Major League Truth

BY KEVIN KERNAN

Not too long ago I was talking to a baseball friend about how much the game has changed and mentioned the 1989 movie Major League, one of my favorite baseball movies.

On Saturday I rewatched the movie. The changes are even more startling than I remembered, and really, 35 years ago is not that long ago.

The movie came out in 1989 but chronicled the fictional 1988 season of the Cleveland Indians. Back then it was 40 years since Cleveland last won a World Series, 1948 was their year when the Larry Doby, Bob Feller and Bob Lemon Indians won the World Series, beating the Boston Braves in six games.

And now it is going on 76 years since Cleveland last won a World Series.

The first baseball scenes of the movie are at Hi Corbett Field in Tucson, and that 1988 spring marked the 42nd straight year the Indians held spring training there. I was at Hi Corbett Field that spring because that was when I started covering the Padres, who at the time held spring training in Yuma, Arizona, a little over three hours down the road.

Like I said, Major League has always been one of my favorite baseball movies because even though it was a comedy, in many ways it was pretty close to the real thing, and a lot of the credit for that goes to former major leaguers Steve Yeager and Pete Vuckovich, who were in the movie and acted as technical advisors. Through the years, Major League was a pre-game watch in so many MLB clubhouses, before iPads took over the game.

Vuckovich as hulking first baseman Clu Haywood offers the classic line to Willie Mays Hayes at first base: “Goin’ somewhere, Meat?’’

That’s when first basemen were not buddy-buddy with every runner that came to the bag. That is one subtle change, but there are many more.

The movie proved to be prophetic, too, and I did not notice this until Saturday.

Randy Newman sings Burn On:

“There’s a red moon rising

On the Cuyahoga River

Rolling onto Cleveland to the lake’’

That is sung in the opening scene of the David Ward film and there is a closeup of one of the Art Deco sculptures of a Guardian figure on the Hope Memorial Bridge, formerly known as the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge. Ward grew up in the Cleveland suburb of South Euclid and the film was a labor of love.

And wouldn’t you know it, in 2021, Indians ownership ditched the Indians nickname and Chief Wahoo for the Guardians. The new name pays homage to the Guardians of Traffic, the eight Art Deco statues that have stood on the bridge near Progressive Field since 1932. Many Cleveland fans are still upset by the change and all you have to do is go to Facebook pages like Cleveland Indians 4 Life or I Love the Cleveland Indians to see that.

The movie somehow nailed it in that opening scene, somehow knowing Guardians would be in their future.

Throughout the movie the Indians are mentioned over and over by Harry Doyle (Bob Uecker).

“Get your tomahawks ready, Cleveland.’’

Beyond the name change there was the ballpark change, the Cleveland Indians of 1988 played in Cleveland Municipal Stadium because Progressive Field didn’t come around until 1994.

Old Milwaukee County Stadium stood in for Cleveland Municipal Stadium in the movie. Both ballparks are gone. And the wonderful bar scene was filmed in West Milwaukee too.

It is the changes in the game though that are all over the movie.

Twice, catchers are run over at home plate, once even in spring training. That doesn’t happen anymore with the changed rules. Willie Mays Hayes (Wesley Snipes) is stealing bases left and right without benefit of an oven mitt. Hayes uses batting gloves and saves a glove for his bedroom wall for each stolen base. Imagine how many bases he would steal today with the pizza box bases, limited disengagements and shorter distance between bases – yet another drastic change.

Hayes would be the perfect Fake Runner for extra innings, too.

Harris also loaded up on Crisco and the sticky stuff, now a no-no.

Slugger Pedro Cerrano (Dennis Haysbert) creates a kind of oven mitt for his bat in an early scene when he takes one of the club covers out of Roger Dorn’s golf bag. Corbin Bernsen plays Dorn. “Hats for bats,’’ Cerrano says.

One of the biggest changes in the game is that in the movie, manager Lou Brown, played brilliantly by James Gammon, has a lot of managerial power. The Nerds aren’t running the show. He actually wears a uniform in the dugout, too, not a pullover. Brown can leave his pitcher in as long as he wants and he also can pick the starting pitcher for the playoff game, Eddie Harris (Chelcie Ross), giving the news to Wild Thing Rick Vaughn (Charlie Sheen) that Harris was the man.

In the playoff game, Harris makes it all the way to the ninth inning and gets two outs but loads the bases in a 2-2 tie. On comes Wild Thing with the heat. No nibbling like today. No sweepers, either.

During the regular season, pitchers rarely go six innings anymore and MLB is trial ballooning a new set of rules to try to get starting pitchers to the sixth inning. They are legislating instead of building starting pitchers that can go six innings, at the least.

In the five games of the 2023 World Series, of the 10 starters, only one pitcher made it to the seventh inning. In the 1988 World Series, also five games, five of the 10 starters made it into the seventh inning and Dodgers starter Orel Hershiser pitched two complete games.

