As we all know, major league sports are about the best of the best athletes coming together to compete with each other for fame and glory. But in the movie, Major League, the story takes on a very different direction from the typical sports movie genre. The film takes place in Cleveland, Ohio, where a former showgirl and now widowed Rachel Phelps (Margaret Whitton) is the new owner of the Cleveland Indians baseball club. Phelps hates the city of Cleveland and wants to move the team to Miami but in order to do so she needs the attendance in the stadium to go down. Her plan is to put the worst professional ballplayers on a team in order to break the lease from Cleveland.

Raggedy Baseball players from all around were called up to try out for the Indians as their season of losing approached. Some of the washed-up players were a young pitcher Ricky “Wild Thang” Vaughn who was a felon and pitched 100 mph with no control to third-baseman Roger Dorn, who was a former MLB star but won’t dive for the ball to prevent injury. You can hardly call any of these players professional, with them all having a major problem effecting how they play baseball. The team starts off the season very slowly but when they learn that Phelps is going to release them no matter if they win or not they get their act together and win the pennant. The irony of these shabby ballplayer that were hired to lose and won it all in the end is exactly the type of story and comedy people can relate to.

The film follows Aristostle’s definition of comedy by following characters who the audience can relate to very easily. Pair that with an antagonist that’s very wealthy and your in for a world of laughs that mocks the rich and praises the working class. By the end of the movie each character solved their problem and used their new found skill to propel the team further into victory. A majority of the comedy is driven from Phelp’s plan to get them lose but is actually the reason they decide to change their old ways and become real profesional baseball players in the end. And with every character trying to win just to spite their owner, it shows how people would react to being lied to in a comedic sense that uses realistic scenarios and unrealstic baseball players to convey how anyone can accomplish something if they try hard enough.