, and the second was that the climactic scene involved just about every possible cliche from every climactic sports game in every sports movie ever, and it probably invented a few of its own as well. Major League II involves the romantic problems of Ricky Vaughn, but the added dimension of Vaughn creating a new image for himself makes his romantic problems look almost like a last-minute, backseat addition. The climax has also been improved. There’s no way to do the Big Game in sports movies these days without doing cliches, but Major League II has less of them, and the idea of Vaughn regaining his confidence and putting players on base purposely just because he personally wants to take out Parkman was a nice touch.

The storyline of Jake Taylor is also a retread, even if it is in a different form. This time, Taylor is hoping to make the team as a coach to his fellow catchers Parkman and Baker.

Tanaka is probably my favorite new character. I love his chemistry with his main antagonist, Cerrano, and the way they try to get into each other’s heads in order to turn each other into better ballplayers is a real hoot. Tanaka believes a ballplayer needs to be a strong warrior, while Cerrano believes in calmness as the best approach to excellence on the diamond.

The one character in Major League II who didn’t change at all is Lou Brown. He’s still grounded, leading his team with a touch of old-school manager grouchiness. There’s a scene later in the movie where he has a heart attack, which puts him in the hospital. He’s forbidden from doing anything baseball-related because he gets worked up over it, but true to his style, even in the finale he’s got his portable radio and headphones on, listening to the game, living and dying with every pitch. In one scene, one of his players goes to visit him, and he specifically tells the player not to go to the stadium and give one of the “win one for Lou” statements because he hates that. What does the player do? Go to the stadium and encourage everyone to win one for Lou.

The first Major League is considered a genuine classic among sports movies. I can’t say I share that viewpoint, but I understand it. My personal preference is for Major League II, less bogged in cliche and funnier. And it seems like the Cleveland Indians may agree with that. When Major League was released, the Tribe was stinking up the league the same way they had done since the Rocky trade. After Major League II, the Indians began a run as one of the most dominant teams of the American League. Just a year after Major League II, in fact, the fantasy evoked in Major League II became real: The Cleveland Indians were in the World Series.

I really don’t see what the adaptors see in the Nick Hornby book that they just have to keep trying to turn it into a love story. There is a love story in the book, but that love is between poor Hornby and his beloved Premier League team, Arsenal Football Club. The first movie based on Fever Pitch got the soccer part right, but a good chunk of it revolves around a love story. Too bad I can’t review it. The Farrelly brothers take Fever Pitch and make a story between boy and girl the very centerpiece, and the one question readers can think to themselves is, what the hell? There was very little of a boy/girl love story in the book, but there was a wealth of other material which could easily have had a movie created around it. Why try to turn it into a romantic comedy in which the girl basically gets in the way?

Well, okay. Again. That comment IS harsh. Lindsay is a pretty well-developed character, especially for a movie like this. She is a high-powered businesswoman with real concerns about how her boyfriend’s obsession with the Boston Red Sox is going to get in the way of their relationship, and how her relationship overall might affect her career, and even a concern about how the difference in their income brackets could get in the way. Ben is supposed to be the main character – it’s him the narration centers around, him who has the season tickets and overall obsession – but all we see him do through most of the movie is go nuts over the team. Even by the standards of the completely sold out fanatic, Ben is way over the top. Some of his scenes – his “Yankee dance” scene being one and his appearance on ESPN being another – are genuinely funny. But others, like the one where he argues with Lindsay about missing a great comeback game in lieu of going to a party with Lindsay, are just ridiculous. You can tell in some scenes that the Farrellys simply gave up trying to explain him.

The story is simple: Boy, a teacher, takes some of his best students to an office where he meets girl. Boy and girl get together and begin relationship. Summer begins and boy, with a ton of free time on his hands, spends it at Fenway Park watching the Boston Red Sox, who got him through a difficult period in his life. Girl questions relationship amidst his insanity. Boy is forced to choose between girl and team. This being a romantic comedy, I don’t think I’m spoiling anything by saying boy gets to keep both girl and team. Red Sox win World Series, since this movie was released in 2005, after they really had won the World Series.

In the middle of the eventful 2004 Red Sox season are Ben and Lindsay. And, well,… That’s pretty much it. It isn’t like they have an important role in regards to the team’s fate that season. The team, on the other hand, definitely plays a role in theirs. Ben is a huge Red Sox fan, but even though his house is covered in Red Sox memorabilia, he’s able to keep himself in check through the winter. But during the summer, he’s a lean, mean, baseball-lovin’ machine who has gone his whole life since the age of five without ever missing a game.

Lindsay meets Ben during the winter, so except for the memorabilia, she suspects nothing except that Ben is merely an extra-passionate fan. Once the income issue is behind her (read: brushed off to the side like she never had a problem with it), she accepts that she’s found probably the greatest guy on Earth. But her friends think the same, and having had similar experiences in the past, they bring up the idea that Ben has some kind of weird problem. Why is he not off the market yet? Lindsay even lampshades the idea when he tries to go into exacting detail, months into their relationship, about how much he loves the Sox. Ben starts taking her to games, and she eventually decides to stop going to so many games so she can concentrate on earning a promotion.

