13 Movies You Loved As A Child (But Hate As An Adult)

7. Rookie Of The Year (1993)

Rookie Of The Year follows the meteoric rise of 12-year-old Henry Rowengartner, a baseball fan so bad at the sport that he manages to break his pitching arm playing Little League. When it heals, however, Henry finds that he now has super-human strength and can out-pitch the best players in the Major Leagues. Before news of the miracle spreads too far, he is snapped up by the struggling Chicago Cubs, who he helps take all the way to the World Series. Why wouldn't kids love that sort of story? Being good enough to join your favourite sports team is a dream shared by millions of 12-year-old boys the world over, and most would happily suffer through a broken arm to make that dream a reality. Home Alone villain Daniel Stern does portray a degree of comic sensibility in his debut as director, but the sentimental overkill and his tendency to overplay the value of his own character are much harder to stomach as an adult, and the same can be said of young Thomas Ian Nicholas' performance.