‘Mr. Baseball’ Is Hit With Little Leaguers

In “Mr. Baseball,” an over-the-hill first-baseman for the New York Yankees (Tom Selleck) is traded to a team in Japan, where his ugly-American, boorish manners cause an uproar. Rated PG-13.

*

Ryan, who is 12, went to see “Mr. Baseball” because he had been intrigued by the ads on TV.

Once you’ve seen the commercials for most of these made-for-the-masses movies, you’ve already seen most of the plot and heard the best lines.

But Ryan, a Little League second-baseman in Irvine, didn’t care. He loved every strike, slide and bunt. He particularly liked the “baseball is only a game” line.

“I liked it when they’re getting training by the coach, and they had to stay quiet, and (Selleck) said he should let them have fun and not worry about playing and winning,” Ryan said.

And he liked it when Mr. Baseball taught the Japanese players how to be more aggressive. “Instead of, like, not diving for the ball, he taught them so they could get more outs and go for the extra bases so they could get more runs and stuff,” he explained.

He didn’t seem as interested in one of the movie’s more subtle messages.

What about what the Japanese taught Mr. Baseball? I asked Ryan. “Remember how the girl said he should value acceptance and cooperation? Remember how he learned to work hard again? And how he apologized to the team in Japanese?”

“What they taught him?” he asked, puzzled. “I don’t remember.”

How about the way he made fun of the Japanese in the beginning?

“He wasn’t used to their culture,” Ryan said.

Ryan’s friend Robert, 12, also liked the movie. And so did nearly every kid in the theater, girls as well as boys. Two 14-year-old players from a girls’ softball team called Selleck “cute” despite the crevasses in his middle-aged face.

After the show, every little thumb was up. And judging by the guffaws after the sock-’em-in-the-jaw-type humor, so were the big thumbs.

Some young moviegoers squirmed and giggled at the bedroom and Japanese bath scenes. (“No peeking,” Selleck cautions his girlfriend, a line that broke up some of the boys.)

Ryan says sex scenes are just “realistic.” How does he know? He sees a first-run movie once a week, and his parents take him sometimes to R-rated movies.

The young audience was clearly familiar with the profanity in the film. When the film broke in the middle, a boy called, “Put it back on, you (expletive)!”

This baseball movie, like most baseball movies I’ve seen, wound up with a predictable, last-inning, big-game situation, a 3-2 count with a pitch to the protagonist.

Did they expect the same pat ending that I did? Yes. But it didn’t happen. And we all liked being surprised.