The Mythology of The Sandlot

  

The Mythology of The Sandlot

 

I’ve already discussed in-depth why 1993’s The Sandlot is one of my favourite films of all-time (click the link to read if you haven’t already: https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2021/07/the-sandlot-1993-favourite-films-series.html), but there was one aspect of it in particular I’ve wanted to dig deeper into for a while now and I knew it would need to be its own thing. The Sandlot is primarily remembered for capturing the fun of being a kid, but something else I think it does particularly well is making the audience see the world through a kid’s eyes, and that’s because of the way the primary antagonist is handled. “The Beast” is one of the best movie monsters I can think of, and I want to explore, in-depth, why that is.

Let’s begin with the not-so-subtle foreshadowing by The Narrator (main character Scotty Smalls retelling the story of his youth that we’re watching play out on screen), telling us it was the summer his best friend Benny got him “…out of the biggest pickle I’d ever be in.” Obviously we’re wondering what “the pickle” was, and the earliest hint of something being wrong when Smalls first goes to the sandlot to try joining in with Benny and the others is when the fence at the far end of the field rattles and there’s a monstrous sound from the other side. Right away, we’re seeing things from Smalls’ perspective, and we never leave the child perspective for the rest of the film.

The Beast is hinted at very early on, but the hints don’t amount to anything right away. They continue to punctuate the early scenes at the sandlot—even right after Smalls catches his first pop fly and it’s a celebratory moment, he turns around, looks at the fence, and we see the shadow of the Beast. It looks like a dinosaur: massive, plodding, growling, and while you could point out it looks obviously fake and exaggerated, that’s sort of the point. Smalls isn’t seeing the Beast for what it actually is, he’s seeing what his imagination is creating based on the information he’s receiving. That’s absolutely a kid thing to do. It’s one of the old clichés that kids think there’s a monster in their closet or under their bed, and all their imaginations need is a spooky looking shadow or a little creak in the floor to conjure the fictitious nightmares.

Then we get to the “truth” when Smalls tries to climb the fence to get a baseball that’s gone over into the yard and the kids pull him away. I use quotes on “truth” because the story Squints tells to Smalls and the others at the campout in the tree fort is clearly not 100% true, but for Smalls, it becomes the only truth he knows. Even he thinks the story is made up just to scare him, but I’m getting ahead of myself, let’s recount the tale Squints tells. Old Man Mertle had a junk yard dog that he fed so much meat to it grew giant and mean, and it killed so many thieves who tried to steal stuff from him that the police told him to lock it up in his back yard “FOR-E-VER” and any baseball that goes over the fence into the yard is never seen again. One kid allegedly went over the fence once and disappeared, presumably eaten by the Beast. There’s clearly some truth in the scary story, and when Smalls looks over the fence from the tree fort that night, he’s convinced of it all. For viewers, the visuals accompanying the story are perfect for how a kid would imagine it as it’s told. I always thought of it as seeing what Smalls is picturing in his head. It’s black-and-white, grainy, and the Beast is shown to be massive and scary. As Squints says, “A true killing machine.”    

The Beast is depicted as a local legend that all the kids know about, but the line between fact and fiction is blurred. It’s like a classic myth. There has to be a seed of truth, and obviously, there is something behind the fence. But what is it really? We get glimpses of the yard here and there, mostly from the kid’s perspective through holes in the fence, making it even more foreboding and mysterious. I love the set design for the yard. It’s littered with random debris (the doll with an arrow through one eye always stood out to me and creeped me out), it’s dirty, the dog house is always billowing with dust, the rusty chain rattles, and the battered fence has the same visual power of every technique Steven Spielberg used to hide the shark in Jaws. What you imagine is always scarier than what you see, so we never get a good look at the Beast for most of the movie. We know it’s a dog, the way we know the monster in Jaws is a shark, but it’s not just a dog, it’s a truly monstrous one. Benny even calls it “a giant gorilla dog thing” at one point. As a kid watching The Sandlot, I was convinced the Beast really was a monster, but as an adult, you suspect it’s just a dog that’s being exaggerated, both in the way the characters talk about it and in the way it’s shown in glimpses on-screen. The glimpses we get of it do look exaggerated, but in a good way. This is the way the kids see it; whether it really looked like that or not is irrelevant, and the quality of the special effects is also inconsequential.

The genius of the Beast as a concept is we only ever get to see it from the kid’s point of view or hear about it from stories they’ve heard or told each other. Not once do Smalls’ parents ever get involved in their struggle with it or even talk about it. If they did, the mythic terror would be shattered. The kids even make the point the audience is obviously going to make: why not just go over to Mr. Mertle’s house, knock on his door, and ask for the ball back? No way, not an option, Mr. Mertle’s status as a mean old man is as potent and the Beast’s status as a baseball-hoarding, kid-eating monstrosity. And so the lost baseballs remain in the lair of the Beast, which isn’t a big deal as long as they have an extra 98 cents lying around, but then Smalls makes a fatal mistake that sets the rest of the films events in motion.

