Catching Up With Scotty Smalls

Okay, sorry for the random post overload today but... well, I got nothin'. I just like posting random stuff, I guess! So here's one more:

My Afternoon with The Sandlot's Scotty Smalls (EW.com)

...it just so happens that April was the 15th anniversary of The Sandlot, so for fun, [Tom] Guiry and I began our afternoon yesterday at the Chelsea Piers batting cages to, you know, emulate The Babe.

When you’re an actor in a film that becomes a classic, it’s hard to live it down. For starters, Guiry's now 27, old enough to smoke his Camels and drink red wine (and yes, we drowned our sorrows in the latter following our poor display of connecting bat with ball). Guiry’s had many, many roles in the last decade and a half (Mystic River, U-571, The Black Donnellys, Law & Order), but people still geek out with him about The Sandlot. And he still gets recognized for it. “Little kids don’t miss a trick,” he says, as we walk to The Half King, a bar co-owned by author Sebastian Junger that Guiry's haunted with the L&O folks before. “I don’t think I look like Scotty Smalls anymore, but anywhere I go—if I go to the mall—and there’s a kid between 6 and 12, they notice me. They’re like, 'Smalls!' Even now.”

Growing up, Guiry used to hate the recognition, but now, as the father of an 8-year-old son named Michael, he embraces it. “When he was about 5, I tried to get him to watch The Sandlot and he’d be like, ‘Turn this off, this is daddy movie,’” says Guiry, with that same Scotty Smalls smile. “But then he got into little league when he was about 7, in Hawaii, and all of his friends liked the movie. He was like, ‘That’s my dad,’ and they didn’t believe him. So I was like, I’ll be there in a week. I go there and I pick him up from school. All of the kids get excited, 'It really is him.' It made my kid’s day, man. That was probably the happiest moment of all my life.”

Man! I didn't realize The Sandlot was such a huge hit. I mean, Robert and I quote it a lot ("FORRRRRR-EHHHH-VERRRRRR!") but I figured we're weird - we always do stuff like that. I'm really surprised kids my age made it a hit, much less that kids today watch it enough to recognize Tom Guiry when he picks up his kid!! I've never noticed ol' Tom-baby in anything else lately but he'll always be the way-less-cute-than-Benny kid with the stupid fish hat from The Sandlot to me. And, I guess, a lot of kids. :o)