The Stars Of The Sandlot Have Changed A Lot Since 1993

Tom Guiry was just 11 years old when he was cast as new kid in town Scotty Smalls—the New York native's feature film debut. Guiry, who started acting to deal with his shyness, landed an agent after she saw him in a local play. The Sandlot was one of his first big auditions, but he didn't initially get the part. "They hired somebody else," Guiry told The Huffington Post, "it was neck-and-neck. I didn't get it, so I came back home." Luckily for Guiry, the other actor didn't work out, so he came back to screen test again, and he knocked it out of the park.

Guiry followed up his work in The Sandlot with a role in the 1994 family film Lassie, and yet another baseball film, The Last Home Run, in 1996. However, the shy kid eventually blossomed into an actor who's mostly made a career out of playing tough men. He appeared alongside Sean Penn and Tim Robbins in Mystic River, went to war in Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down, navigated the Irish mob in the TV series the Black Donnellys, and played a fur trapper alongside Tom Hardy and Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant. An incident with the law in 2013 notwithstanding, Guiry mostly lives a quiet life with his wife and kids in New Jersey between roles.

That doesn't stop The Sandlot from bringing him back into the news every now and again, though. In 2018, for example, he and Patrick Renna made headlines after they ran into an unsuspecting stranger sporting a t-shirt with the film's signature line, "You're killing me, Smalls!" The really humorous thing about it was that the wearer didn't seem to get the reference — or who he was taking a picture with — so it was the actors who were more excited about the chance encounter. Guiry credits the "nostalgia factor" and continued relatability of the movie with why it still resonates with audiences more than a quarter of a century later.

Patrick Renna stole bases and hearts as Hamilton "Ham" Porter the second he uttered the line "You're killing me, Smalls!" The actor was just 13 when he made his film debut in The Sandlot and had a blast. "I don't even necessarily remember the filming as much as I remember the times we didn't film," he told Us Weekly. "Running around with all the guys and raising hell in Salt Lake City and going to movies...things like that."

He reunited with Sandlot castmate Chauncey Leopardi two years later in the soccer flick The Big Green, following a turn opposite comedian Pauly Shore in Son in Law. Renna continued working throughout the '90s appearing on favorites like Home Improvement, Boy Meets World, and The X-Files and a string of movies. He also had a recurring role on Boston Legal and more recently appeared in the Kickstarter-funded film Bad Roomies, which he co-produced.

Renna still doesn't mind being recognized by Sandlot fans. As he told MTV, "99 percent of the time, it's people that are remembering a great moment in their childhood and they're just telling me how much it meant to them...it's pretty awesome." In addition to taking on an entirely different role as a new father to his son Flynn with wife Jasmin, Renna also recently returned to the screen in a big way with a recurring guest role in the Netflix wrestling dramedy GLOW. In the show, Renna appeared as a superfan of the titular team named Cupcake. Considering his second-most famous line from The Sandlot came when he ridiculed a teammate by shouting, "You play ball like a girl!" it's a little poetic to see him stanning some female athletes in his newer work.

Yeah, yeah. Like more than one of his Sandlot castmates, Marty York made his screen debut in the film, which he followed with small parts on Saved by the Bell: the College Years and a couple of episodes of Boy Meets World. Other than Sandlot fan events and a 2015 episode of Adult Swim's The Eric Andre Show, the place he's appeared the most has been gossip site TMZ, which reported he was arrested for alleged domestic violence in 2009. Since his "little league days," York has transformed from scrawny kid to buff personal trainer, and at one point he was working on developing a line of workout supplements he dubbed "Beast Juice"—a reference Sandlot fans will recognize as being inspired by the fearsome dog the crew has to face.

Despite his attention-getting physique, York has expressed some gratitude about his relative anonymity in adulthood, when compared to his more recognizable former co-stars. "I think me and Vic [DiMattia] don't really get recognized as much as like — we went out to dinner with Pat Renna, who plays Ham. That dude looks exactly the same," he told Philly Voice. "He can't walk down a street without people driving by and yelling, 'You're killing me, Smalls!'"

