The Sandlot Monologues

In the summer of 1962, a new kid in town is taken under the wing of a young baseball prodigy and his rowdy team, resulting in many adventures.

Michael Squints Palledorous walked a little taller that day. And we had to tip our hats to him. He was lucky she hadn't beat the crap out of him. We wouldn't have blamed her. What he'd done was sneaky, rotten, and low… and cool. Not another one among us would have ever in a million years even for a million dollars have the guts to put the move on the lifeguard. He did. He had kissed a woman. And he had kissed her long and good. We got banned from the pool forever that day. But every time we walked by after that, the lifeguard looked down from her tower, right over at Squints, and smiled.

Bertram?… Bertram got really into the 60s, and no one ever saw him again.

Even though Bill loved the Murderers' Row ball, he was still plenty mad about me having swiped his Babe Ruth autographed ball and ruining it. So, I didn't feel too bad when he grounded me for a week instead of the rest of my life.

Things worked out between me and him. And from then on, I didn't have any trouble just calling him, "Dad", all the time.

We all lived in the neighborhood for a couple of more years, mostly through Junior High School, and every Summer was great. But none of them ever came close to that first one. When one guy would move away, we never replaced him on the team with anyone else. We just kept the game going like he was still there.

It was weird that Benny had said that Babe Ruth was like the Hercules of Baseball and the Beast's name ended up being Hercules. None of us could ever figure out what that meant, but we were all amazed by it. I kept in touch with those guys over the years and I found out that Yeah-Yeah's parents had shipped him off to Military School. After the Army, he became one of the pioneering developers of bungee jumping. Of course, we all know why. Bertram, well... Bertram got really into the '60s and no one ever saw him again. Timmy and Tommy became an architect and a contractor. They started out small, designing playground equipment and prefabricated tree houses. But they became multimillionaires when they invented... mini malls. Squints grew up and married Wendy Peffercorn. They have 9 kids. They bought Vincent's Drug Store and they still own it to this day. Hamilton Porter became a professional wrestler. You know him as "The Great Hambino". DeNunez played Triple A ball, but he never got to the majors. He owns he own business now and he coaches a little league team that his sons play on called, "The Heaters". Hercules lived to be 199 years old... uh, in doggie years. I was the last one to move away. But when I did, the Sandlot was still there. After Benny pickled the Beast, his reputation spread all over town. From then on, he was known as, "Benny 'The Jet' Rodriguez" and the nickname stuck with him for the rest of his life.

You see, for us, baseball was a game. But, for Benjamin Franklin Rodriguez, baseball was life.

And he/we did the dumbest thing anyone of us could ever have imagined.

Even though none of us had ever seen a Playboy magazine, which we constantly lied about, we figured going to the pool was the next best thing to being there.

It wasn't really the pool honeys, like we said; because, if any one of them had come up to any one of us, we'd have just pee'd our pants. We all went because, well, because Wendy Peffercorn - was the lifeguard.