By India McCarty
THE SANDLOT is a classic baseball movie, beloved by viewers of all ages. But are the movie’s fantastical events actually based on a true story?
“It wasn’t the way my childhood was,” David Mickey Evans, the director and co-writer of the movie, told the Times Leader in a 2018 interview. “It was the way I wish my childhood was, the way it should have been.”
Evans and his brother Scott grew up in the San Fernando Valley in the 1970s, where they played plenty of baseball with friends. He explained that THE SANDLOT’s script was inspired by something that happened to his brother — some neighborhood bullies sent Scott over a fence to retrieve a baseball and he wound up getting bitten by a dog.
“I ran to the ball, I picked it up. The dog was just snarling. You could literally feel…the slobbering all over the back of my hand,” Scott shared on a 2022 episode of “The Baseball Bucket List Podcast.”
He continued, “I picked the ball up and I backed off and I started walking. And all the guys, like in the movie, they’re watching over the fence…they saw what I didn’t see. They screamed ‘Run!’ because the dog was stretching that metal chain and it broke. So I had to run, of course.”
The dog bit Scott’s leg, but he hit it on the head with the baseball and made it over the fence. His mom later took him to the hospital to get stitches. Years later, Evans would remember the childhood anecdote and start turning it into a story.
“Driving home on the 405 Freeway, the incident when he went over that backyard fence and got bit came into my head and I said, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s a movie,’” he said in a 2019 interview with Florida’s Hometown News. “That was it. Just a kid, going over a fence to get a baseball and there’s a big bad dog back there. Sometimes that’s all you need.”
Evans added, “Those characters that I wrote, I created them, they are all very special to me.”
THE SANDLOT, released in 1993, would go on to be a hit with audiences and critics alike. Movieguide®’s review calls it a “good, wholesome family entertainment,” adding that it “will cause its viewers to laugh and to rejoice as they leave the theatre wishing that more just plain good movies would come along.”
Like many good movies, THE SANDLOT contains some elements of the truth — with plenty of dramatic exaggeration to keep things interesting!
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