The Grass Is Greener..?

The older I get, the more I think about The Sandlot. I know that is kind of a weird thing to admit, but hear me out.

Over the decades, the film has cemented itself as a classic. A coming-of-age masterpiece. A slice of life. Americana. It is an unapologetic tribute to mid-century American neighborhood life: the innocence of long summers, tight-knit communities, breaking the rules, paying the consequences, and the fierce loyalty among kids who only know each other by their last names or nicknames.

More than anything, it is a film about boys, made for boys, celebrating boyhood in its rawest, most innocent state. Dirty knees, tree house sleepovers, tall tales about the neighborhood beast, and a shared obsession that gives shape to the endless summer days. Those qualities feel increasingly rare in modern filmmaking. It comes from an era that did not feel the need to deconstruct childhood or rush kids into adulthood; it just let them run wild until the porch lights flickered on.

It is s'mores, fireworks, hot lifeguards, problem solving, bad decisions, kindness, bravery, and baseball. I can't even tell you the last time I sat down and watched the movie, but the entire plot is inexplicably etched into my memory.

Despite all these things, I don't think any of them are the reason why the movie stays lodged in my head.

What really stands out to me, upon reflection, is that I had none of that.

There was no grass where I grew up.

I spent my childhood in the Mojave desert. Hard-packed dirt roads that rattled the windows of the car on the way to school. Dust devils and wildfires were common. There were no sidewalks, no curbs, no neatly plotted subdivisions with folks sitting out on front porches. Even cul-de-sacs were unknown to me.

You did not hop on a bicycle to pedal over to a friend’s house because friends lived miles away through the dust and heat. A dirt bike might have worked, but I never had one. As a result, I never put on a costume and walked door-to-door for Halloween. Fireworks were not only illegal, but posed such a hire fire risk that I never personally set one off until I was well into my teens. We had local firework shows, of course, but in the same way that they were portrayed in the film.

I certainly never played a pickup game of baseball in an empty lot.

The world outside my front door was harsh, sunny, and full of empty land. It was far from a neighborhood in any traditional sense.

I am being dramatic to a degree. Of course we had neighbors, and there were homes scattered around. The school yards had athletic fields for soccer and baseball, kept alive and green by extensive sprinkler systems. But the connective fibers of a community were missing. The front yards, the street trees, the wandering packs of kids.

When I watched The Sandlot back then, I did not overthink it. It was just another tape tossed into the VCR on a hot afternoon, a piece of entertainment not unlike The Goonies. Really, it just felt like fantasy.

I never cared about baseball anyway. I did not play it, did not follow the sport, and could not tell you the basic rules of the game. I still cannot, and I still do not watch it. But that was never what lingered. Even as a kid who barely thought twice about the movie after the tape rewound, what stuck in the back of my mind was the boy standing at the edge of the fence: Smalls.

Smalls was clumsy, ignorant of the unspoken social codes around him, new to town, and desperately alone. He did not just need to learn how to catch a ball; he needed a place to belong. When Benny looked over at him, handed him a glove, and told the other kids he was playing, it was not sportsmanship. It was an act of kindness. An older kid looking out for the new guy.

To a kid watching The Sandlot on a 90s CRT in the desert, that small-town world simply did not exist. It was a mythical realm where boys ran through garden sprinklers, ate melted s'mores under streetlights, and lived an entire life between breakfast and sundown without an adult in sight.

Part of that was the era. The movie is set in the 1960s, and I was growing up in the 1990s. But a calendar shift alone did not explain the distance. The landscape itself felt like another planet.

Now, decades later, I no longer live in the desert. I live in a small town in East Tennessee. Outside my window, there are towering oak trees and heavy morning fog rolling off the low mountains. There is deep green grass, actual sidewalks connecting house to house, and public parks with baseball diamonds.

And funny enough, the movie I barely gave a second thought to as a kid has become something I find myself reflecting on more often than I would have expected.

The older I get, the more I realize that in some ways, the version of Smalls in me never completely vanished. Moving across the country into an established community carries real friction. The South has its own rhythm, its own long memory, and its own quiet vernacular. I say cart, they say buggy. They have a natural twang to their voice; I do not.

I am a transplant here. Like Smalls, even as a grown man, I sometimes catch myself wondering if my hat sits crooked and I stick out against the crowd. I will probably always carry that stubborn sense of being the outsider looking in.

I don't have any friends. I might be able to make some if I tried harder, but as of yet, no Benny has extended an invite to the ball field metaphorically speaking. The likelihood of this is diminished with adulthood, of course. Kids make friends quickly. Adults do not. And that's fine. This move was not really for me. It was for my kids.

They are growing up on grass. They have neighbors to shout to across property lines. They will have sidewalks to scrape their knees on, front porches to drop their bikes beside, and actual neighborhood streets to sprint down with their friends from school when dusk starts to settle. They will never look at The Sandlot and wonder what a suburban summer feels like. They will just live it.

There is an unexpected turn to all of this, though.

Back when I watched The Sandlot, the quiet mechanical hum of my parents' VCR as background noise, I assumed that world was purely a Hollywood fabrication, an idealized slice of Americana that never truly existed. But living here now, you realize something startling: despite the passage of decades, despite the screens, the phones, and all the noise of modern life, that world actually does exist.

I feel it most on the Fourth of July.

In the film, that is the holy night. The one night the boys play ball under the flickering glare of town fireworks, Ray Charles singing "America the Beautiful" while the sky bursts into red and white. The boys freeze mid-play just to stare upward, washed in the light of the fireworks and starlight.

Out here on a summer evening, when the humidity breaks and the golden hour light lays flat and warm across the freshly mowed lawns, you can smell charcoal smoke drifting between the tree trunks. The crickets start up. The sun dips behind the ridge of the low mountains. Then the first fireworks whistle into the evening sky, detonating into blooms of crimson and green right above the treeline.

Standing out on the porch, watching those colors wash over the grass while kids shout somewhere in the yard in the warm, golden summer air, it hits you with a strange, surreal weight: It is real. It was real all along. It was just waiting for me to find it. Uprooting your life is hard. It is a terrifying, disorienting choice to make. But life is short, and there is genuine joy in finding the courage to leave what you know and step into unfamiliar terrain. I would have never known this Sandlot world existed if I had stayed in the desert.

I loved aspects of the desert, but I love this new world too. Sometimes fatherhood is trading the dirt you knew for the grass you want your children to stand on. There is a quiet, steady satisfaction in handing your boys the kind of childhood you only ever witnessed on VHS.

I may always feel a little like the new kid in the neighborhood, but watching my sons run out into the trees, belonging to a place before they even know they have to try, that makes the whole journey worth it.

TL;DR if you haven't seen The Sandlot you should watch it. 10/10 movie.