Is The Sandlot a True Story? All About the Real-Life Moment That Inspired the Coming-of-Age Classic

“Legends never die,” and neither do cult classics like The Sandlot.

The 1993 coming-of-age movie tells the story of Scottie Smalls (Thomas Guiry), a kid who moves to California’s San Fernando Valley in the summer of 1962. He befriends a group of ragtag misfits who have baseball on the brain. Outside of scoring home runs, they also end up having a string of summer adventures, including rescuing a prized baseball from the jaws of a local monstrous dog.

In the decades since its release, The Sandlot has become a classic for multiple generations, and now it’s finding a new audience since it was added to Netflix in November 2025.

“At the end of the day, it’s something that has given people genuine joy, so I feel like if that’s my life and that character has to be something I have to keep alive, then that’s a blessing,” Chauncey Leopardi, who played Michael “Squints” Palledorous, told PEOPLE in November 2025.

“It makes people happy and offered us all tons of core memories,” he continued, referring to his Sandlot castmates.

The film was directed, co-written and narrated by David Mickey Evans, whose childhood inspired the family film.

Here’s everything to know about the true story of The Sandlot.

Is The Sandlot based on a true story?

The Sandlot is based on the childhood of David Mickey Evans, who co-wrote and directed the movie.

According to Evans, his mom moved him and his brother, Scott Evans, from Pennsylvania to California when he was “about 5.” His memories of growing up in the San Fernando Valley during the 1970s would later inspire his script for The Sandlot.

“It wasn’t the way my childhood was,” Evans told the Times Leader in July 2018. “It was the way I wish my childhood was, the way it should have been.”

The actual events involved Evans’ brother, who was sent by a group of neighborhood bullies over a wall to retrieve a baseball. Evans’ brother wound up getting bitten by a dog, and decades later, Evans would turn the bullies “into heroes” in his movie.

“It was cathartic,” he said about rewriting the real people.

Was “The Beast” in The Sandlot based on a real dog?

Yes, Hercules the dog, a.k.a. “The Beast,” was inspired by an actual animal from Evans’ childhood.

In real life, it was Evans’ brother, Scott, who had the close encounter with a neighborhood dog after a group of local kids helped him climb over a fence to retrieve a baseball.

When Scott made it over the fence, he grabbed the ball and came face-to-face with the canine, who was chained up.

“I ran to the ball, I picked it up. The dog was just snarling. You could literally feel … the slobbering all over the back of my hand,” Scott recalled on an October 2022 episode of The Baseball Bucket List Podcast. “I picked the ball up and I backed off and I started walking. And all the guys, like in the movie, they’re watching over the fence … they saw what I didn’t see.”

“They screamed ‘Run!’ because the dog was stretching that metal chain and it broke,” Scott continued. “So I had to run, of course.”

Scott scurried up a tree and almost made it back over the fence before the dog chomped down on his left thigh. He hit the dog on the head with the baseball, and the dog fell to the ground. Scott made it over the other side of the fence and fell to the sidewalk. His mom picked him up and took him to the hospital to get stitches.

According to Scott, the real dog was a German Shepherd-Doberman Pinscher mix named Hercules. Evans used an English Mastiff in the movie.

In the early 1990s, Evans got the idea for The Sandlot when he thought of Scott’s encounter with the dog from decades earlier.

“Driving home on the 405 Freeway, the incident when he went over that backyard fence and got bit came into my head and I said, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s a movie,’ ” Evans recalled Florida’s Hometown News in November 2019. “That was it. Just a kid, going over a fence to get a baseball and there’s a big bad dog back there. Sometimes that’s all you need.”

“Those characters that I wrote, I created them, they are all very special to me,” he added.

Where was The Sandlot filmed?

The Sandlot is set in California, but the movie was filmed almost entirely in Utah.

The film was shot in Salt Lake City, Ogden and Midvale, Utah, according to Visit Utah. The actual dusty sandlot where the boys played baseball is located at 1388 Glenrose Drive in Salt Lake City, per Salt Lake magazine.

“This was the first time I’d ever worked in Utah, and the people there have a work ethic that’s unrivaled,” Evans told Salt Lake magazine in February 2023. “The underlying values of the characters in the movie, I think, fit pretty perfectly with Salt Lake as I know it. I love it. The people there have just a magnificent take on family. It seems to me it’s a bit of a meritocracy. It’s a good-things-happen-to-those-who-do-good-things kind of vibe.”

Where can I watch The Sandlot?

The Sandlot is available to stream on Netflix and Disney+.