Line #9 YMMV/MajorLeague


1	----
2	* AlternateCharacterInterpretation: The first movie's original ending painted Rachel Phelps in quite a different light. In a deleted scene, she confides to Lou Brown that she never had any intention of moving the team, and all her actions were [[BatmanGambit a ploy]] to motivate them to success. The scene was cut because test audiences liked the character better as a villain.
3	* SugarWiki/AwesomeMusic: [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxZbOZDineQ X's hard-rocking rendition of "Wild Thing"]], which is used as Rick Vaughn's entrance theme.
4	%%* EnsembleDarkhorse: Doyle. Also Cerrano.
5	* FridgeLogic: Once some of the misfits were starting to come into their own, why didn't Phelps trade some of them for minor-league prospects or cash?
6	* HarsherInHindsight: Just a few years after the film was released, Florida did get its own Major League Baseball team, the Marlins. Cleveland fans couldn't helps but notice the irony when after a couple of seasons of being a laughingstock the Marlins became contenders and then defeated the Indians in the 1997 World Series.
7	* HilariousInHindsight:
8	** The owner's entire plot. Shortly after the movies were released, Miami was given an expansion team... and Cleveland built the Indians a palatial new stadium. Meanwhile, the Florida Marlins, despite winning two World Series in their brief history (including one over the Indians!), have been beset with financial problems. The biggest bone of contention? Marlins' ownership wants a new stadium. The Marlins ''did'' get a new stadium, for the 2012 season. They promptly suffered a losing season, during which they've had a fire sale and sold their most talented players, leading to cries that the Marlins ownership deceived Miami tax payers into paying for a new stadium by promising to use the uptick in revenue on keeping their talent.
9	** The movie quite accurately portrays the Indians as a laughing stock -- they had been a terrible team for decades by the time the movie debuted in 1989. But the team would take a major step forward in just a few years, and the Indians would establish themselves as one of the best clubs in baseball from 1994-2001. The Indians never did win a World Series, but they came achingly close a couple times.
10	** Taka Tanaka was supposed to be a sign of bad management from Dorn. This was before the Asian invasion of Major League Baseball began, which gave us the likes of Hideo Nomo, Hideki Matsui, Ichiro Suzuki, Daisuke Matsuzaka and most recently Shohei Ohtani.
11	** The 1995 Seattle Mariners ended up having quite a few similarities with the Indians' season in the movie: a perennial losing team on the verge of moving that staged an incredible comeback to win their division in a one-game playoff (Ironically, they were eliminated in the ALCS by ''Cleveland'').
12	** Creator/CharlieSheen with control issues, eh?
13	** A team didn't move from Cleveland to Miami, but [=LeBron=] James, Cleveland's most talented player, did end up taking his talents to South Beach.
14	** Creator/CharlieSheen plays a pitcher. In 2016, a pitcher with Sheen's real name (Carlos Estevez) was called up by the Colorado Rockies.
15	* MemeticMutation:
16	** "This guy here is dead!" "Cross him off, then."
17	** "How's your wife and my kids?"
18	** "Don't give me any of this ''ole'' bullshit!"
19	** "''Juuuuuuust'' a bit outside..."
20	** "They're shitty."
21	* TheProblemWithLicensedGames: There was a [[NoExportForYou Japan-only]] Famicom adaptation that is only a generic baseball game. ''The A.V. Club'' [[http://www.avclub.com/article/japanese-studio-turned-major-league-extraordinarly-207568 even pointed out]] that a weird bordering on InNameOnly platformer like most movie-based NES games could at least capture the zaniness of the source material.
22	* RetroactiveRecognition: In the first film, Creator/NeilFlynn has a very brief role as a Cleveland-area construction worker and Indians fan.
23	* {{Sequelitis}}: The original overshadows the more goofy sequels, even in the cast's eyes. By Corbin Bernsen's own admission in an interview with ESPN Radio, "we should've never done them."
24	* SpecialEffectsFailure:
25	** A shot in the third film of Tanaka throwing a ball in from the outfield is clearly green-screen.
26	** So were a couple of Hog's curveballs.
27	** And Downtown's hits.
