Have You Considered Thinking Bigger?

Like, a Huge-r Amount Than Previous.

Considering the weeks in 2021 preceding it, the past five business days for the Mets have been spectacular. No scandals, besides Brandon Nimmo running the word “contagious” to the ground. Francisco Lindor continues to be a great dude, only now he’s doing it with Met color-adjacent hair. I envision a McDowell’s spokesperson future for Mr. Smile.

Tomorrow my age odometer will read different. Because of this I have been in a fog this month. Late Bloomers are plentiful. All the same I would rather have not had this written in permanent marker on my scouting report.

I have also been reaching into the past (more than usual), and rediscovered the 1987 straight-to-video adventure Think Big!

I watched this the other night for the first time since grade school. P.S. 206 packed a bunch of us one late afternoon in their, in retrospect, impressively big auditorium. For whatever reason there was time to fill between 2:15 and three in the afternoon, and someone on the staff decided Gary Carter, Mookie Wilson, and Roger McDowell would be the best, cheapest babysitters. I am 99 percent sure all three players were not on the Mets by the time I saw it, and 83 percent sure I did not know this at the time, because, yeah, there is a good chance this video was my first exposure to the Metsies.

In other words Think Big! is not something I want to mock. Besides, it’s for children who need to not go out and blaze doobies or write HOMEWORK SUCKS on their shoes or buy a Columbia House subscription or whatever parents feared most youths would do in those days. And there are a few lines for adults, like when Carter says he thinks he should speak to his agent.

It should also be noted Think Big! came out years before Doug Funnie’s hit single “Bangin’ on a Trash Can (Think Big)” and The Beach Boys’ excellent yet sadly not on Spotify tune “Make it Big” that opened Troop Beverly Hills (introducing Jenny Lewis!)

Here’s the synopsis:

A 30-minute musical adventure pits World Champions Gary Carter, Mookie Wilson and Roger McDowell against an unbeatable, computer-generated baseball team called the Megabats.  And as they map out their gameplan, they help their two young friends realize that if you want to be a winner in life, you've got to THINK BIG.

The best kind of adventure is a musical adventure, everyone knows that. Fortunately none of the players try to sing as if they were Darryl Strawberry.

I wonder if McDowell threatened to walk if he didn’t get the one guitar and he had to use a bat as an axe like the others.

McDowell is fun in this. He does a Pee Wee Herman impression at one point. He earned the Gibson.

In Big!, two kids keep losing to two other kids in a simulated baseball game. The winners somehow got away with giving their players 100 percent everything, and our three Met heroes teach the loser kids about the beauty of intangibles. At one point Carter actually asks if computers are so smart, how do they not know how hard players work. They should have shown this in the beginning of Moneyball.

I could write 10,000 words on Carter’s mug here. I personally prefer McDowell’s “Hey, yeah, that’s the ticket!” point and nod, but to each their own.

Carter told the story of how he needed knee surgery in high school and fought back to become a star athlete again. “Why did you choose to catch if he had knee trouble at a young age?” is something I would have asked, which is why my scenes were left on the cutting room floor.

Mookie taught the youngins’ that if you take care of yourself, live right, and practice “clean living” that you can do anything. You just got to believe in you.

Roger’s song was about teamwork. He relies on the eight dudes behind him to finish the job his sinkers started, you see.

So with this knowledge the kids came back down 4-0 in the 9th to win. Henry Aaron hit a grand slam to tie it, then Mookie singled, stole second, McDowell bunted him to third, and Kid smacked a sacrifice fly (don’t need a homer with one out!) to give them the victory. Why are you teaching us about smallball in a movie called Think Big!? Wasn’t Aaron’s grand slam much more important? Once again, got to wait for the Snyder Cut to hear me ask the pertinent questions.

This special was oh so very eighties, very more is more. Think big, pummel the Joneses into submission and win the capitalism game.

A far less cynical view is the superficial one: don’t set limits on yourself. That is a good lesson to children. Unfortunately, I can tell you with confidence the message did not stick very long if at all in my brain. I definitely could have used it as much as anybody in the early 90s, and the mid-90s, and through today. What did sink in was that adult men in Mets jerseys have fun and are respected by people in regular, high-collared attire. Bastards.