Thirty years ago this July, a proper name entered the lexicon of baseball fans and film enthusiasts.
Henry Rowengartner.
For many, the name will elicit memories from childhood and a period when several prominent baseball films were released, including “Angels in the Outfield,” “Little Big League,”The Sandlot” and “Rookie of the Year.”
“Rookie of the Year” is a family comedy that centers around twelve-year-old Henry Rowengartner, or, Gardenhoser, Rosinbagger and several other erroneous names fictional Chicago Cubs manager Sal Martinella (played by Albert Hall) calls him throughout the film.
After breaking his arm in a schoolyard accident, Rowengartner discovers that he’s been gifted with a powerful right arm that can hit triple-digits on the radar gun. While attending a Cubs game with his two friends, Rowengartner drew the attention of the front office after he unleashed a throw from the bleachers to the catcher after the opposing team homered. The struggling Cubs signed Rowengartner to a major league contract in hopes of turning their season around.
Actor Thomas Ian Nicholas portrayed Rowengartner, in what was his first starring film role.
The young actor starred alongside Gary Busey, who played aging ace Chet Steadman, Amy Morton, who played Rowengartner’s mom Mary, and Daniel Stern, who played zany pitching coach Phil Brickma and also directed the film.
The idea of of a pre-teen getting to play Major League Baseball and help lead a club to the postseason is a far-fetched dream that so many kids can’t help but to fantasize over. For Nicholas, getting to step foot on the mound at historic Wrigley Field in front of 35,000 fans in Rowengartner’s debut made him forget that he was even shooting a movie.
“I always say that in that moment, even though I’m a trained actor, I wasn’t really acting,” said Nicholas. “To be walking out to the mound and for two minutes I would say that I pretty much believed that I was Henry because those 35,000 people were chanting my character’s name.”
Beyond the baseball theme, “Rookie of the Year” is also about family, particularly the connection of mother and son. In the film, Rowengartner is raised by his mother, which Nicholas connected with in his own personal life having been raised by a single mother.
The actor will be busy this year, making appearances to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the film, while continuing to act, produce and perform with his band.
For Nicholas, the nostalgia and love the film still garners thirty years later gives him hope that a sequel could still be in the works.
“This is the year, thirty years in, this is the one to finally go forward.”
I had the privilege of speaking with Nicholas where he discussed auditioning for the role, shooting at Wrigley Field and hopes of making a sequel.
MMO: How did you come to secure the role of Henry for “Rookie of the Year”?
Nicholas: Even though it’s thirty years, or thirty-one that I was auditioning for it, I remember it like it was yesterday. It was a crazy process because the audition process was vastly different than it is now, we were doing everything in person. There were no virtual auditions over Zoom.
I remember that I auditioned for it and didn’t get a callback, and I was in the process of switching agencies. I knew they had been searching in L.A., New York and Chicago.
I found out later that Daniel Stern was very, very close to hiring his own son, who’s ironically named Henry. Henry Stern is a now a senator in California, he’s a couple of years younger than me.
I switched agents and the new agent said, “I have an audition for you for ‘Rookie of the Year.’” I said, ‘I already went on that,’ and she said, “They obviously don’t remember you. Go again.”
I went and got a callback and I remember meeting with Daniel Stern. It was like the perfect storm but working in my favor that I got two opportunities instead of just one.
MMO: Did you have any formal experience playing baseball prior to shooting the film?
Nicholas: No. [Laughs.] I’ve been acting since 1986 and grew up, similar to Henry, in a single parent household with just my mom. Things were more focused on the arts and entertainment than they were sports. I liked to play sports but I didn’t formally play on any teams.
Of course, when I got the job, I immediately linked up with a neighbor of mine and learned the mechanics of pitching so that I could throw sixty feet, six inches and throw a strike.
It was very easy to tap into Henry’s bad performance in Little League and more challenging to be good.
MMO: You mention that you worked with a neighbor on the mechanics of pitching. Was there any other training you underwent for the role?
Nicholas: That was the main thing. I had a couple of weeks before I flew to Chicago and I went out every day until I could actually throw from that distance.
When we got into town, I feel like we did a couple of games. Some actors that were playing some of the players had actually played on major league teams before. But that was about it.
Of course, that all went out the window when Daniel Stern wanted to get this crazy arm thing going for Henry, which went completely against the mechanics of pitching. If you know anything about the mechanics, Henry is essentially short-arming it. Tiger Balm was my best friend on set. [Laughs.]
MMO: One of the funnier scenes in the film is when Henry taunts the Dodgers pitcher after drawing a walk in his first career plate appearance. That pitcher is Tim Stoddard, who appeared in close to 500 major league games for his career. I read that he also acted as the film’s baseball adviser. Can you talk about his role?
