Iowa has never hosted a Major League Baseball game, which is strange, because for so many people, Iowa cornfields have come to represent a place where the game can be played as it used to be, as it should be.

~Chelsea Janes/Washington Post

Much is being written about last night’s “Field of Dreams Game” between the Yankees and White Sox in Dyersville, Iowa, location for the 1989 film based on William Patrick Kinsella’s novel Shoeless Joe.   Major League Baseball (MLB) described it on Twitter as, “What a night!! Baseball remains the best!”  The New York Times touted the event as “packed full of nostalgia.”

Unfortunately, for me, someone who has two personal connections to the film and its location, last night was anything but a dream.  It was a nightmare akin to the “upside down” alternate universe in “Stranger Things.”

The first occasion on which “Field of Dreams” came alive for me was during a driving vacation when our family made a detour to Dyersville.  The three of us made our own version of the classic film.  We walked out of the corn into right field.  My daughter and I had “a catch.”  We did the wave on the three-tiered bench along the first base line a la Kevin Kosner, James Earl Jones, Amy Madigan and Gaby Hoffman.  And through the magic of stop action, duplicated the scene where a young “Moonlight” Graham crosses the base path and becomes Dr. Graham, except young and old Archibald Graham were played by my daughter and wife instead of Frank Whaley and Burt Lancaster, respectively.

The second occasion was an opportunity to discuss a pivotal moment in the movie with James Earl Jones.  When Ray Kinsella (Kosner) drops Terrence Mann (Jones) at his Boston apartment following a Red Sox game at Fenway Park, Mann makes a hand gesture as he says goodbye.  Always interested in the origin of these small but powerful cinematic moments, I asked Jones had he come up with the idea.  Or was it in the script?  He told me he adlibbed that little piece of business drawing on the body language used by casino croupiers to signal, “The hand is over.”

What I saw when I switched to the game was not the Field of Dreams I knew.  If MLB and Fox really wanted to pay homage to baseball as it is presented in both the movie and book, all they had to do was read the script.  For example, listen to what led a young Archibald Graham to hitchhike on a rural roadside where he is picked up by Kinsella and Mann.

I play baseball.  I’m looking for a place to play.  I heard that all through the Midwest, they have towns with teams.  And in some places, they’ll even find you a day job.

Or Mann’s climatic explanation of baseball as the national pastime.

The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball.  America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers.  It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again.  But baseball has marked the time.  This field, this game.  It’s a part of our past, Ray.  It reminds us of all that once was good…and it could be again.

“Field of Dreams” is the story of a long ago game captured by Roger Kahn in The Boys of Summer or Doris Kearns Goodwin in Wait Till Next Year or George F. Will in Boys at Work.  It is the saga of a struggling graduate student who would walk to Memorial Stadium in Baltimore and pay 85 cents for a bleacher seat or who picked up a $10 ticket to game six of the 1971 World Series.

In no way did last night have any connection to those youthful memories.  The “characters” on the field have individual salaries that dwarf the total payrolls of all the teams combined when Joe Jackson took to the outfield in Comiskey Park.  And a fan needed to be equally well off as tickets ranged from $375 to $1,210 per seat retail with many being resold online for more than $4,000.

Nor was the game played on the original field.  Instead it was “staged” in a temporary 8,000 seat stadium complete with digital scoreboard, a jumbotron and advertisements projected on green screens around the ballpark.  MLB and corporate media had produced the perfect metaphor for modern day America.  Billionaire owners and multi-millionaire players entertaining rich fans who paid more for an evening of faux nostalgia than the monthly take home pay of the average household.  A far cry from Archie Graham’s “they’ll even find you a day job.”

Instead of a one-off regular game in a neutral location, MLB missed a golden opportunity to honor its past.  Imagine two teams, made up of current inductees in the Baseball Hall of Fame, taking the field like “ghosts” of a past era.  And fans standing or sitting on beach chairs along the baselines, sipping lemonade served from the porch of the “Kinsella home.”  On the day my family arrived at the field, there was a pick-up game.  The score did not matter.  The sights and sounds on the field let you know there was magic in the air.  When Terrence Mann tells Kinsella, “People will come, Ray.  People will definitely come,” that is what he envisioned.

One more thing. If Fox Sports really wanted to honor the underlying theme of the film, Ray Kinsella’s relationship with his father John over Joe Jackson’s role in the 1919 “Black Sox” scandal, they would have had Barry Bonds, Pete Rose and Alex Rodriguez in the broadcast booth.   That would have represented “the one true constant” associated with baseball, athletes putting themselves before team and willing to bend or break the rules to win at all costs.  Come to think of it, that would have been a perfect metaphor for America in 2021.

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP