Ken Griffey Jr.’s ‘Little Big League’ Role, Explained

If you’re a baseball fan, there’s a good chance you’ve seen Little Big League. The 1994 film follows 12-year-old Billy Heywood, who wakes up one day and discovers he is now the owner and manager of the team, which gets him into many shenanigans with the team and with Major League Baseball officials who are unhappy with the idea of working for a child.

At the end of the season, the Twins play the real-life 1994 Seattle Mariners team in a sudden-death matchup for a postseason birth. The Mariners’ star player at the time, of course, was MLB legend and Hall-of-Famer Ken Griffey Jr., who steals the show at the end of the movie with a home run and eventual home-run robbery that would send the movie’s fictional Twins team packing. But his role in the movie almost never happened.

“Griffey was the dream, but we thought, Nah, he’ll never do it,” recalls Little Big League co-writer Adam Scheinman in a prior interview with Seattle Met. The part was initially written for Oakland Athletics legend Rickey Henderson, because the writers thought they’d never be able to snag someone as famous as Griffey Jr.

One of the more memorable moments in his time on screen was when he nailed a homer over the Metrodome’s famous right field wall, where the Twins played until 2009. Of course, he did it with a broken bat.

“I could see there was a little hairline crack in the bat. I go, you need another bat! And he says, No, that’s ok,” said actor Timothy Busfield, who plays fictional Twins first baseman Lou Collins, in an interview with What You Know. “And action! He hits the next pitch out with a broken bat in the right section, exactly where the director wanted it. Two swings, two balls in the upper deck. Literally, like he was playing pepper. He had that kind of control. It was stupid.”

Sadly, Little Big League was a box-office flop. Compared to major baseball blockbusters like The Sandlot and Angels of the Outfield, the movie only made $12 million on a $20 million budget. It was also released in close proximity to Disney’s The Lion King, which harmed its box office chances severely.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Today, the movie is recognized as a cult classic, it’s played on MLB Network all the time, and the actress who plays Billy’s mom has a son who ended up becoming a real-life player for the Chicago Cubs. How’s that for a happy ending?