Nicholas: He was there every day. I might also add that the ring at the end, which everyone always asks about, was actually Stoddard’s 1983 Orioles [championship] ring. We had to put a lot of duct tape on the bottom because his hands are massive and mine are not, especially when I was twelve.
It’s funny, there are a lot of questions about the hidden-ball trick scene and whether or not Henry was balking. I remember Tim instructing me where to put my feet so that it wasn’t a balk. The shot that they used in the film you can’t see where my feet are, so it’s a big question amongst baseball advocates as to whether or not Henry was balking. But I assure you, I was not.
Tim used to play for the Cubs, and I ran into him a couple of years back at the Cubs Convention. That was cool because I hadn’t seen him in like twenty-eight years.
MMO: Have you kept in touch with many of your co-stars over the years?
Nicholas: This year is the thirtieth anniversary and the Cubs are doing an official Henry Rowengartner Day. It’s advertised on their website and they’re making 10,000 bobbleheads of Henry in the floater pitch position. That’s on July 2 at Wrigley.
I’ve been going out every year to throw out the first pitch since 2008; it’s sort of an annual tradition. That will be part of that tradition but now [with] an official Henry Rowengartner Day. They’re showing the movie at Gallagher Way just outside the stadium afterward.
As far as keeping in touch with people, at the twenty-fifth anniversary they invited Amy Morton, who played my mom, and is on “Chicago P.D.” She came out to do the first pitch. She didn’t want to throw so we ended up doing this whole reenactment of the floater. I still have a video of it and it’s a pretty awesome moment. I even wrote “Mary” in my glove and they did a close-up shot of it. I threw a strike as a floater and the guy who was catching for me barely moved his glove. It was the perfect floater pitch!
I’ve been in touch with Daniel Stern starting a couple of years ago. I mentioned that his son, Henry, is a senator here in California. My son, Nolan River, booked the movie “Old,” the M. Night [Shyamalan] movie that came out a couple of years ago. This was 2020 and he needed a passport to go to the Dominican Republic to shoot the movie. During Covid, there was no expediting of passports. Danny and Henry actually linked us up with our local senator and helped expedite Nolan’s passport. Talk about a full circle of events of fathers and sons helping fathers and sons!
MMO: How many months did you shoot for?
Nicholas: We shot for three months in Chicago: September, October, November. I believe there were fifty-five shooting days, five-day weeks. I worked fifty-four of them.
MMO: What was it like juggling school and shooting the film?
Nicholas: It’s government regulated that you have to do three hours of school every day. It was a little bit challenging.
Wrigley Field is set up so much differently now, but at the time, where we were parked with the trailers was a good fifteen-minute walk. Sometimes I spent more time walking to the school trailer and walking back than I did school. I can only imagine what kind of challenge that was for the producers!
For me, it was easy. It was just go here, go there, do this. That’s definitely a challenge when you’re working with kids and the amount of time they’re allowed to shoot based on their age. You have to follow all the rules.
MMO: Another scene from the film that stands out is your ability to echo your voice as you did early on in the film when Henry is doing laundry in the basement. How did you learn to do that, and was that something you ad-libbed?
Nicholas: Everyone loves the echo. My mom and I had some roommates around that time, and one was this writer/performer/stand-up comedian, who could do this echo. He could also throw his voice which I never learned how to do. You could literally be standing in front of him and it sounded like it was coming from behind you! He was the one who taught me how to do that echo.
In that scene, it was just one of those things where because Henry was announcing his name I just kind of threw it in and Danny loved it. So it stayed and what you hear is what I did live.
MMO: What was Daniel Stern like both as a co-star and director of the film?
Nicholas: Danny’s amazing. He’s not the zany character that we know him for in things like “Home Alone” and even as Brickma in “Rookie of the Year.” He’s just a sweetheart of a man and was a great director.
Being that he is a talented actor, both in comedy and drama, he really understood how to communicate what he wanted to us as the actors.
I had a fantastic time working with him. I know it’s been thirty years but I would love to work with him again.
MMO: What are your memories of shooting at Wrigley Field? Is it true that the first time they shot at Wrigley was in between an actual double-header?
Nicholas: Yeah, it was actually three days before we started the official principal photography. We were in town for a couple of weeks for rehearsals and some of those baseball games that we did in parks and things with some of the team.
They had an opportunity to shoot on September 19; it was a doubleheader of the Cardinals versus the Cubs. We had ten minutes to shoot all of those shots.