If Fever Pitch played a romantic comedy from the strict angle of how close can a guy get to his team before it gets in the way, it could have worked. But it also relies on a lot of trite cliches, and it tries to wedge the common plot thread about the woman performing double duty between the man and her dream job, which – since Lindsay is a lot more developed than Ben – tends to make Fever Pitch come off like a romantic comedy about the woman torn between man and work with the baseball team just providing an extra wedge. Fever Pitch would have been a lot more tolerable – despite the cliched, overwrought, and downright silly ending – if it had just taken the baseball route.

The Red Sox only take a central plot role close to the end, when Ben throws a hissy about missing a big game against the Yankees which the Red Sox won with a spectacular ninth-inning comeback. Ben’s explanation for his anger at missing the game is too nonsensical to come off as anything other than an obsessed, angry rant. Then the finale involves Lindsay running across the field at Fenway during a playoff game.

To the movie’s credit, Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore are both lovable as their characters, but they lack chemistry and don’t have the script material to work with. The Farrellys appear to have just wanted to force the story out, something which becomes flat obvious in the final act, when Ben misses the game against the Yankees.

Fever Pitch the book could inspire a mine of decent sports movies, so why people keep getting romantic comedies out of it is beyond me. The American version of Fever Pitch is just bad. The British version at least has a grounding in the original material and is more developed and centered around the main character. If you’re a Red Sox fan, you might be able to find a little bit of redemption in this version of Fever Pitch; for everything wrong about it, you can tell the Farrellys – New England natives themselves – really did try to create a love letter, and their love for their favorite baseball team is genuinely heartfelt. But following your heart’s desire is sometimes a risky proposition which leads to doing some insanely dumb things.

I hated, hated, hated, hated, HATED The Benchwarmers. I mean I really, really (expletive deleted) hated it. I hated it so much that not even the presence of America’s Pastime can be tallied in its favor, especially not considering the good guys are fielding a team of all of three players: The catcher, the pitcher, and the center fielder. Even a cameo by Reggie Jackson can’t do anything to lift this movie above the toilet trash flick that it is!

The Benchwarmers is bad. Yes, I understand it’s supposed to be a spoof. But as a spoof, no one will ever compare it to the Marx Brothers, or the Zucker Brothers, or Mel Brooks. Hell, even comparing it to the pop culture grab-bagging of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer would be comparing it to a high standard it doesn’t deserve! You had to know this kind of crap could roll out of the Happy Madison studio and involve the insufferable Nick Swardson as a writer and a star.

Rob Schneider is one of the marquee stars of The Benchwarmers, and – to paraphrase a review of another movie – the more I see of his starring roles, the less I think of Schneider as an actor and the more I look at him like a social experiment. How much can the general public take before we boot the guy from public consciousness? Jon Heder and David Spade – who can’t even come off as funny anymore – are the other two main stars of The Benchwarmers. Jon Lovitz is the movie’s major co-star, playing a kind of good-hearted slimeball. He’s about the only character in The Benchwarmers who didn’t offend me to the very core of my being, but to the movie’s discredit that isn’t for a lack of trying.

Throughout the course of the movie, I do not believe there is a single bodily excretion that isn’t played in the name of “comedy.” There are gas jokes, some of which are in the worst, more possibly vile taste. There is a vomit joke, and another joke which involves a disabled man eating a tube of sunblock. One of the main characters perpetually wears a skateboarding helmet and pads for absolutely no reason. And oh yeah, there’s a character in the movie named Howie who is disabled, with a horrendous wig and a voice played all for laughs. At least I never heard the word “retard,” but then again, I was watching the edited-for-television version showing on FX.

The plot revolves around a trio of people who were unpopular as kids: Gus, Clark, and Richie. One day they chase off a gang of bullies who were pushing around a young kid, Nelson, on a baseball diamond. Soon after, on the field themselves getting a feel back for baseball, they challenge the bullies to a baseball game and win. A few days later, one of the bullies challenges the three of them to a baseball game again, this time with the backing of his team, and the three of them win again.

Nelson’s father, Mel, is impressed with the trio’s wins. He’s also one of those poor nerds who everyone made fun of when he was a kid… And who grew up to become a billionaire! He dreamed up this idea for a tournament, and the winners will be granted access to a multimillion dollar stadium he’s building. So Clark, Gus, and Richie form their official team, the Benchwarmers, and enter the tournament.

Everyone in The Benchwarmers is either a complete moron or an unrepentant prick. In a few cases, they’re both. Writers Swardson and Allen Covert are apparently of that comedy breed who think inexplicable naivety, left-field visual gags (like Clark’s helmet) and no-holds-barred toilet humor are funny. Calling The Benchwarmers a lowest common denominator comedy is giving it too much credit. The lowest common denominator can treat The Benchwarmers like a cockroach. Swardson plays the disabled Howie with an annoying lisp, and watching the way his character works, I couldn’t help but think of Robert Downey and Ben Stiller’s famous “Full Retard” scene from Tropic Thunder. Although Swardson isn’t going for the Magical Retard trope that’s become so annoyingly common in movies with disabled people, Howie is offensive because he manages to combine a decently working mind with a misunderstanding of his surroundings. The result looks like a character who looks like he could understand the world, but isn’t making the effort to try.

