Major League
1989
David S. Ward
Major League was an easy film to love. Sure, it's flawed, and we'll touch briefly on some of those flaws, but man, did I have fun watching this stupid little movie. In essence, that's what being an underdog is all about, right? There are flaws, so many flaws that you don't expect any success, and yet this scrappy underdog grabs that success anyway, against all odds. Major League was about underdogs, but it also was itself an underdog, at least as far as my expectations went.
Let's acknowledge the fact that this has a lot to do with the fact that it's specifically a movie about baseball. Well, maybe not about baseball, but certainly featuring baseball. Either way, I love baseball, so I'm going to love a baseball movie. Here, the plot is kind of like The Producers—the new owner of the Cleveland Indians wants to tank the team and move to Miami, but the scrubs that she hires end up doing much better than expected. So the film follows a group of these loveable weirdos as they improve throughout the season and find their groove and capture the attention of a city that hadn't tasted sports success in decades.
I think Major League gets to the heart of what makes sports so fun to watch at certain times. Sure, it's fun to win, but that's only half of it. The other half is when the winners are people who are just like you. Ya know, losers. Losers who win. That was the whole thing with the 2017-18 Eagles, right? They were self-professed underdogs, representing a city full of underdogs. The oddsmakers expected them to lose every game, and yet they continued to win. Everyone expects Philadelphia to lose, and yet we persevere. Felt good to see our values reflected in a colorful group of overachievers.
So because this idea constituted the majority of the film, I'll call it a success. There were also some smaller parts of the movie that seemed like decisions made by suits in a boardroom somewhere. Like, I can picture David S. Ward being told that he isn't getting funding for his dumb baseball movie unless he injects some romance into it, and so a stupid fucking subplot involving broken-down catcher Jake Taylor (Tom Berenger) pursuing his ex-girlfriend. It's a completely unnecessary diversion from the baseball stuff, and honestly, it's aged like milk. Jake is a straight-up stalker who puts undue on an engaged woman to sleep with him. So not only is it unnecessary, but it's actively detrimental to the quality of the film.
There's other stuff, like a couple hokey slow ballads that don't fit the tone of the film (though I guess it was funny hearing Randy Newman sing one of his dopey ballads in a sort of ironic way). It still just felt like misguided executive notes, like, "every profitable movie has a big ballad, add one plz!!!!" And then there was the other other stuff, like the All State Insurance guy playing a "voodoo" character that felt like a racist caricature in 2022, but vaguely racist in a way that perhaps isn't worth diving into for today (though I'd be happy to discuss if you feel like I should).
I won't say that Major League is a great movie despite these flaws. The flaws are baked into what make Major League what it is. I think that this was a fun film, though, even when considering the big picture. The laughs were big (pretty much anything the announcer says), the plot holes were forgivable (attendance figures seemed important at the beginning, but then were completely forgotten about), and the flaws are sort of eyeroll-worthy funny in a post-1980s ironic way (that they played the whole "you were served a paternity suit at the surprise party you never showed up to" monologue COMPLETELY STRAIGHT is kind of insane, and hilarious).
But most importantly, this film is a crucial addition to the pantheon of underdog sports films. That's the main reason why Major League endures, and it's the main reason I'll stake a claim saying that I liked it. There will probably never be another important sporting event in my life when I don't think to myself beforehand: "Well, I guess there's only one thing left to do—win the whole fucking thing."
GRADE: 3.5 pukes out of 5
NEXT TIME: I love when we violently shift gears from movie to movie in this column. I've never seen the next one, but I can imagine that it's going to be very interesting moving from Major League to Malcolm X. Let's see.
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