I still remember Danny getting on a wireless microphone pacing through the outfield and telling the crowd, which was 35,000 people, that we were going to shoot this movie and this twelve-year-old kid was going to have this fastball and we were going to take the Cubs to win the World Series. And let me tell you something, those Cubs fans cheered like the Cubs had just won the World Series in that moment!
I still have fond memories of that moment from walking from the bullpen to the mound. Danny got the entire 35,000 crowd to chant Henry’s name. It was such a surreal moment!
I always say that in that moment, even though I’m a trained actor, I wasn’t really acting. To be walking out to the mound and for two minutes I would say that I pretty much believed that I was Henry because those 35,000 people were chanting my character’s name. That full 360 Steadicam shot around me is legit.
We did get to shoot there in October for an entire month. They would put ads in the paper and people would come fill the stands. If there wasn’t a Bears game, we’d get like 5,000 people in the stands. If there was a Bears game, we’d get like 300-500 people.
MMO: What was Gary Busey like on set?
Nicholas: Gary is a character. He has a lot of energy! The energy that you think he has, he has ten times more. He’s like a giant kid.
I didn’t get a lot of time with him outside of the actual scenes that we were doing because, like we were talking about before, I was doing school. I would really only come to set when they were ready to shoot, so I had just the rehearsals and scenes.
Gary was really nice to me and I think he had more energy than me at that time. You’d think as a twelve-year-old kid I’d be the one bouncing off the walls!
MMO: I heard a podcast you were interviewed on where you talked about the climax of the film where Henry floats the pitch to strike out Alejandro “Butch” Heddo (played by the late Tom Milanovich) to send the Cubs to the National League Championship Series. You said that when you looked to the stands to find Amy Morton, you saw your real mother instead. Can you expand on that?
Nicholas: That is true. What transpired at that time was we were shooting that scene and I don’t think for that moment Amy was on set. That was just my coverage which happens a lot of times. It’s like the irony of Casey Affleck playing my brother in “American Pie.” The only time I ever met him was at the premiere. I was never there in person with him when we were shooting those scenes. The script supervisor read his lines, and vice versa.
They had this fifteen-foot ladder that I had at eye-line so when I looked to the stands, my look was in the right direction for the camera.
I can’t remember who was up there for the rehearsal, but when we went to do the take, I looked up to the eye-line and they put my mom, my actual mom, on top of the ladder. It was a surprise to me but it helped me tap into that emotion because my mom is similar to Henry’s mom and a big supporter of my career.
I remember afterward she was like, “I’m sorry, they asked me to do it!” I wasn’t expecting it but it was a nice surprise.
MMO: Do you have a favorite scene?
Nicholas: There’s a lot of great moments. I’ve often said that the scene of walking out to the mound is one of the most memorable, but that’s not necessarily for the acting part of it.
I would say because drama is more my forte, my favorite moment was the scene with Amy Morton after she punches Jack Bradfield (played by Bruce Altman) and then we have the heart-to-heart of who Henry’s dad really was. He reveals that he already knew because grandma told him in the second grade.
That whole moment was really great. Amy is such an incredible actor. That’s probably one of my favorites, and more dramatic moments of the film.
MMO: Conversely, was there a scene that was toughest to shoot?
Nicholas: The baseball stuff. My heart goes out to the people that were just coming to volunteer to be in the stands, because it was October in Chicago. It’s not very warm in October in Chicago.
We had huge parkas on, me, along with all of the other actors and people in the stands. When the camera is up, we all had to take off our coats and pretend it was a warm summer day or night. That was definitely the challenge.
The other challenge, of course, was pitching and trying to make sure I had time to warm up my arm. Thinking about the mechanics of baseball, a lot of times you’re not throwing cold. You don’t want to go to the gym and work out cold, you want to warm up. We’d sneak those warmup pitches in any chance we could get before the scenes just to get my arm ready.
MMO: There were a few big league stars that made cameos in “Rookie of the Year” in Pedro Guerrero, Bobby Bonilla and Barry Bonds. Did you get to interact with them much?
Nicholas: I was there for all the times they were on set. I would say the coolest experience for me was Barry Bonds stayed after and watched me shoot a scene and gave me a compliment. As a kid, even though I wasn’t a sports guy, everyone knew who those players were. It was an awesome moment of like, ‘My God, Barry Bonds just complimented my acting!’
When we were doing promo, I got to go to a few other baseball stadiums and got to go out to Shea Stadium.
MMO: There’s been talk over the years about making a sequel to “Rookie of the Year.” Do you have any insight into those talks? And what are your thoughts on making another film?
Nicholas: There’s been some interest. Obviously, things changed hands because this was a Fox movie but now Disney owns Fox. It’s kind of an odd thing where all the people that I know who worked there thirty years ago have all changed now.
