Major League (1989)

Major League arrives from 1989, a year when a baseball comedy could assemble an integrated roster and think nothing of it. Wesley Snipes and Dennis Haysbert hold prominent supporting roles, and a Cuban slugger anchors the middle of the order, yet the film treats this as ordinary clubhouse texture. No speeches accompany the lineup card. Pedro Cerrano's voodoo shrine to Jobu is mined for broad ethnic comedy, which is its own kind of period detail, and the movie never pauses to interrogate what it has done.

The plot concerns Rachel Phelps, a widow who inherits the Cleveland Indians and schemes to lose her way to Miami. Here is a film whose engine is owner malfeasance, a lease escape clause, and a portfolio-obsessed third baseman mocked for caring more about his money than the game. The sympathies land on winning, not on the arrangement that produced the villain. Ms. Phelps wields genuine power, and the script codes her as the antagonist for holding it. Rene Russo's Lynn waits in the stands to hold up a bare hand at the climax. The romantic resolution is a ring removed, nothing more.

The opening montage sets somber images of Cleveland's industrial waterfront to Randy Newman's "Burn On", a song about the Cuyahoga River catching fire. It is mood, not argument. Elsewhere the film offers no body politics, no neurological self-discovery, no rewritten history. Ricky Vaughn's wildness is corrected by an optometrist. The sermon, delivered by a manager aboard a rundown bus, is teamwork and grit, a creed old enough to vote. Everything else is a curveball that never breaks.