The biggest flaws come from the management of the team by the owner (Rachel Phelps).
#1: Why didn’t she start suspending or putting out hits on players who played well?
#2: Why didn’t she sign a reliever who could blow any game he’s win?
#3: If she wanted to kill attendance, couldn’t she just make ticket prices extremely high?, therefore she gets money and gets to leave. Or she could turn Cleveland Stadium into more of a pit.
#4: How come she never put a mole onto the team to report the whole ‘stripping her nude’ thing for winning to her?
some other flaws-
the promotion for anybody alive when the Indians last won the pennant (which I’d say would be 1954, unless they want 1948) wouldn’t be that special, unless they couldn’t get 35 year old guys to show up (other than Dorn)
Sure, I figure the team didn’t soar until after the trading deadline, but a few of them could have been traded if necessary.
one last thought… the two sequels were bad. I saw the second one, I don’t need to see the third one. But with one in 89, two in 94 and three in 98, that must mean that Cerano was around 40 by III (unless he defected young)
I’m guessing that she couldn’t afford to be too blatant about trying to lose. Note that she had the players fooled for most of the movie until the GM came and told the manager. My guess is that the Indians were pretty strapped for talent and cash during the preceding offseason, so that she could field a team supposedly as bad as the one she did without anybody thinking she was intentionally tanking the season. Heck, suppose somebody built a team from walk-ons and career minor leaguers and had them play in Detroit next season, would anybody really notice? But if you start suspending the 2 or 3 players who manage to hit over .250, then it looks suspicious.
The manager wasn’t in on the ploy, so he wouldn’t have kept playing the closer if he’d blown every save opportunity.
Remember, she had to make the franchise look attractive to a new town, so she could move the team there. If she raised ticket prices ridiculously high when the team was performing so badly, it would look (and it would in fact be) like she was trying to milk the city for everything it had on the way out. That doesn’t exactly make a town giddy to build a stadium for your team.
Now this is a good point. She probably could have gotten Dorn to report to her, or one of the guys who was cut during spring training would have been glad to be a mole just to stay on the team. But there’d be the risk of discovery since the manager wasn’t in on the plan. That was really the drawback to her entire ploy.
Well, he had to stay in baseball until he was 35 at least, so he could win the Presidency on 24 Hey, Nolan Ryan played until he was 46, there are a couple middle relief guys floating around the league who were in the majors in 1979 so they’ve gotta be pretty old. No reason Cerrano couldn’t play at 40.
, who plays Pedro Cerrano in Major League. He’s the president of the United States in the second season of 24, and the first season revolved around his run in the presidential primary.
The whole premise of the movie was an Indians team with fictional players and management, wasn’t it? If you accept a fictional Indians, why not accept a fictional loss record?
Major League II wasn’t too bad, I thought. Major League III is the only new-release movie I’ve ever gone to see where my wife and I were the only two people in the theater. It was terrible.
Yeah, and if you can but a fictional team playing in a park that’s not even in Cleveland (I believe they used Milwaukee for the filming), then why not buy the rest of it?
Robbie my man, you’re not exactly Bill Veeck when it comes to sporting promotions, are you? The point of a promotion isn’t necessarily to make the product being promoted exclusive. Promotions for sporting events are designed to get people into the ballpark (where they’ll at least buy the overpriced beer, food, t-shirts, etc and hopefully have a good enough time to want to come back on their own dime), not to be rewards for a select few. That being the case, a free Indians ticket for everyone over 35 wouldn’t necessarily be a bad idea.
Now the Indians real promotion in 1974 of selling cups of beer for 10 cents each, now that was a bad promotion!
The catch-all answer to 1, 2 and 3 is that she’d run the risk of being suspended by the Commissioner’s Office. In the major leagues, you’re only allowed to destroy your own team if you’re a friend of the commissioner. (See: Loria, Jeffrey.) And even if they did approve such a scheme, they would never let you be that obvious about it. Imagine if the Expos suddenly benched Vladimir Guerrero and Jose Vidro; everyone would know they were trying to lose on purpose. It would be a PR nightmare for the major leagues if they didn’t do something about it.
The thing is, major league owners have actually done this! Bob Short, owner of the Washington Senators 2.0, deliberately screwed up his team in order to get out of his lease in Washington and move the team to Texas. Jeffrey Loria destroyed the Expos in order to get a buyout from MLB so he could buy the Marlins. Carl Pohlad tried to destroy the Minnesota Twins, but the contraction scheme never panned out and they accidentally started winning. The Giants for There are examples in other pro sports, too.
It’s not that far-fetched a concept - it’s based on real life experience.
Because Huizenga didn’t destroy the team with some sort of ulterior motive. He was just cheap and felt that the costs for winning the World Series outweighed the profits.
There’s a difference between not caring and deliberately sabotaging the team so you could move it or contract it.
The biggest “logical” problem in that movie had nothing to do with baseball. It had to do with the fact we were supposed to regard Tom Berenger as a loveable underdog in his attempts to woo a college professor.
He makes a point of saying “I make the major league minimum,” as if that’s supposed to make us feel sorry for him, and sympathize with him over the welathy, snooty academics his old girlfriend is hanging out with now.
Ha! Major league “minimum” makes ANY player far richer than 99% of the population at large, and considerably richer than the vast majority of college professors.
Underdog, my foot! The WORST player in major league baseball makes FAR more money than all but a few college professors. So, I had a hard time identifying with a supposed “little guy” like Berenger.
Going back to flaws in the movie, the really big one was the army barracks style housing for the players in spring training.
But “Major League” was a great movie in my book. I saw the movie in suburban Cleveland the weekend when it opened, and at the time the Indians really hadn’t had any success at all since the 1959 pennant race. When Cleveland won the game at the end of the movie and clinched the AL East people in the theater cheered like they were actually at the game.
I also wish that when Phoebe covered for Rachel by making a movie star the fictious father of her baby, she would have used Brad Pitt instead of James Brolin.
And as for the topic at hand, Jennifer Aniston is only 34 years old. She isn’t exactly a senior citizen!
You’re right, certainly, about the fact that he’s doing well compared to the rest of us. But the point was that the people in the room assumed he was a star with a fat contract, but then he has to reveal that he’s a washed-up player who barely made the roster. And he has to do this in front of his old girlfriend’s fiancee, too (and that one woman who was hot for him)! I think I could be sympathetic.
Hey, Nolan Ryan played until he was 46, there are a couple middle relief guys floating around the league who were in the majors in 1979 so they’ve gotta be pretty old. No reason Cerrano couldn’t play at 40.