Film · 1989 · Films · 1980s
Major League
Scored from 118 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
Rachel Phelps inherits the Cleveland Indians from her late husband and wants the franchise moved to Miami, which the lease permits only if attendance collapses — so she stocks the roster with rejects and plays for the worst season in club history. Her recruits include Jake Taylor, a catcher with ruined knees coming back from the Mexican League, ex-convict pitcher Ricky Vaughn, who throws hard and nowhere near the plate, voodoo-practising slugger Pedro Cerrano, who cannot hit a curveball, and contract-protected third baseman Roger Dorn, all handed to career minor-leaguer Lou Brown to manage. When the players work out what the front office is actually doing, spite becomes their organising principle. David S. Ward's baseball comedy, called by broadcaster Harry Doyle.
Released in 1989, Major League is a comedy and sport film. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. Its certificate is R. It runs 1h 47m. Inside comedy it is classed as Dramedy.
Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 2,246 of whom clear the calibration test. 3,140 other films from the 1980s form the cohort it is ranked inside. The calibrated figure is built from 118 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 122 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where Major League lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 1980s (3,141 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 118.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