28	* UnintentionalPeriodPiece:
29	** Rachel Phelps' scheme to move the UsefulNotes/{{Cleveland}} Indians to UsefulNotes/{{Miami}} became a moot point as soon as Miami received their own expansion UsefulNotes/MajorLeagueBaseball franchise in the form of the Marlins in 1993. The Indians ultimately face off against their Eastern Division rivals, the UsefulNotes/NewYork Yankees in a one-game playoff. Since 1994, the Indians (now Guardians) have been in the Central Division, after Major League Baseball went to a three division alignment.
30	** Similarly, one of the incentives for moving the Indians to Miami that Phelps cites is that they'd be moving to a new 60,000 seat stadium, which given the time would more than likely be a multi-purpose venue with football. Just 2 years after the movie's release Comiskey Park II (now Guaranteed Rate Field) would open in Chicago, and the following year would open up Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore. The two stadiums were [[GenreKiller Genre Killers]] for huge multipurpose stadiums, incentivizing teams to build smaller, 35-45k capacity stadiums, and indeed, when the Florida Marlins first began play in 1993, their attendance struggled for years, one reason cited being that their stadium, the multipurpose 75,000 Joe Robbie Stadium (now Hard Rock Stadium), was terrible for baseball.
31	** Throughout the movie, Rick Vaughn's ability to throw mid-upper nineties heat is treated as a big deal, and at the time the movie was made, it would be. However, by the TheNewTwenties, being able to throw that hard is extremely commonplace in the major leagues, especially among relievers. [[note]]This is also because of changes in the way they measure speed. The JUGS gun they used in the 80s was known to be slower than the Stalker Pro Sports Radar Gun that came out in the 90s, and measured the pitch closer to the release point. (A pitch can slow by up to 9-10% by the time it reaches the plate due to air. In the 2000s they started measuring pitch speed at release point. Back in the 80s they measured 50 feet out. So a pitch measuring 92 on a JUGS could measure 94 on a Stalker Pro Sports and 95 or 96 on the current Stalker Pro II)[[/note]]
32	** The team's uniforms and branding prominently features Chief Wahoo. The mascot was eventually phased out due to long-standing controversies over racial insensitivity. At the end of the 2021 season, the team completely dropped the "Indians" identity and was renamed the Cleveland Guardians [[note]]keeping at least part of the old name Indians intact[[/note]].
33	** The backdrop of the film was framed around the real-life blue-collar struggles of Cleveland as a city and the Indians as a long-suffering franchise at the end of the 1980's. The team was not just bad, but also played in a dilapidated stadium that was emblematic of the city as a whole. In the mid-90's, the downtown Cleveland area got a rejuvenated shot in the arm with a new sports-and-business complex headlined by a brand-new ballpark for the Indians (Jacobs, now Progressive Field). The city began to flourish financially while the Indians were a baseball powerhouse (including two World Series appearances in three years) selling out the stadium every game for years, a stark contrast to the woebegotten Cleveland of the 80's shown in the movie.
34	** In the second movie, Jack Parkman would have been called out automatically for initiating contact with catcher Rube Baker at the plate under the rules that MLB put in place in 2014 to cut down on injuries to catchers.
35	** In today's game, pitchers rarely go more than six innings on a good day, let alone one where they've been tagged for several runs. There's no way that Cleveland would let starting pitcher Schoup pitch into the ninth inning of a 6-5 game, nor would Chicago leave starter Bucek in to face Cerrano with two runners on in the eighth. The first movie is more plausible, as Cleveland's Harris and New York's Jackson each only make one mistake for a two-run home run over the course of eight-plus innings, but in the 2020s, both pitchers would have been pulled an inning or two before giving up the home run.
36	** In the first movie, part of the movie takes place in their Spring Training home of Hi Corbett Field in Tucson, Arizona. It became dated when the real life Indians would move their Spring Training site to Winter Haven, Florida in 1993, then again to Goodyear, Arizona in 2009.
37	** In the second movie, Dorn needs to plaster advertisements all throughout the stadium as a desperate attempt to raise money. This is viewed as extremely tacky, lowbrow, and hurtful to the integrity of the game. Today, this is the accepted standard, with ads now even appearing on the players' uniforms.
38	* ValuesDissonance: By modern standards, Jake's behavior towards Lynn (e.g. tailing her home from her work after she's told him she's not interested in him) reads as [[StalkingIsLove stalking]], rather than charmingly romantic.

Context YMMV / MajorLeague