Major League Turns 22!

Every blogger gets inspired to write by something in their lives. Food bloggers love food. fetish bloggers like weird stuff they wouldn't like their parents to know they like. Sometimes the food bloggers and the fetish bloggers are one and the same (you know who you are). Me? I love baseball. Something about the science of hitting a round ball with a round bat (allegedly the most difficult thing to do in all of sports) just hooked me when I was little and it never let go. I got my first taste of baseball when I was five years old, which is when my parents moved our family from Uruguay (no baseball) to the United States. I saw my first baseball movie just a couple of years later.

That movie is still my favorite movie and (arguably) one of the best sports movies ever made. That movie is what inspired this entire blog (Jobu being the voodoo doll belonging to one of the main characters). That movie... is Major League. Today, Major League turns 22 years old. Pretty amazing right? 22 years ago today, Major League was released to the public in theaters around the nation. David S. Ward took an $11 million budget (less than many actors make individually these days) and made 107 minutes of glory.

If you don't know it (be ashamed) the plot of this movie involves evil owner Rachel Phelps (Margaret Whitton), a former Las Vegas showgirl who inherits the team when her husband passes away, putting together a team of the worst baseball players she can find. She does this in the hopes that the team will finish last and she will be able to relocate it to Miami, where she dreams of living. She fills the roster with aging veterans like catcher Jake Taylor (Tom Berenger) and pitcher Eddie Harris (Chelcie Ross), unheard of rookies like Rick Vaughn (Charlie Sheen), and over-priced players like Roger Dorn (Corbin Bernsen). The team, joined by walk-on sprinter Willie Mays Hayes (Wesley Snipes) and Voodoo master Pedro Cerrano (Dennis Haysbert), proceeds to start the season very badly, but not badly enough for the Mrs. Phelps' tastes. She takes away such amenities as the team plane, hot tubs and other necessary equipment. At this point, Manager Lou Brown (James Gammon) finds out about the plan to have the team finish dead last. He tells the players in an emotional locker room speech in which Jake Taylor inspires the rest of the team to try to "Win the whole...fucking...thing."

I don't want to give the rest away for those of you who haven't seen it. Crawl out from under the neighbor's house (where you live) and go rent it, download it, Netflix it, Redbox it or steal it from your neighbors (you might as well at this point, you live under their house). You'll probably see many more references to this classic movie in this blog (check out my fantasy draft awards). Hell, I could write 2,000 words on this movie right now if I wanted to. However, I'll leave that to the movie critics. I just wanted to give a small shout out to my favorite movie on it's 22nd birthday.

image courtesy of: http://www.ign.com