Major League, the perfect sports movie, was released in 1989. Known mostly for foisting Charlie Sheen and Wesley Snipes into the realm of movie stardome, the film combined a classic underdog tale with fish-out-of-water characters in a buddy comedy while managing to predict future trends like a sci-fi story. A little more than three decades after its release, the film's conceit is playing out in Oklahoma City.
For those who have not seen the movie, the heroes are the Cleveland Indians, a real Major League Baseball team (now called the “Guardians” – they have uniforms and everything) that had perennially been at the bottom of their division. As cellar dwellers, the financial condition of the team was awful and the team’s new owner, Rachel Phelps—a former exotic dancer that inherited the team from her deceased husband—introduced the concept of “tanking” in order to improve the team’s long-term viability. Her plan was to make the team as bad as possible to invoke a contractual clause that would allow her to move the team from Cleveland to Florida.
Her blueprint for accomplishing this will sound familiar to an OKC Thunder fan. The experienced players on the roster were jettisoned and replaced with young, unknown players. The only high-paid players that remained were overpriced veterans whose salaries dwarfed their production. After releasing their training camp roster, the Cleveland fans reacted very much like the Thunder fanbase while watching the first pre-season basketball game: