Create
Tampa ‘Sandlot kid’ remembers James Earl Jones
It’s one of the most revered baseball films of the second half of the 20th Century. From 1993, The Sandlot, a wistfully nostalgic look at a gang of 12-year-old kids and their ragtag neighborhood team in the early 1960s, pushed the same buttons as A Christmas Story and The Wonder Years; even those viewers who couldn’t relate to the nostalgia element found it fun, and funny.
Writer/director David Mickey Evans’ movie featured a cast of unknowns as the boys; Denis Leary had a featured role as a disapproving stepdad. The other adult in The Sandlot, a mysterious neighbor known as Mr. Mertle, was played by James Earl Jones, who died Sept. 9 at age 93.
“With that smile, which everyone knows, he made you feel like ‘This guy is just a teddy bear – with the coolest voice in the world,’” remembers Hillsborough County resident Shane Obedzinski, 42. Obedzinski played Tommy “Repeat” Timmons, the youngest member of the sandlot team, so nicknamed because he repeated everything uttered by his big brother (Timmy).
Jones, says Obedzinski, was only on the Utah set for a single day. “Before he was on set, we all got to meet him in the morning. They put him in his trailer. Of course, we were all young and he was Darth Vader, so we were all eager to meet him. They let us all go in one by one and say hi.
“I walked in there, and he was either eating oatmeal or cereal. I say hello, nice to meet you – and he looks up happily and smiles and says ‘Hello!’ And it was almost goosebump-inducing. That voice, as everyone knows and talks about, just filled that small trailer. Almost felt like it shook it.
“And that’s all I needed. Because I could close my eyes, and Darth Vader just said hello to me. And then he said something like “I’m looking forward to working with you boys later.”
In the script, the whole gang went into Mr. Mertle’s tiny house to talk baseball; because the rooms were so small, this was changed – after an awkward rehearsal – to just two of the boys, Smalls and Benny, going in.
Shane Obedzinski. Photo: IMDB.
Obedzinski was 10 years old when 20th Century Fox made The Sandlot. He’d started acting at age 3, appearing in commercials and on Nickelodeon TV shows, filmed in Orlando. He’s in John Goodman’s sci-fi comedy Matinee, and in the Macaulay Culkin charmer My Girl.
Child actors, notoriously, have a hard time finding work as they grow taller and their looks and voices change; after The Sandlot, Obedzinski spent 10 years drumming for the Bay Area rock band Epic Turn. “During those moments, I thought that was my thing,” he says. “So I never really looked back at acting.”
He has been the proud owner of Times Square Pizza Co. in Brandon since 2010.
People still ask him about The Sandlot. Talks are underway, Obedzinski explains, to bring the characters back for a new movie, or even a TV series.
“We knew we made a good little film. We felt good about it. And then it just kind of went away. We know VHS and DVD kept it alive; people shared it with their kids and friends.”
In 2013, he was asked to be part of a 20th anniversary tour for the movie. In the Brandon Town Center mall, he remembers, “I saw me and boys on T-shirts and socks, and all this weird stuff. We didn’t understand that it had become this cult classic, or whatever you want to call it.
“We went on the tour, and hundreds if not thousands of people would want to meet us and share their stories with us.”
Every five years, the cast holds an event at the site where the movie was made. Tickets for the first gathering – about 6,000 tickets – sold out in a matter of minutes. “The movie just won’t stop.”
Photo: 20th Century Fox