There is a jarring hypocrisy in the existence of Howie. One of the precious few good things I can say about The Benchwarmers is that it beats a strong anti-bullying message into your head. But in Howie, the movie is mocking mentally disabled people. The movie is also especially mean-spirited toward Nelson, and to people in general who identify as nerds. Apparently no one sent Covert, Swardson, and director Dennis Dugan that this isn’t the 1980′s anymore, and the online globalization of the world has effectively destroyed the trope of the nerd, at least in the more generalized, negative ways. Yet The Benchwarmers, despite its anti-bullying theme, is heavily reliant on poking fun at just about every aspect of the nerd kids you would frequently find in teen movies and shows from the 80′s.

Mel mentions in passing the his son seems to be extremely prone to, er… Gas attacks. Do ideas and dialogue like that sound like fun? Rob Schneider isn’t known for either comedic or populist sensibilities. (Except for The Hot Chick, which in all honesty was actually very funny.) Schneider once wrote an ill-advised letter to Los Angeles Times critic Patrick Goldstein, mocking Goldstein for never winning a Pulitzer Prize, after Goldstein insulted his movie Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo. Schneider’s letter was not just ill-advised, but ill-researched as Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert took the letter and ran with it, listing the prizes Goldstein won, and using his own Pulitzer Prize as a launching point to one of the greatest critical comeback insults ever written. I wish I could do the same to tell Schneider (as well as Covert and Swardson who, let’s face it, are far more culpable in this case than him) that his movie sucks. But as I’ve never won a Pulitzer, I don’t feel qualified, so I’ll just quote Reggie Jackson: “I can’t stand this stuff. Drives me crazy!”

-First of all, I don’t try to show any bias toward books about the Yankees. It’s not because the Yankees are my favorite team and I’m trying to rub it in. In fact, I go out of my way to track down lesser-known books about small teams. I mean, I know the history of the Yankees, and reading it from angle after angle after endless, endless angle gets boring after awhile. I’m bored and don’t want to read about them all the damn time!

-My heartfelt congratulations to the St. Louis Cardinals fans and their incredible team. Watching them in the postseason and their fast, exciting style of strategic small ball reminded me of why they’re one of my favorite National League teams. They may have been out of it in August, but don’t let any detractors say the Cardinals didn’t deserve that title. They fought back hard, climbed back into the race, and defeated maybe the three best teams in MLB. It’s character like that that makes me wish I could be a full-time Cardinals fan.

-As for the losers, well, last year they really accomplished something. I couldn’t help but feel bad when they lost the World Series. This year, though, I’m just laughing my fool head right off. They lost two World Series in a row, and now all those Dallas sports fans who made fun of the Buffalo Bills are getting a taste of what it’s like. That and after taking into account some baffling strategic blunders by Ron Washington, I lost any feeling the Rangers deserved it. The icing on the cake would have been to watch them get beat by the New York Mets.

-You knew Tony La Russa wouldn’t be around much longer. He went out in a way most managers only dream of.

-I know Theo Epstein is running the Cubbies now And Albert Pujols is a free agent, but how dumb can newspaper speculation get? The go-to mathematical formula for the fate of Pujols has somehow taken on this look:
Epstein + Cubs = Pujols joining the Cubs
How do you figure? This is a perfect example of people getting caught up in groundless speculation caused by the media not having, you know, a real story. It’s like how everyone last year flogged the Yankees for not getting Cliff Lee when Lee had already stated in plain, clear English that he had no desire to go to the Yankees! Believe it or not, some people are motivated by factors other than money!

-Ozzie Guillen isn’t going to look right in anything other than a White Sox uniform. He’s one of the reasons I identify so closely with the team and cling to them as a part of Chicago from when I was living there.

-Due to my aforementioned lack of library access, you’ll be seeing many more movie reviews and commentaries on other writing. I’ll still write about books, of course, it’s just that the frequency of the other things will increase while my book review frequency will be slightly down. It will only be until I’m back on my feet. There’s no way I’m going to stop writing Lit Bases because people are starting to really take notice of it, and besides, I’m not going to stop watching or reading about baseball.

-My presence as a writer on the internet first came to prominence about seven years ago when I was invited to write about video games for the now-defunct independent website Netjak. Video games are one of the primary things people close to me identify me with, and so between Lit Bases articles, I’m writing an autobiography with video games as the focal point. Kinda like Fever Pitch, but with video games.

Moneyball is an underdog story, but a very different kind of animal in the underdog trope. The Oakland Athletics are a team now known for their lack of convention and disregard for what’s considered standard and normal, and in this way it makes perfect sense that Moneyball is about them. If Moneyball were a fictional story, it would still revolve around the Athletics because no one would buy into the Yankees, Cubs, or Braves being underfunded small-market underdogs. As Brad Pitt playing Billy Beane says, “Here’s the real problem: There are rich teams, and there are poor teams. Then there’s 50 feet of crap. And then there’s us.” Moneyball is the story of how the Athletics bucked the traditional system and won as many games as the New York Yankees on a budget which might pay for half an arm of Alex Rodriguez.

In his review of this movie, Roger Ebert wrote that the real main character in Moneyball is the idea. This is true, but where I disagree with Ebert is in his insistence that the idea is the main character in the movie. The idea was definitely the main character in the book, which is considered one of the sport’s classic pieces of literature. But the problem with using an idea as a main character is that it can go out in so many different ways, none of which will necessarily be taken to their natural conclusions. I read the book and found it to be inconsistent about its subject matter and too prone to jumping around to the point where author Michael Lewis seemed confused himself. He tries to do a million different things in Moneyball and so he ended up doing nothing.

This is the challenge of adapting a book such as Moneyball. Fortunately, Aaron Sorkin was one of the screenwriters, and so the movie does something traditional thinking would deem impossible: It takes an idea – a mathematics-based idea, no less – and creates a small group of fully human vessels to convey it through. Billy Beane was a once-promising draft prospect with the New York Mets who got up to The Show and blew it. We are given a series of brief flashbacks in Moneyball to give the tale. Unlike most other ballplayers who try to weather out their careers, Beane eventually accepts the fact that his baseball career will never amount to a Cooperstown resume, and so one day during his stint with the Oakland Athletics, he goes to the front office and asks for a job as a scout. The team owner is suprised by the request but complies. Honestly, I didn’t like the flashbacks. They do explain why Billy seems so morose at times, but his divorce could have done that job just as well.

Anyway, after a long time as a scout, Beane lands in the General Manager’s seat. It’s the 2001 ALDS the first time we see Beane, in the deciding fifth game against the Yankees. Oakland loses, and their three big guns, Jason Giambi, Johnny Damon, and Jason Isringhausen, are of course off to free agency and big bucks. Beane needs a monetary break to replace that kind of talent which the front office just doesn’t have. One day while he’s in Cleveland trying to work out a trade, he meets Peter Brand and is impressed when the Tribe’s GM takes his advice. He flags Peter down and picks his brain, trying to learn what make’s Brand’s baseball side tick. Peter, who is ostracized in Cleveland for his unconventional team-building views, finds his niche in Oakland, where he is exactly the kind of radical thinker Beane needs.

The relationship between Beane and Brand is the real crux of the movie. In humanizing an idea based on a subject few people understand, we come to learn a lot of essential character details about them both. Beane and Brand are played by Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill respectively, turning Moneyball into an odd variation of the buddy movie. They bounce off each other and are one of the better duos to pop up onscreen in recent years. Beane playfully teases Brand a lot, but even at his worst he’s still respectful of Brand’s ideas because he knows Oakland’s turnaround sits inside the supercomputer brain of his math-loving, Yale grad new Assistant GM.

The Athletics go from worst to first, as do so all underfunded, talentless teams from sports movies. In this respect, Moneyball is both definition and subversion of that particular storytelling trope: The Athletics have no funding or talent, and are just this odd bunch of folks who learn to come together as a team and surprise the entire league. But the only focus on the players is strictly on their presence as components of a bigger whole and not on their cute little quirks. It’s the GM duo who have to convince everyone on the planet that their team can play well, most of all manager Art Howe, who refuses to play the players Billy suggests. When Oakland is sent home from the ALDS again, Billy feels it hard because he knows idiots like Joe Morgan are going to denounces him as a fluke, while a World Series win would get everyone to acknowledge the change he brought to baseball.

There’s a certain somberness to Moneyball, probably because it’s so grounded in Billy’s failures as a ballplayer and his divorce. We do have to put up with a handful of slow, boring scenes which don’t really include a whole lot of the main story. But even so, Moneyball is easily the best baseball movie of the last 20 years. If it weren’t for a couple of technical issues, it would have dethroned Eight Men Out as my favorite baseball movie. Moneyball is an outstanding drama which shows us statistics in a humanized form. You can only hope Billy Beane will win the World Series after seeing it. Hey, other teams are doing well on his ideas.

Judging strictly on the reputation of Juiced, I can say that Vindicated is part epilogue to everything Canseco said in that book and part middle finger extended to all the journalist hacks who tried to write it off. It’s a rub-in, a big I-told-you-so to the people who tried their hardest to keep their heads buried in the sand, oblivious for the sake of keeping the Great Keepers of America’s Pastime deified. And you know what? Canseco has every right to say it. No one wanted to listen to him, but Uncle Sam landed on his side and now we don’t have a choice. Jose Canseco takes some great satisfaction in telling us off, and he’s earned the right to say it all.

Vindicated is an angry rant disguised as the story of what happened to Canseco after the publication of Juiced. Juiced is basically the focal point of Vindicated. Canseco writes about what he had to put up with and the things he did, including lie detector tests, to prove that he was telling the truth. He even covers the notorious incident in which he offered to keep Magglio Ordonez’s name out of the book in exchange for something, going as far as to take a lie detector test for that too, and placing every question he was asked during every lie detector test into Vindicated.

Jose Canseco writes Vindicated with a huge chip on his shoulder, and that’s apparent even from the first chapter when he writes about the hacking of Roger Clemens’s name from Juiced. Disrespect is the recurring theme of Vindicated. Throughout the book, Canseco reiterates the fact that although the media and baseball tried to write him off, the fans loved him for writing Juiced. He also mentions fairly frequently that he wrote Juiced in order to get back at baseball for blacklisting him. Again, he has every right to do that because Juiced caused more controversy within the mighty halls of the reigning gods of Major League Baseball. But the fact that Canseco was blacklisted doesn’t need to be constantly mentioned. It’s more of a public secret than anything. People who follow baseball, whether they love or hate Jose Canseco, already know MLB forced him into retirement by blacklist. The same thing happened to Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens. If there are people who couldn’t figure it out then, you bet your ass they figured it out when Canseco was voted down by the Cooperstown committee.

