The Sandlot

Tom Guiry plays Scotty Smalls, the shy new kid in town who wants to join the rowdy pickup baseball team that plays every day in the neighborhood sandlot. But he doesn't know how to catch a baseball, and his stepfather, Bill, is too busy to teach him. He tries out for the team anyway, and though he isn't very good, it turns out he's lucky: there happen to be only eight of them, and nine makes a team. The summer passes blissfully as Scotty learns to play ball under the wing of Benny Rodriguez, the oldest and best player, as well as Ham, Squints, Repeat, and the rest of the kid-eccentrics. The skies darken, however, when Benny literally knocks the stuffing out of the team's only baseball, a sign of impending doom, or worse, bad luck. Wanting to set things right, Scotty returns home and "borrows" Bill's ball, which he promptly uses to hit his first home run, knocking it clear out of the sandlot into mean old Mr. Mertle's junkyard, which is home to his legendary guard dog, the Beast. Scotty admits that he took the ball without asking, and he naively explains that Bill will want it back since it had a woman's name written on it: some lady named Babe Ruth. Horror-stricken, the team mobilizes to fetch it from the Beast's clutches, building a series of mechanical ball-retrieval machines which get progressively more complicated and preposterous as the Beast's size grows in their imaginations.