“I am Hercules.” — Kevin Sorbo
The Sandlot is one of those movies that feels smaller when you’re a kid and larger when you’re an adult. What once felt like nothing more than a string of jokes and bits slowly reveals itself as something gentler — a memory of a summer that mattered, even if no one knew it at the time.
The narration sets the tone. It’s Christmas Story–adjacent, but with a key distinction: Ralphie grows up still wrestling with his childhood. Scotty Smalls grows up simply grateful for his. There’s no bitterness in the voiceover—only fondness.
That tone brings the movie closer to a family-friendly Stand by Me. Same idea—kids on the brink of change, one last shared adventure—but filtered through humor, exaggeration, and baseball. And even then, it’s not really about baseball. Baseball is the setting, not the point. This is a movie about kids hanging out one last summer before their lives quietly shift out of reach.
You see that shift everywhere. The legend of the Beast is cartoonish and funny, a child’s myth inflated into something operatic. The s’mores bit still works. The chewing-tobacco-on-the-carnival-ride scene remains perfectly disgusting and impeccably timed. Everything is heightened, but it’s emotionally honest—how summers felt, not how they literally happened.
The adults mostly exist as pressure. Bill, Smalls’ stepdad, radiates pure Denis Leary energy. You know he’s going to give that kid a black eye; the only surprise is how.
Even the stuff that could have aged poorly mostly doesn’t. The pool make-out scene lives in a gray area, sure, but it never feels creepy. If this movie had been made five years earlier, it’s easy to imagine that scene being played differently. Instead, the joke stays on Squints, keeping it silly over leering. That restraint matters.
Hercules—the Beast—becomes a central emotional anchor for the movie. He’s terrifying, misunderstood, and ultimately just a lonely old dog with a bad reputation. For anyone who grew up with an outdoor dog—the kind that growls at strangers but licks your face when you get home—it rings true. And mercifully, this is a movie with the right amount of dog in it: memorable, meaningful, never emotionally exploitative.
Art LaFleur’s brief turn as Babe Ruth is one of those performances that stays with you. He shows up for maybe three minutes, delivers a handful of lines with the perfect mix of gruff kindness and faint impatience, and then vanishes. But those minutes quietly reframe everything that follows. He’s not trying to steal the spotlight—he’s just there to hand it back to the kids. That understatement is what makes him so good, and it’s why, even now, I catch myself smiling every time the Bambino walks out of the fog.
I was surprised by how teary the ending made me. Nothing especially tragic happens—none of the boys meet some grim fate, no one gets killed breaking up a fight at a McDonald’s—and yet the emotion sneaks up all the same. Maybe it’s the exact balance the movie strikes between sweetness and sincerity, with just a trace of melancholy underneath. Even Hercules—or the Beast, as he’s more often called—is revealed, just before the epilogue, to be a mere mortal when the fence collapses on him. Later, we’re told he lives to be 199 in dog years, which sounds legendary until you realize he’s still the only character who actually dies. Or maybe the sadness comes from something simpler: the knowledge that once the movie ends, you don’t really get to see these kids—these newfound celluloid friends—again. Like childhood summers themselves, they don’t end in tragedy. They just end.
The epilogue seals it. “Heroes get remembered, legends never die” works because the movie earns it. The futures aren’t tragic, but they aren’t fantasy either. Benny Rodriguez makes it all the way, the way you always hoped he would. The rest don’t—and that’s the point. Bertram gets really into the ’60s. Life happens. It’s the exact right balance of bitter and sweet—proof that a family movie doesn’t need to be a bummer to be honest, and doesn’t need to be a fantasy to be comforting.
If anything, The Sandlot improves with age. As a kid, it’s funny and exciting. As an adult, it’s generous. It’s the kind of memory that sneaks up on you years later—when you’re old enough to see just how much that one summer really meant.
Final Verdict: 92 out of 100
Sidenote: Postscript
