'You're killing me, Smalls!': Remembering 'The Sandlot,' 30 years later

The most famous line in the history of movies is somebody saying something wrong. It’s the line, “Here’s looking at you, kid.” But Bogart actually says, “He’s looking at you, kid.” That little inexpressive nothing became a classic thing. And the big stuff sort of went away. That’s my first point and probably my last.

So, in search of baseball simplicity, they turned their attention to what had started the season as a joke but had increasingly become a source of what MLB seemed to have lost the ability to produce. Fun. What was more fun than a basketball player—the basketball player—walking away from a $4 million NBA salary (which, at the time, was astronomical)