I’ve talked with Danny about it and there was a moment when the Cubs won the World Series that I was in talks with Fox, but they were going to maybe do a reboot and not a sequel. That kind of came and went and didn’t happen.
Nostalgia is big right now; I don’t know if there’s another possibility. I keep talking about it in interviews and maybe someone at Disney will read one of them and go that’s a good idea, we should do that!
My son is eleven so he’s right around the age; turning twelve at the end of this year. This is the year, thirty years in, this is the one to finally go forward.
But again, it’s not really my call since the studio owns all the rights and it’s a little convoluted. I’m definitely interested in it. Or, maybe it’s like the idea of where I talked to Danny about maybe we just leave well-enough alone and have the nostalgia be. I don’t really know.
MMO: I think it would be great to have you and your son as part of the sequel. Especially considering he’s right around the age that you were when you shot the film.
Nicholas: I agree with you, Mathew. I think it’s still sort of in the ether. Maybe doing this Rowengartner Day at Wrigley, and Disney is involved in the approval of that, so maybe this will kind of open up their eyes to the interest in things.
MMO: Why do you think the film still holds up?
Nicholas: There’s an interesting part when I was meeting with one of the producers to try and get the long-awaited sequel going, back pre-2016. I was like, ‘If the Cubs don’t win the World Series it’s okay, we can do the sequel. And if they do, then it’s art imitating life because the Cubs have their win just like they did in the film.’
We were talking about the life of the movie and our opinions as to why it’s kind of carried on. There were a bunch of kids’ baseball films at the time; that was just one of four. People mix them up between “The Sandlot,” “Rookie of the Year,” “Angels in the Outfield,” and “Little Big League.”
It’s funny, too, because on the films I’m working on that I produce, on my film “Adverse” that I produced for Lionsgate, I hired Luke Edwards who was in “Little Big League.” And just recently for my TV show “Underdeveloped” that I just produced and starred in, I hired Luke again.
We still joke about how when we were growing up, people would say the wrong baseball movie name. People would tell him they loved him in “Rookie of the Year”, and I would sometimes get “Little Big League.” We got to the point where we just stopped correcting people because they were just saying that they loved it and that was good enough, it didn’t matter if they got the details right.
For me, at the end of that conversation, what it had was that mother/son relationship and it really had the mom having so much strength. And that’s maybe why it carried on to a different level because it had this other element. Amy Morton is so great in the movie portraying that role and that strength as a single parent.
I’m a big believer in single parents, I have my mom who is my mentor and hero in a lot of ways. The person who I rely on, like Henry relied on his mom.
MMO: You mentioned July 2 at Wrigley Field. Are there any other events currently planned to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary?
Nicholas: My band (Thomas Nicholas Band) plays in Chicago and all around Illinois. We play everywhere but we do a lot of shows there. I will probably be playing a concert with my band around that time.
My normal sort of annual tradition is I go out, throw out the first pitch, and then my band plays across the street from Wrigley at HVAC Pub. I’m talking with them and trying to decide if we should do it before this year because they’re showing the movie at Gallagher Way on the big screen outside of it. It’s a Sunday night so I don’t know if people are going to come party with my band on a Sunday after the game and after the movie. [Laughs.] We might do it beforehand.
I’m a big fan of the Chicago dog. The closest Chicago dog from Wrigley is probably about a ten-minute walk at a place called Wrigley Dog. I’ve had it in my mind that you can make a Chicago dog at Wrigley inside the stadium, but there isn’t one right there in the area. One of my other harebrained ideas is to open up a Henry’s hot dog spot right there in Wrigleyville.
I’ve been talking about it for five years like the sequel, so maybe this is the year it all comes together.
MMO: What other projects are you involved with?
Nicholas: I like to keep busy. I talked about “Adverse,” my film that came out with Lionsgate that you can see now on streaming platforms. I’m very proud of my work in that. It’s very different from “Rookie of the Year,” it’s a dramatic film, a crime drama.
I have a TV show with Tom Arnold and Mark Pellegrino that we just shot; we’re in post-production now. I did that song with Bowling for Soup that’s a parody of “1985” called “1999.” My band is running around, still playing shows, and working on my seventh album.
I frankly just don’t like to sleep with my music career, producing career and being a dad. I drink a lot of coffee. [Laughs.]
MMO: Thanks very much for taking the time to reminisce about the film, Thomas.
Nicholas: Mathew, it’s my pleasure, man. I really enjoyed speaking with you.
Follow Thomas Ian Nicholas on Twitter, @TINBand
Check out Nicholas’ website here.
