Earlier this year we lost a baseball legend who was forced into retirement and, as of this writing, still barred from ever being in the Baseball Hall of Fame because of his choice to gamble on the sport that made him famous. He is considered one of the best to ever play the sport but his gambling problems earned him a permanent ban from the sport and left his amazing career forever marred by the scandal. Pete Rose may have been one of the greatest players of all time but now he will always be remembered for that scandal and for all the years that he begged his fans and Major League Baseball to forgive him. To this date it is a controversial opinion whether or not he should be allowed into the Hall of Fame because of this. It’s already too late to let him play again; even before his sudden death he was aged out of the sport he loved so much. I was thinking about Pete Rose a lot while revisiting the 1989 classic baseball fantasy film Field of Dreams, a film about second chances for disgraced baseball players and families alike and I’d like to think that if it ever got remade Pete Rose would be among the players coming out of that cornfield to play some ball.
In 1989 one of the biggest scandals to come out of professional baseball was the Black Sox Scandal. This was an incident in the 1919 World Series where eight men playing for the Chicago White Sox were accused of intentionally losing the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds in exchange for a large payout from a gambling syndicate. This led to the creation of the Commissioner of Baseball whose primary responsibility at the time was to restore the integrity of the sport. The eight players named in the scandal were acquitted in a 1921 trial but the new Commissioner, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, permanently banned all eight of them from ever playing professional baseball again. Despite many attempts to reverse this decision over the following decades it was never lifted and none of these players, including Shoeless Joe Jackson, ever played professionally again.
In 1980 Canadian Author W. P. Kinsella published a short story titled Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa. This was expanded two years later into the novel Shoeless Joe, a story that is “not so much about baseball as it’s about dreams, magic, life, and what is quintessentially American,” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. Indeed, while it starts out about baseball it slowly becomes something more, examining the relationships of fathers and sons and the need to forgive past offenses and mend ties before it’s too late. This novel was adapted into the movie Field of Dreams in 1989 and, while not a hit with all audiences, struck a chord with many and has become an endearing classic in the years since. To a certain generation all you have to say is “If you build it, he will come,” and they will immediately know the reference and what it means.
Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) lives with his wife, Annie (Amy Madigan), and daughter Karin (Gaby Hoffmann), on their farm in rural Iowa. Ray struggles with a broken relationship with his deceased father, a lifelong baseball fan, as well as his own fears of growing old having never done anything to achieve his own dreams in life. While walking through his cornfield one evening, he hears a voice whispering, “If you build it, he will come.” He sees a vision of a baseball diamond in the cornfield and Shoeless Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta) standing in the middle, wearing his old uniform. Ray’s wife believes in him and lets him plow under part of their corn crop to build the field despite it being a great financial risk to them. As he is building the field he bonds with his daughter over stories of Shoeless Joe Jackson and the scandal that ended his career.
With the baseball diamond built Shoeless Joe Jackson appears out of the corn and spends some time catching fly balls and batting against Ray. Later, by Ray’s invitation, more players come out of the corn to play. Meanwhile, with the loss of the crop, the family is struggling to pay their mortgage and the townsfolk have branded them as crazy for wasting precious farmland. Annie’s brother, Mark (Timothy Busfield), offers to buy their land and save them from foreclosure but they refuse. Mark, like the rest of the townsfolk, cannot see the players like Ray and his family can. Ray refuses to sell. Then the mysterious voice comes to him again with the cryptic words “ease his pain.” Ray will eventually figure out this is in reference to Terence Mann (James Earl Jones), a Boston author who once dreamed of playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers but has since become a disenfranchised recluse. Ray sets out to find Terence only to find a bitter broken man with no interest in going with him anywhere, least of all to a farm in the middle of Iowa.
Field of Dreams is the kind of film where you have to suspend disbelief and just go with the story. Some people can do that and some will sit with their arms firmly folded across their chest and poke holes in the narrative, stubbornly refusing to let the message of the story sink in. This isn’t a film about reality and shouldn’t be taken that way. It is a fantasy with an underlying message underneath about dreams and how we can miss out on them when we focus too much on our day-to-day lives. Terence Mann represents that side of things as he has allowed his own personal pain to turn him into a cold and distant recluse, away from the world he lives in, not even writing anymore. Just existing. It takes a lot of persuasion to even get him out of his home, let alone on Ray’s side. Only the magical whisper of the mysterious voice saying “go the distance,” heard by both men while attending a game at Fenway Park, convinces the disenchanted author to come along for the journey. This will lead the two to another person, Archibald “Moonlight” Graham (Burt Lancaster), a ballplayer who played in one game for the New York Giants in 1922 but never got to bat. Graham, they discover, has died several years prior but went on to become a doctor who valued his life saving lives although he never forgot how close he came to his dreams of playing professional baseball.
Despite being only a modest hit upon release, Field of Dreams has had a lasting legacy on moviegoers and baseball fans alike. Major League Baseball has launched the Field of Dreams games where two professional teams play in a specially built ballpark out in the cornfields in tribute to the film and to the players represented in it. This has become a bit of a tradition in recent years and two new teams get the opportunity to play there each year.
While the real Shoeless Joe Jackson, nor the other seven members of the Black Sox Scandal, ever got to play professionally again their legacy lives on in memory thanks in large part to this film. But this film isn’t really about them or baseball. For that there is a perfectly good film that released just the year before called Eight Men Out that goes into great detail about the whole affair. Field of Dreams is about Ray and his own dreams as well as the lost opportunity to repair his relationship with his dead father whom he walked out on as a young man and never saw again in life. In the real world this would be a forever lost opportunity and that is the message of Field of Dreams, or at least one of them. Don’t lose the opportunity to mend fences by waiting until it is too late.
If this film was nothing more than just building a baseball diamond for some ghosts to play on it wouldn’t be as beloved today as it is. The ending hits a note that resonates with people, especially those who have lost a loved one without putting the past to bed. Ray gets the opportunity to finally face his father one last time and bond with the man he couldn’t while still living. The two are able to let the past go and spend some quality time on the field, burying years of anger. In life we will never get an opportunity like this; it’s the nature of the real world. It’s a fantasy that brings with it a real-world caution to spend this time wisely while we can because once it is gone we can never get it back.
Academy Award Nominations:
Best Picture: Lawrence Gordon and Charles Gordon
Best Screenplay - Based on Material from Another Medium: Phil Alden Robinson
Best Original Score: James Horner
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Release Date: May 5, 1989
Running Time: 108 Minutes
Rated PG
Starring: Kevin Costner, Amy Madigan, James Earl Jones, Ray Liotta, and Burt Lancaster
Directed By: Phil Alden Robinson
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