Speaking of Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, Canseco is notorious for his almost rabidly promotional views on steroids. That’s one of the few sections of Juiced that I did read. So it was a little surprising to find him taking such a repentant stance toward them in Vindicated. He acknowledges what he wrote in Juiced, saying that it may be that maturity got to him, and directly takes back what he said earlier. He doesn’t come off as completely anti-steroid, but he does say that he wouldn’t take steroids if he could do it all over again. He also brings up his days as the Godfather of Steroids, although he doesn’t write at length about it.

Surprised I was again at the way Canseco writes about baseball itself. The final chapter of Vindicated, in fact, is a rave about how much he loves baseball and why. It does a lot to remind people who may hate Canseco that he, like most people, got into baseball because he loves it. It’s Jose Canseco being sentimental, a mode of him we’re not used to seeing, and he writes about his joining a Sunday league and a minor league just for fun after his time in Major League Baseball is over. Even when he writes about steroids, you can tell he has a deep love for the game and the way it feels to hit a home run. And when he writes about hitting home runs, he always mentions that he bulked up to be a home run hitter because the fans love home runs.

That’s really all there is to say. Canseco writes in a very breezy, easy-to-read fashion with a matter-of-fact tone. Otherwise, Vindicated is a fun little story to read on a short airplane flight. It lacks meaningful substance, but it isn’t bad. In order to get anything out of Vindicated, it would probably help if you look at it like an epilogue to Juiced. Of course, having not read Juiced, I’m not in a position to say that for sure.

Back to the Minors does everything it can to broaden the audience for the first two movies. That sentence is read: They tried to make it family friendly. There are a couple of obscene words in the movie, and the manager of the parent club, the Minnesota Twins, has a cocaine habit. Okay, actually no one ever says or even lightly implies that Twins manager Leonard Huff has a cocaine habit. It is just a conclusion I deciphered completely independently, on my very own, from simply knowing what I know about the effects of cocaine and watching the skittish, manic performance of Ted McGinley, who plays Huff. Other than that, Back to the Minors smoothes out the rougher edges of minor league baseball, a grave mistake that the first two Major League movies both avoided. At least there isn’t a romantic subplot and/or a kid in Back to the Minors.

The back of the DVD package trumpets the returns of five series stalwarts, but that’s only five who appeared before out of, well, a lot. Roger Dorn, Pedro Cerrano, Taka Tanaka, Rube Baker, and Harry Doyle were the ones from the previous installments. The missing characters are felt: Ricky “Wild Thing” Vaughn, Willie Mays Hayes, Rachel Phelps, Jack Parkman, and Lou Brown are all nowhere to be found. Now we have a pitcher named Hog Ellis, a power hitter named Bliiy “Downtown” Anderson, a former ballet dancer named Lance Pere, and an aging outfielder-turned-first baseman named Frank “Pops” Morgan. Gluing it all together is a career minor leaguer named Sean Archer. Actually his name is Gus Cantrell, but he’s played by Scott Bakula, who will forever in my mind be associated with the captain in the world’s most regrettable Star Trek series, which forever brands him as Sean Archer.

Back to the Minors clearly takes place in the original Major League canon, but it also pretends the previous installments never existed. Tanaka, Dorn, Cerrano, and Baker all appear to have some kind of past with Cantrell which is never mentioned. Doyle was apparently demoted. And the Cleveland Indians, the team from the first two Major League movies, were apparently moved overnight to Minnesota and renamed the Twins. Oh, wait… Apparently the Cleveland Indians and Minnesota Twins exist together as independent entities. My bad. So we have an entire player network which was lifted and moved from one team to another without any explanation whatsoever. This isn’t addressed; the players are all in Minnesota’s system now, the Tribe is never mentioned, and the players who know each other forget everything that happened before Back to the Minors took place. Okay, I’ll work with that. But it’s strange that a movie which came out in 2000 would choose the Twins over the Indians. The first Major League movie was a grandiose daydream written by a diehard, tortured Tribe fan (that’s mentioned in the making-of documentary on the DVD) in 1989 when the Cleveland Indians were in one of the many nadirs they dropped into. By the time Back to the Minors came out, the Indians were beginning the last leg of a multiyear run as one of the most feared teams in the American League, which culminated in two Pennants.

Bull Durham got a portrayal of minor league baseball right because it was written strictly with a councilling of a player in mind. The managers cared about the team probably because they were always worried about their jobs. The players only cared about getting called up to The Show. Back to the Minors is your typical worst-to-first story about a sucky team that gets a new manager and begins to dominate the league with a gaggle of lovable goofballs and a little bit of teamwork.

Strange again, though, that the Buzz never get to play an actual championship. Major League: Back to the Minors is here strictly to embarrass fans of the Twins, it seems. The real championship in Back to the Minors is a game at Buzz Stadium against the Buzz’s parent club from Minneapolis. This game, by the way,is taking place strictly because Minnesota’s skittish manager had the Metrodome lights cut at the very last second of an earlier game against the Buzz which he was about to lose. Basically the second half of the movie is a redux of the first half of the movie because had they just used the first half, the whole thing would have ended well short of feature length.