Around the fifty minute mark, Benny hits a baseball so hard it busts the guts out of it, and the team views this unbelievable event as an omen. The concept is consistent with their beliefs about the Beast as a mythic monster, but also with their views on the legendary baseball player George Herman “Babe” Ruth (A.K.A The Babe, The Sultan of Swat, The Titan of Terror, The King of Crash, The Colossus of Clout, and The Great Bambino). They have deified Babe Ruth. I love the contrast between how the kids view the Beast and how they view the Babe. Both are mythic figures to them, but one is their ultimate hero, and the other is their worst nightmare. There’s just one problem: Smalls doesn’t realize who Babe Ruth is, so when he runs home to borrow the baseball on his step-dad’s trophy mantle, he doesn’t realize he’s swiping a ball signed by the legend himself, and when he hits it over the fence into Mr. Mertle’s yard, he discovers he has messed up worse than he even first realized.

After the kids understand the baseball Smalls hit over the fence is signed by Babe Ruth, Benny explains to Smalls that Babe Ruth was the greatest baseball player who ever lived, saying he “was less than a God but more than a man, like Hercules or something.” We’ll come back to this comment. The kids have to get that ball back, so they begin to strategize, with simple approaches at first, but each time they fail they come back with a more elaborate plan, and each time the Beast destroys their efforts in an over-the-top fashion. Again, this is likely the way the kids saw it at the time, or the way Scotty remembers it; the Beast is powerful enough to crumple steel and leap as high as the top of the fence to catch a baseball in its jaws. Impossible for a real dog, but their imaginations exaggerate the Beast’s abilities, so to say these scenes come off as silly or fake is a hollow and unfounded criticism. 

We (the audience) also get to see a little more of the Beast each time the kids try a new technique for retrieving the ball. A paw here, then a paw and a leg, until eventually we get to see its massive drooling jaws and the danger gets too real. Yeah-Yeah is almost eaten, Timmy is nearly killed when the vacuums explode in the treehouse (okay, maybe not almost killed, but hey, there’s an explosion and he was still in there when it happened, it could have been worse than him just walking out covered in dust!) and then when all hope seems lost, Benny has a dream in which he meets Babe Ruth and is given some sage advice from the baseball god.

And so, Benny becomes a legend himself, hopping that fence to “pickle the beast” and get that ball back once and for all. It’s been set up earlier in the film that Benny is not only the best player on the team, but the fastest runner. When he finally breaches the barrier between the sandlot and the realm of the Beast, we get our first proper look at what it really is. It turns out to be a Mastiff, not a gorilla dog, but it’s still a large and imposing canine. The scene of Benny facing the Beast for the first time is incredibly intense. Lots of close-ups and a music track composed of whistling and twangy guitar make it feel like a shootout in a western. The confrontation between boy and beast has been built up to perfectly. Benny gets the ball, leaps back over the fence, and for a brief moment, he’s won, but then the Beast also leaps over the fence and an epic chase ensues all across town.

The chase ends where it began, on the other side of Mr. Mertle’s fence. Benny leaps it again, the Beast smashes through the boards, and then, when it seems like it’s over for Benny, the entire fence collapses! The wall separating their two worlds comes crashing down right on the Beast himself, reducing the killer dog to nothing but a hurt, scared animal. Smalls encourages Benny to help him lift the fence to save the Beast, and in a redemptive moment that truly feels earned, the Beast licks Smalls all over his face and reveals itself not to be a monster, but a good dog. He’s the best boy, not a monster of legend. He even shows them all the baseballs he’s stashed, and when they take the dog back to Mr. Mertle, they find out the dog’s owner isn’t a mean old man, either, just a lonely former baseball player who even knew Babe Ruth back in the day.

I don’t need to say much else about the ending of the film. It’s truly satisfying, uplifting, and touching, but the relief that comes with finding out the Beast isn’t a murderous monster is genuine, both for the kids and the audience. It turns out the dog even has a different name from his misleading moniker: Hercules. Here’s a line from the Narrator during the wrap-up at the end: “It was weird that Benny had said that Babe Ruth was like the Hercules of Baseball and the Beast's name ended up being Hercules. None of us could ever figure out what that meant, but we were all amazed by it.” It’s a funny and poignant line.

So there you have it: The Sandlot might seem like a simple, fun family movie that, as the tagline puts it (far too simplistically) is about “The adventure of a lifetime, the summer of their dreams...the dog of their nightmares” but the way the story is told is far more sure handed and creative than its often given credit for. Critic reviews were middling when it was released, and it’s never really been reappraised, but there’s a reason The Sandlot still has such a devoted fan base to this day and continues to be discovered by new generations. For the record, there were two sequels, a TV series is in the works, all the films are available on Disney+, and Patrick Renna who played Ham Porter has a YouTube channel where he has reunited with his co-stars and discussed the film with them all these years later. The director, too, David Mickey Evans, remains vocal about the film on his blog, and while he never made another movie that left an impact like The Sandlot, he is still clearly proud of what he made to this day, and rightfully so.

The Sandlot has left a worthy legacy, and while I think I covered why it’s so great on the whole in my previous Favourite Films entry, I wanted to take a closer look at this particular aspect of the film as a major reason for why it is so great. I’ve never heard anyone else talk about the film in this way, and maybe some will agree or some will think I’m making a big thing out of nothing describing this as a “mythology”, but it certainly seems to me that the clever writing/storytelling at work here is a big part of what has made the film endure as one of my all-time favourites from when I was very young and just discovering what it meant to be a film fan to where I am now in my adult life.