That’s not what is happening in the game today, pitching injuries are off the charts. The Nerds create a problem and then the league tries to legislate a solution; it is a vicious cycle of incompetence as experienced pitching coaches and minor league development people have been shown the door in favor of data gatherers.

Pitchers can’t go deep anymore in the majors because they don’t go deep in the minor leagues with the new ways of teaching and pitching. Instead of learning how to navigate a lineup three times, it is total gas and total spin and go.

Beware the almighty pitch count.

Harris also loaded up on Crisco and the sticky stuff, now a no-no.

And, of course, all pitching decisions are now made by the front office and the Nerds, using a legion of data, there is no such thing as a gut decision made by a manager. I maintain, one of the last gut decisions made solely by a manager in the World Series was Jack McKeon’s gutsy decision to start Josh Beckett in Game 6 of the 2003 World Series on short rest at Yankee Stadium, a World Series winning decision as Beckett pitched a 2-0 shutout and the Marlins won the Series, four games to two.

In the bottom of the ninth, with the game tied, Indians catcher Jake Taylor (Tom Berenger) would never be allowed to bunt with a runner on second and two outs of a playoff game as he did in the movie, even if he didn’t have two sore knees as Taylor limped down the line to beat the throw.

Taylor also would not be using conventional catching signals to give to his pitchers as he did in the movie. He would be using PitchCom, you can thank the cheating Astros – and other teams – for that change. The catcher position is the one position that has undergone such radical change. In the movie, Taylor sets up in a conventional Johnny Bench stance, offering a target to his pitchers. In baseball now, there is no target as the catcher gets on one knee, there is only the goal of tricking the umpire into trying to call a strike on a borderline pitch by framing the baseball. Taylor also went through an intensive ball blocking drill in spring training in the film, one that would never happen today.

Balls are not blocked, they are waved at as they fly past the one-knee-down catcher.

Willie Mays Hayes made his presence felt in spring training and made the team by using his speed in a competitive race between teammates. No such sprinting is allowed anymore because someone might pull a hammy if they run too hard in spring training or anywhere else.

When Willie Mays Hayes came around from second to score on Taylor’s bunt, he used a perfect hook slide at home plate. Nowadays it is an elbow busting or face busting headfirst slide or sometimes home plate is missed entirely by the runner as he makes an off-balance reach for the plate.

Saw that happen twice this week.

This movie may also have been the introduction to Launch Angle. Hayes is constantly fouling balls into the top of the batting cage. Back in the day, players used to say it was snowing when that happened. Manager Lou Brown will not stand for it and orders Hayes to hit the ball on the ground to use his speed.

“You may run like Hayes but you hit like shit.’’

Brown made Hayes do pushups on popups, that can’t happen today. Just watch any game and count the popups, especially by hitters hitting under .200. When Hayes makes a basket catch, Brown says, “Nice catch. Don’t ever f—— do that again.’’ Now managers look the other way, there is rarely a correction made on the field in front of everyone.

When the manager or pitching coach went out to talk to his pitcher in the movie, you could see their lips move, there wasn’t the Matt Blake hand over the mouth espionage of today. There also were American League umpires. The Yankees and Indians were in the same division, too back in 1988, the East Division. There was not a flood of playoff teams.

One thing has remained pretty much the same. A lot of owners don’t want to spend the money to put a winning team out there as Indians owner Rachel Phelps (Margaret Whitton) is trying to lose on purpose to drive the attendance down so she can void her Cleveland lease and move the team to a sweetheart deal in sunny Miami.

At the time the movie was made, there was no MLB team in Miami.

The radar gun was on display as well with Wild Thing hitting 97, 99 and 101 – and that was the old gun. “We better teach this kid some control before he kills somebody,’’ Lou Brown says early in the movie.

Now they send pitchers to the Pitch Lab to gain even more velocity, who cares about command.

Owners are still scaling down teams and moving them, look what A’s owner John Fisher is doing to the vagabond A’s in his efforts to move to Las Vegas. Teams like the Pirates are not putting the money into the team they should be to try to win the tepid NL Central. And what the heck is going on with the money-making Cardinals?

“What I want is for us to finish dead last,’’ Phelps says to her general manager.

The crusty 30-year minor league manager, Lou Brown, was hired by the Indians while working his off-season job at Tire World.

Now managers can come from an off-season broadcasting job. Brown also is allowed to have a trusted veteran Don Zimmer-like sidekick as his bench coach. Now it is a data assistant.

Teams are still losing – you could call it tanking – but now for draft picks. Look at what the Orioles did, they rebuilt their team with a series of terrible teams leading to high picks.

So that has not changed.

You can always count on the owners trying to put money in their pockets, that is why they are all over the gambling scene, yet Pete Rose cannot be in the Hall of Fame because of gambling – and 1989 was the year that all went down with Pete being banned.

Credit the movie Major League for barreling it up in so many ways back then when it was a much different ballgame.