Grant Gelt got his start with a string of TV appearances on Knots Landing, Tales from the Crypt, Northern Exposure, and Blossom and others, making his film debut in the Steven Seagal action movie Marked for Death in 1991. However, The Sandlot gave him the biggest role of his short acting career. He fondly recalls making the film, especially the night when the boys snuck into a screening of the R-rated hit Basic Instinct. Gelt has since started a new chapter in his career, moving from artist management into a senior executive role at the artist-to-fan engagement platform Fullscreen Direct.

He may not have been able to handle a certain treehouse vacuum cleaner, but Victor DiMattia certainly cleaned up when it came to booking acting jobs. Prior to playing Timmy Timmons, DiMattia appeared on a number of TV shows, including Family Ties, Punky Brewster, Designing Women, and Growing Pains. He made his big-screen debut in Turner & Hooch with Tom Hanks and worked with rapper Vanilla Ice on his ill-fated screen debut, Cool As Ice. 

DiMattia quit acting a few years after The Sandlot and pursued other interests, including playing in a band. He works as a bartender in L.A., writes comedy, and hangs out on occasion with castmate Marty York, in addition to putting in regular appearances at Sandlot fan events. In 2018, his cinematic career began to show new signs of life when he starred in an indie film called Get Married or Die. "I'm still doing some acting and even some other stuff, kind of behind the scenes, in film," he told Philly Voice of his reemerging presence in Hollywood. On top of that, he also runs a pop culture-centered podcast called Vic in a Box, which he launched in mid-2017 with — surprise, surprise — a commentary segment on being part of The Sandlot.

Veteran character actor Art LaFleur had some pretty legendary cleats to fill when he accepted the role of The Babe in The Sandlot, but he'd done his homework. "I had just read a biography of Babe Ruth," he told SB Nation, "So when I went into the audition I went in as Babe. I wore a newsboy kind of hat. I went in with a cigar...I used some of the slang terms that he used." Impressed, director David Mickey Evans hired him on the spot to play the legendary slugger who visits Benny the Jet in a dream. LaFleur already had a couple of baseball films under his belt, comedy Mr. Baseball and the classic Field of Dreams, when he joined The Sandlot team, making him something of a sports film MVP.

Initially, he moved to California to be a writer, but a friend convinced him to try acting instead. LaFleur studied with famed teacher, Gordon Hunt (father of Oscar-winner Helen Hunt), and by the late '70s, he'd already secured small parts on Charlie's Angels, Lou Grant, and M*A*S*H. He's worked fairly consistently ever since, appearing in cult classics like The Blob, family fare like The Santa Clause 2, and episodes of House, Home Improvement, The Mentalist, and Key and Peele. Though it was just a "one-day job," LaFleur says he gets recognized for The Sandlot more than anything else in his career.

By the time Karen Allen appeared as the empathetic mom in The Sandlot, she'd already cemented her place in fans' hearts as Katy in 1978's classic frat comedy Animal House and Indiana Jones' gal pal Marion Ravenwood in 1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark. Spunky and likable, Allen made for an affable sparring partner to Bill Murray in Scrooged, and turned on the waterworks in John Carpenter's underrated sci-fi drama Starman opposite Jeff Bridges. As the '80s wound down, Allen turned her attention back to theatre, working on and off Broadway. 

After her son was born in 1990, Allen took smaller roles, such as her work in The Sandlot, so she could spend more time with her family. In 1993, she and her son moved to the Berkshires region of Massachusetts into a converted barn she'd purchased. She got involved in the local theatre scene, acting in and directing plays at the Berkshire Theatre Festival and teaching classes. Allen opened a yoga studio in Great Barrington, Massachusetts in 1995 and a store called Karen Allen Fiber Arts in 2005, featuring what she told the New York Times were her "first ecstasy": textiles, something she studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology during her early twenties in New York. 

Steven Spielberg managed to lure her back for the fourth Indy flick, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in 2008, but Allen has mostly remained happily out of the spotlight.