Movie Review: Rookie of the Year (1993)

Rookie of the Year (1993, Thomas Ian Nicholas, Gary Busey)

This was on TV last night completely randomly and I watched it with my mom. I'd never seen it before. I'm not great at reviewing movies, but I've mostly been off the net the last few days so this is what I've got to work with :)

In short, this is a fun little movie to watch if you see it playing on TV late at night, but otherwise it's not really worth your time unless you're either a 12-year-old kid wishing you could play for the Cubs, or if you like kid movies with Disney endings.

Thomas Ian Nicholas, who six years later would play Kevin in American Pie (which I realized about halfway through this movie), plays Henry, a 12-year-old kid who breaks his arm in a bizarre baseball accident and it heals in a bizarre way that allows him to snap some tendons and suddenly throw a baseball 100 miles per hour. Gary Busey plays a veteran pitcher who's all but done for in his career. Bruce Altman plays Jack, a guy who is dating Henry's single mom (Amy Morton). Jack becomes Henry's "manager", and you basically spend the rest of the movie learning to hate him and to love Busey's pitcher character, essentially.

In addition to having to figure out how to throw 100mph and actually throw strikes, Henry also has to figure out how to talk to 12-year-old girls at the school cafeteria, and how to not piss off his two best friends, who follow him around just about everywhere.

Pretty much everything about this movie is predictable, and in the end everyone lives happily ever after, but there are a few good laughs along the way; John Candy plays the role of the announcer in the style of Bob Uecker in Major League, and has a couple of good one-liners. Daniel Stern, just a few years removed from his role as one of the burglars in Home Alone, plays the insane Cubs pitching coach who's constantly getting himself locked away various places, to the benefit of everyone else involved; and he bears a scary resemblance to Nate Robertson, the current Tigers pitcher.

Watch it with a little kid and you won't be too unhappy about it.