Back to the Minors, to its credit, captures the quirks so revered in minor league baseball. But that’s all they are. These aren’t quirks developing naturally out of the characters. They’re in the movie to be the defining traits of everyone while Gus walks around being a good old boy. Cerrano is still into his faith, Huff is some kind of arrogant speed demon lacking self-control, Lance eventually leads the Buzz through ballet training, and Tanaka is trying to find peace of brain. Harry Doyle, played by the great, funny, witty quip artist Bob Ueker, is up in the booth again.

The jokes really aren’t that funny. Gus is first seen throwing a frozen ball, which is amusing, but there is a family atmosphere dominating the movie and so the raunchiness and vulgarity which made the first two Major League movies so much fun aren’t anywhere. Ueker, playing Doyle, seems to be the only one trying to rescue the mediocre comedy. He reads his lines with verve and spirit, but also an intensity which is suggestive of the fact that he sweating through the movie knowing how awful it is. Doyle’s comments in this movie aren’t really funny, but a lot of his actions are just mean-spirited, and so Doyle just isn’t very likable.

One of the few other credits I want to hand out to Major League: Back to the Minors is that it’s so far the only Major League movie which doesn’t get bogged down in a main character love story. Gus has a nice, beautiful dame on his arm named Maggie, but her standby role is done straight. There’s no implications of leering, cheating, or relationship problems that affect the way Gus manages the Buzz. In fact, she gives him occasional good advice, which he sometimes takes, and so she would be his grounding agent if he had any issues which needed grounding. The movie doesn’t get caught up in any issues between them, and the closest they come to a fight is when Gus punches out Huff at a dinner in Minneapolis.

People, I never was fond of the Major League movies. The first two are grossly overrated. Now, they both have funny jokes, are well-made, and have great heart and effort put into them. My problem is they ultimately get dragged down too much in cliches, especially the first one. But Major League: Back to the Minors is more like an exclamation point at the end. It’s the kind of dumb exclamation that results in facepalms.

The scenario isn’t COMPLETELY arbitrary, at least. Billy’s grandfather, Thomas, owned the team and wrote in his will that, because Billy loves baseball and the Twins so much, he should be the one to inherit the team when he passes. The idea of Billy being a minor is addressed; the will had apparently been written some years before, and Thomas specifies that if Billy is still too young when he dies, then his aides should help him run the team until he’s old enough to do it himself. The part about the aides is only mentioned in passing – kind of like Billy’s father, because this is a 90′s movie and all precocious kids in 90′s movies are legally obligated to have widowed mothers who only address their fathers in throwaway one-liners – but it helps to create a teensy bit of plausibility.

Yeah, Little Big League is one of those movies. The kid does something big, loses sight of who he is and everything else in his life, and learns a Lesson. Capital L.

To be honest, I was pretty surprised by Little Big League. Lord knows I’m not going to run around breathlessly comparing it to Citizen Kane, but as a family film that is guilty of smoothing over the rougher edges of the baseball jock, it’s actually pretty inspired. Several of the jokes were original and funny; there was one I especially liked where Billy tries to relax his team before a big game by confusing the players with a difficult math question which is quickly solved by one of the team’s star players.

It’s tough to find a lot to say about Little Big League other than that, because I feel like I just reviewed it when I posted my Rookie of the Year write-up. The two movies are very similar, and they follow basically the same story arc. Rookie of the Year was about a kid who went to play for the Chicago Cubs, learned that being a professional ballplayer was tearing a rift in his personal life, and decided to stay away from more professional baseball until he was older and more prepared to shoulder the lifestyle. Little Big League is about a kid who owns the Minnesota Twins and changes because of the demanding schedule he gets saddled with upon taking the managerial reins. Yes, he takes over as manager too, after having a nasty argument with the team’s current manager and firing him. His reason for firing him? The guy was just too nasty, and Billy didn’t like that.

The managerial thing isn’t just something that happens to expand the length of the movie, either. It’s the plot. Forget owning the team, it’s the management of the team which is the crux of Little Big League’s story. Most of the movie is little Billy pulling his duty as a manager, with a little bit of ownership taking a backseat. The way he changes through the movie revolves entirely around his managerial duties. First, he takes over the team because no other manager they talked to was qualified. The team of course has reservations about playing for a wide-eyed kid who still looks up to ballplayers as demigods, so Billy sweetens up the deal by saying he’ll step down if the team isn’t in divisional contention within a few weeks. He bases his philosophy on the idea that hey, you guys get to play a game for a living! Baseball should always be fun!

The team loosens up and lo! After a few weeks, they’re suddenly in divisional contention! (Who knew?!) But Billy changes once he’s forced to send his all-time favorite player down to the minors. The player chews him out for that, and Billy turns a whole lot darker. While there does seem to be a dark cloud following him through many of these scenes, they do sometimes make for great comedy – Billy’s ESPN interview with Chris Berman is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in a baseball movie. It would have fit right into Bull Durham, if Bull Durham made space for little kids. It’s up to Billy to rediscover what made playing baseball so much fun in the first place.

Little Big League, given the nature of the family-friendly genre, can be extremely cheesy at times, like when Billy rediscovers his love of baseball in a pick-up game in Chicago. Fortunately, the cheese in this movie is at least original, though that doesn’t go a long way toward making it more bearable. It IS a kids’ Lesson movie, after all, so that arc has to be in there.

