SABR 54: Listen to highlights from “Major League” Q&A with filmmaker David S. Ward
On Thursday, July 30, 2026, acclaimed filmmaker David S. Ward and author Jonathan Knight led a discussion about the classic baseball film Major League during the SABR 54 convention at the Hilton Cleveland Downtown hotel in Cleveland, Ohio. A screening of the film for SABR 54 attendees followed the Q&A.
Ward is the writer and director of Major League, the classic 1989 baseball film about the Cleveland Indians, along with a pair of sequels. The Indians were his favorite childhood team while he was growing up in northern Ohio. His screenplay for The Sting won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1974. He was also nominated for an Oscar in the same category in 1994 for Sleepless in Seattle (co-written with Nora Ephron and Jeff Arch). His other feature films include Cannery Row, King Ralph, and The Program.
Knight is the author of The Making of Major League: A Juuuust a Bit Inside Look at the Classic Baseball Comedy, a best-seller on the classic 1989 film. He has also written 10 other books on Cleveland sports history and other topics. He served as editor of the Classic Sports series from Kent State University Press and he is a graduate of Ohio University’s prestigious E.W. Scripps School of Journalism.
Here are some highlights:
On finding new audiences in the 21st century
- Ward: “Every kid — boys and girls now, because girls are playing a lot of softball and even hardball now — wants to see the well-known baseball movies because they’ve heard about them. So every year, we have a new group of young people seeing the movie. There are four or five of those: The Sandlot, Bull Durham, Major League. … There haven’t been a lot of baseball movies made lately, because they don’t do that well (internationally). They play pretty well in Japan, in South Korea, maybe in China a little bit. But not in the rest of the world. They don’t make many baseball movies anymore for that reason. So the best baseball movies were made many years ago. People who love baseball still watch those movies.”
On casting actors with varied baseball experience
- Ward: “When I was casting, I would take actors outside, I’d give them a glove, and we’d play catch. I saw how they caught and how they threw. I had one guy tell me he had played Triple-A ball in the Cardinals organization. I took him outside and he couldn’t catch the ball I threw him. First of all, actors will lie about this! They will tell you they can do things they can’t do. I traveled all the way to South Carolina to meet Tom [Berenger] in Beaufort. His mechanics were fine. I wasn’t able to hit with him yet. The only player, strangely enough, who admitted he had never really played baseball was Wesley Snipes. But Wesley was one of the best athletes I had ever met. He was a dancer, originally. Before Major League, he had done a small boxing film. I cast him because he was so talented and so funny and I figured, ‘We’ll figure this out.’ But he was the only one. Chelcie Ross [who played pitcher Eddie Harris] had a little arthritis in his arm, but he used to play baseball, and that’s why we made him a junkballer. … What we did was we had a two-week training camp that Steve Yeager ran. He was the former Dodger catcher who was our consultant. … Baseball involves very quick stops and starts. And if you’re not in shape to do that, you’re going to get hurt.”
On the crowd at Milwaukee County Stadium, where the film was shot
- Ward: “The most amazing experience I’ve ever had as a director was the night that we had 27,000 people there and to have everyone singing ‘Wild Thing.’ We crowded them all in the background behind home plate and down the first-base line. It was incredible. When [Pedro] Cerrano is running around the bases with the bat, they would stand and cheer. All of the actors came up to me and said, ‘This is the greatest experience I’ve ever had.’ You really don’t know what it’s like for baseball players to have the crowd behind them. They say they don’t hear it, they do. They’re human, they’ve gotta hear it. … But when that whole stadium was standing up and singing ‘Wild Thing,’ and those young girls came out and stood on the top of the dugout — we had six cameras and I turned to Rey [cinematographer Reynaldo Villalobos] and said, ‘Do we have a camera on that?’ … It just was remarkable. We had the lyrics to ‘Wild Thing’ on the scoreboard and they were all belting it out. … Today they’d put that crowd in digitally. We had ’em live.”
On the inspiration for Jake Taylor’s bunt in the final scene
- Ward: “Most sports movies come down to the final game and the big moment of victory. And I felt like if we’re going to end a baseball movie, let’s not have somebody hit the big home run. Let’s do it in a way that involves a couple of players doing something you may have never seen before. I had never seen a guy score from second base on a bunt that was still in play. And then I thought, Jake Taylor [played by Tom Berenger] is not going to give any indication to the third baseman that he’s going to bunt. So he calls his shot. Which to both the pitcher and Yankee fans feels like, ‘Oh my god, what a piece of pretension that is!’ So he calls his shot, gets some chin music, gets dusted off, and then he does it again. … I just felt like, I haven’t seen that before and I hope people appreciate a different way to end a sports movie.”
For more coverage of SABR 54, visit SABR.org/convention.
Originally published: August 10, 2026. Last Updated: August 10, 2026.