Watching Kevin Costner and the Yankees and White Sox enter the playing field through the corn last night was mesmerizing. The back and forth in the 9th inning kept everyone in their seats afraid to miss the action. It was a moment publicists would spend tons of money to create and last night it happened effortlessly for Major League Baseball. Let’s hope this is not the last time we see a game at the Field of Dreams. Let’s hope all athletic enterprises learn a marketing lesson from it.
The 1989 film Field of Dreams explored issues of faith, family, redemption, and healing through the magical time journey of Ray Kinsella into the past. The lives of Ray and Annie Kinsella was normal, although not the ones they had dreamed about, until one day Ray hears the iconic message coming from the corn fields on the farm he and his wife own. “If you build it, he will come.” It was a story that resonated with many Americans not only in 1989 but today with a vast majority of Americans and made the stars of the movie forever a part of American folklore.
It is a story about trust and believing in yourself. Being true to yourself no matter how much you are questioned by others as Ray was when building his field in the movie. It is a movie about faith, the knowledge that if you try and fail, there is satisfaction in the journey and the effort. And the movie demonstrated the magical feeling of accomplishing something no one else thinks is possible.
In the movie Ray started hearing voices in his head that led him to plowing under a perfectly good corn field and started construction on a baseball field. Ray believed and hoped that through building a baseball field, he could bring back his deceased father’s hero, Shoeless Joe Jackson, the player accused, and many felt unjustly suspended from baseball because of his alleged involvement in the Black Sox scandal during the 1919 World Series.
Ray followed his calling even though it put his family in near financial ruin. One miraculous day a figure appears from the surrounding corn field, Shoeless Joe Jackson himself. Shoeless Joe spoke to Ray about how Joe squandered his life after the scandal and admitted that the only place he ever felt at ease was on the baseball field. Shoeless Joe loved the game and what the game meant to him and his teammates. He asked Ray if his former teammates, who were also kicked out of baseball because of the scandal could visit, too.
Ray hoped that by building the field and bringing his father’s hero, Shoeless Joe, to the field, his father would come. Ray is told by the voice in his head to “Go the distance.” He travels to Boston to meet up with Terence Mann, a highly popular writer, who has become disillusioned and disturbed with the state of America and retired from public life. They make a trip to Chisholm, Minnesota, meet up with Moonlight Graham and all return to Iowa on the eve of the Kinsella’s farm being foreclosed.
Ray has an epiphany and decides to save the farm by charging people to come watch a bunch of dead and disgraced baseball players compete alongside others who had not been banned. It is humorous that Ty Cobb was refused permission to play not because he was a racist or prone to violence, but because he was a “son of a bitch”. Even disgraced former players evidently had standards.
Characters in the film like Doc “Moonlight” Graham bring a magical feel to the story as they intertwine history with modern day reality in a way that seems so believable. Annie, Ray’s wife, epitomizes the strong women of today when she shuts down a neo-fascist mom who proposes banning classic books like The Wizard of Oz and The Diary of Anne Frank. Terence Mann portrayed by James Earl Jones is a strong intellectual man, who although lost, has found his way back through faith. Ray Liotta, as Shoeless Joe, was amazing in the role as he brought to life the humor, anguish, passion, and heartbreak of Shoeless Joe Jackson’s life.
Field of Dreams draws us into the world of generational differences, of complex relationships between fathers and sons, husbands and wives, and the relationships and nurturing that exists between them. It takes many of us back to our youth when things were simpler and our lives less hectic. A time we often dream about but seldom get the opportunity to relive. The film talks about unfinished business we often encounter as we move through our lives. It gives hope that goals unfulfilled and dreams unaccomplished can someday be completed. It is a film about compassion and forgiveness.
Mostly it is about baseball, the all-American sport which so many of us grew up with and learned life lessons on the field alongside our family and friends. Father and son having a catch on a Field of Dreams is a magical moment all of us wish we could have one more time. Watching Kevin Costner play catch last night on the field before the game brought back memories to millions of people,
The MLB game last night between the Chicago White Sox and the New York Yankees played out like it was a movie directed by Field of Dreams Phil Alden Robinson. It had everything you could have wished for in a sequel. Stars, pageantry, beautiful weather, a great crowd, an entrance as great as any team entering a playing site could ever make, history, and a finish that provided drama and suspense. The contest showed us all the majesty of baseball, how it, like life is never over until it is over. It was a home run night for the MLB.
The one constant in life is baseball!
Oh Geez Sports 