The locker room hijinks add a little bit of flair to the movie, but the players are all characters you’ve seen in this genre and know pretty well. There are plenty of cameos in Little Big League that fans would love, although they all occur during games. And one of the cliches, of course, has to fall head over heels for Billy’s mother. That’s another one of those 90′s movie laws. I liked Jonathan Silverman’s character, though, and his solving of the math problem Billy asks to the locker room is one of the more priceless scenes in this movie. Of course, this being a family flick, we’re spared the more off-color (read: funny) antics of regular players. I’ve lamented before that baseball is at its memorable best when all pretense of All-American wholesomeness is removed and we’re allowed to sit back and enjoy the jock jokes in all their glorious vulgarity. Having a kid around all the time tends to rob us all of that.

Maybe the reason Little Big League is so funny to me is because I watched it with such low expectations. As I said, we know this genre, its recycled jokes, and general aversion to offending people for want of being as inoffensive as possible. Little Big League is guilty of all of those crimes, but is guilty of them in a funny, clever way. I’m sorry. I’ll try to redeem myself next time.

It’s more or less a direct parody of Rookie of the Year, which is about a ten-year-old kid who breaks his arm, feels it repair funny, and is equipped with a 100 mph fastball which he uses to get signed by the Chicago Cubs and lead them to World Series glory. Seriously. Yes, there’s a big deal made among baseball fanatics about how the final game revolved around the Cubs winning the division title, but there’s also a very clear shot of a World Series ring sitting on the finger of main character Henry Rowengartner at the end. The Futurama episode was much better.

Movies about precocious kids were everywhere in the 1990′s. Free Willy, Air Bud, Jungle 2 Jungle, and a whole host of other movies made by people who didn’t seem to understand that kids fantasize about being courageous, heroic adults like Luke Skywalker or Indiana Jones. I guess in a sense, Rookie of the Year does understand the mindset of children: Henry is a little kid living his dream of playing for the Cubs. In the clubhouse, he is awed by seeing his heroes up close and personal, and can’t believe he’ll be playing alongside them. But Rookie of the Year is a Kids’ Message Movie, so we have to quickly be snapped back to reality by the fact that the other players don’t like him and the fact that his newfound fame is taking a ton of time away from his friends.

Rookie of the Year takes on a mighty attempt at suspension of disbelief in order to justify the signing: The Chicago Cubs are in financial trouble and must sell out literally every game that season. In real life, this would be one of those “Come ON!!!” pronouncements, in which the team owner pats you on the back and goes “You’re allllrrrriiiiiiiiggghhhhttt!!!” Cubs fans are an optimistic and sunny bunch; when the team is doing well, they don’t believe in feeling the doom and gloom around every corner; when they’re not doing well – which is more often the case – the fans revel in the beauty of baseball and the electric atmosphere of Wrigleyville.

As the Cubs lament their financial situation, young Henry Rowengartner breaks his arm. It heals with extra-tight joints or some such, as Henry learns when he engages in the opponent-home-run-return ritual which is such a sacred rite at Wrigley Field. He unleashes the most blistering fastball ever seen, is caught by the team owner, and signed as a reliever. To be fair to the movie, it is never really implied that Henry becomes the great team leader or even its great rallying player, but the Cubs’ fortunes do change pretty quickly once he’s in Cubbie blue. The movie is about Henry, his dream of playing for the Cubs, and how being a star interrupts the other aspects of his everyday life. It’s not a rally-the-troops movie or a tame-the-wildmen-and-make-lots-of-friends-among-them movie. Unfortunately, it does contain one of those damned lessons, as is the wont in kids’ flicks.

John Candy plays the blowhard radio announcer, and that’s to the movie’s credit. Candy was always good at roles like that. But one of the movie’s anchoring jokes is the proper pronunciation of Henry’s last name. The team manager is constantly saying it wrong, so much that when he gets it right during the climax, Henry lampshades it by saying “What did he call me?” Rookie of the Year also leans on Daniel Stern, who plays a bouncing ball of caffeine. Actually he plays the pitching coach, a guy so out there he makes Bill Lee look stuck in the lower depth of the Earth’s mantle by comparison. Stern’s lively, energetic, and entertaining performance is another one of Rookie of the Year’s better qualities, but his character is just so annoying that Stern’s talent does more to put a point on his annoyance than alleviate it.

Henry’s personal story is one you know pretty well: He lives with his mother. His father is given a throwaway line about just what happened to him and never mentioned again. She’s dating this hotshot business jerk who, when Henry becomes the new sensation of Chicago, milks Henry’s name and image for everything it’s worth. (He even tries to trade Henry to New York without his mother’s permission.) When Henry is with the Cubs, he finds a mentor in his favorite player, Chet “Rocket” Steadman, who helps show Henry the ways of the big leagues and falls in love with his mother.

The problem with so many family films is that they so rarely bother to take chances. The definition of family has become so narrow that producers out for a quick buck have a grab bag full of go-to jokes they use whenever they’re running out of steam – which, given said narrow definition of family, is quite often – and there’s so little to use in it. Part of this is because the writers are writing strictly to entertain for the little kids and not necessarily the parents who are actually paying for the tickets. There is also the fear that some of the jokes might fly over the kids’ heads or might be a little too off-color or offensive. This doesn’t leave even a good screenwriter with a ton of material to work with, and so virtually everything he’s able to get away with comes off as trite. Writing something that is completely inoffensive requires that a screenwriter be bland, and taking risks can frequently mean offending any number of people. Baseball is unfortunately one of those subjects which, being a piece of Americana, is tried to make as inoffensive as possible so it will be embraced by everyone, and not leave anyone offended. (Of note, baseball also allows the Cleveland Indians to use a red, smiley Indian as a logo. I’m not a politically correct person, but a Warner Brothers cartoon face is tasteless.) Baseball movies which see baseball itself in this light are prone to blandness.

Baseball movies are at their best when the family image is ditched and the crudeness, lewdness, and offensive locker room bravado is embraced. Bull Durham and Major League both understood this. Rookie of the Year does not. Would a group of jocks really tone it down for one little kid? It’s funny how the worlds in movies like this always find ways to adjust to children.

The Gashouse Gang had some legendary characters: Pepper Martin, Leo Durocher, and Dizzy Dean. You learn a little bit about Martin and Durocher in The Gashouse Gang. You’ll be learning a lot about the last one, because The Gashouse Gang is so centered around Dizzy Dean that it might as well be a biography of him. That and his brother, Paul. Branch Rickey shows up in The Gashouse Gang a lot too, but he is of course relegated into the background, which I guess is an understandable move. After all, Rickey is only the guy who forever changed the face of the entire damn sport two separate times!

Okay, maybe that observation about Rickey in Heidenry’s book is a little bit unfair. He was the owner of the team, after all, and Heindenry and an essential part of any Magic Season chronicle is the buildup explanation – the culmination of conditions which resulted in the season at hand. And the St. Louis Cardinals, despite their legions of fervent worshippers, have always been a rather low-budget operation. At least, they’ve been comparatively low-budget when compared to the big-spending powerhouses, but one way or the other they’ve always been a model franchise. They’ve been successful in every aspect of baseball. On the field, only the New York Yankees have ever won more titles than the ten possessed by the Redbirds, and their 17 Pennants place them among baseball’s most dominant teams of all time. If they had a top five – or maybe even a top ten – budget, it’s scary to think of just how powerful the Cardinals could have been.

As far as the Magic Season trope goes, The Gashouse Gang is pretty generic. Even with the presence of Dizzy and Paul Dean – Diz being one of the funniest and most colorful characters to ever stand atop a pitcher’s mound – The Gashouse Gang is really, really played down. It doesn’t present us with any of the small-time incidents that would make the team come off as fun, loose, or rowdy as baseball mythos leads us to believe, and that is a massive strike against The Gashouse Gang.

The Gashouse Gang should have been a better – or at least a more fun – book than it is. I can’t think of a lot of other baseball books that I wanted to like as much as I did this one. The Cardinals are one of my favorite National League teams, and so I’m pretty steeped in their legacy and was looking forward to being regaled with anecdotes unique to this amazing powerhouse. But the execution of The Gashouse Gang, aside from revolving almost solely around one player, is blase. It’s like one of those summer popcorn movies that you don’t remember ten seconds after stepping out of the theater.

During the initial buildup to the 1934 season, The Gashouse Gang reads like a good overview. Heidenry writes brief biographies of a handful of the important players on the team, and more in-depth biographies about Rickey and the Dean brothers. After Around the third or fourth chapter, the team overview takes a holiday as the zoom lens focuses in on the brothers Dean.

The REAL shame of The Gashouse Gang is that you don’t learn very much about them, either. Heidenry leaves you with the unfailing fact that Dizzy was the definite star of the team. But as far as the descriptions of Dizzy’s on-field antics go, Bill Lee’s book Baseball Eccentrics contains more details about the Dizzy Dean we all know and love. We get a glimpse of the Dizzy Dean who wittily claimed he was marrying a woman who had slept with half the city because he was one of the people she slept with (the marriage, by the way, lasted for 43 years despite her reputation) and the Dizzy Dean who rebelled halfway through the season, trying to go on strike because he felt like he wasn’t being paid enough. Heidenry writes at one point that his teammates saw him as a good guy with a penchant for mischief, and that’s how he comes off, even in spite of his apparently constant feuding with Branch Rickey.

Very few of the other Cardinals players are so much as mentioned with regular frequency. Pepper Martin gets a little bit of face time, and Leo Durocher is pointed at once or twice. But for the most part, Heidenry rarely changes his angle of Dizzy Dean, Dizzy Dean, Dizzy Dean until the Cardinals begin their final push for the Pennant. Dean still figures prominently into the narrative, but the team is finally moved more into the forefront.

The unfortunate addendum is that this is one of those books in which the World Series is really dragged out. The coverage lasts for about 50 pages, okay, so I guess it FEELS more dragged out than it actually is. But it comes as a bit of a shock because we Heidenry starts giving out more details of the games, which he doesn’t do a whole lot of in the rest of the book. I think too many details will slow the book down; there’s a thin, fine line between too many details and too few details, but Heidenry doesn’t write like he’s trying to walk on it. It could be that I’m not remembering correctly because the Dean coverage keeps getting in the way, but I don’t think there was as much effort put into it as warranted.

As I said, I really wanted to like The Gashouse Gang, but it was a disappointment. On the upside, if you’re looking for a good biography about a year in the life of Dizzy Dean, you won’t find one better than this.