I don't have to tell you that the one constant through all the years has been baseball. America has been erased like a blackboard, only to be rebuilt and then erased again. But baseball has marked time while America has rolled by like a procession of steamrollers.
This quote comes toward the end of the novel Shoeless Joe, written by the Canadian author W.P. Kinsella.
It's a delectable couple of lines, I especially love the bits about the blackboard eraser and the steamrollers. One certainly cannot deny those are apt metaphors for describing the history of this country.
But what about the baseball part? Those of us who are devotees of the game certainly believe that too.
In the book, those words come out of the mouth of J.D. Salinger, yes that one, who is sucked unwillingly at first, into a cockamamie scheme (as it seems on the surface) of the book's protagonist Ray Kinsella.
That scheme is for Ray to devote a few acres of his Iowa farm, which he can ill afford to give up, into a baseball field which he builds by hand, by himself, in order to attract the spirits of long departed ballplayers to play upon. In the book they're not just any dead players, but players who in life, for one reason or other had not completely fulfilled their ball playing dreams. The first group of spirit players to show up were the eight members of the Chicago White Sox who were banned from the game after they took money from gamblers to throw the 1919 World Series. That group includes the title character of the book, "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, one of the greatest hitters the game has ever known. Jackson serves as the go-between for Ray and his fellow players.
The real J.D. Salinger who had nothing to do with the creation of the book, was replaced by the fictional author Terrence Mann (played by James Earl Jones) in the movie Field of Dreams which is based on the novel.
In the climatic scene of the film, against the strains of inspirational music, the character of Mann reciting a cropped version of Salinger's inspiring soliloquy from the book, is crosscut between the disdainful words of Ray's brother-in-law Mark who is trying to buy the farm. The scene is set on the ball field that Ray has tirelessly worked to build. The ballplayers are all there, visible only to the audience and to those in the film who believe.
As Mark is an agnostic, he walks through the field completely oblivious to the action going on around him. While the killjoy relative tells Ray that he'll be ruined by the next sunrise if he doesn't give up this godforsaken nonsense and sell the farm and all his dreams along with it, Mann, a true believer, tells Ray that people will come to his field, other true believers who will hand over their hard earned money for the privilege.
It's the classic struggle between the heart and the head, between hope and despair, dreams and reality, a purely cinematic moment designed to pull every ounce of heart string out of the viewer, as is just about every other scene in Field of Dreams.
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| Evoking one of the indelible scenes from the movie, members of the White Sox and the Yankees enter the "Field of Dreams" before their game in Dyersville, Iowa, August 12, 2021 - Reuters |
The population of Dyersville, a town of about 4,000 in northeast Iowa, tripled last week as it hosted the first of what promises to be many "Field of Dreams" major league baseball games. The game was played upon a field constructed especially for the purpose, adjacent to the original field built to be the set for the 1989 movie, which has since become (to some folks anyway) a classic.
Fittingly, the teams chosen to face each other in the first major league baseball game ever to be played in the state of Iowa, were the Chicago White Sox and the New York Yankees, the team whom we learn in the book, was particularly despised by Ray's dad, John. The senior Kinsella, was himself once an aspiring ballplayer whose spirit ends up playing on his son's field of misfit athletes.
Part of the inspiration for the event was the tradition begun over a decade ago of playing selected National Hockey League games outdoors in baseball parks and football stadiums.
Much of what turns off people to professional sports these days is the crass commercialism and ungodly sums of money involved in the games. Beyond the novelty factor, the idea was to strip away much of that, well the appearances of it anyway, and bring the sport closer to its roots. By that I mean play the game in its purest form, as it once was played by children, or adults pretending to be children. Anyone who has ever played pickup hockey on a frozen pond knows exactly what I'm talking about.
Same with baseball. It doesn't have to be a pristine field carved out of a cornfield, the game could be played in a schoolyard, a city park, a vacant lot, or just about any space big enough to contain most of the balls hit by the strongest hitters will do. Here in Chicago where there was limited space available for ball fields, they made the ball ridiculously big so it wouldn't travel too far. If you couldn't come up with enough players to field two teams, the game was adaptable for any number of players. And if you could only come up with two players, you could just play catch, an infinitely satisfying activity and bonding experience, especially between a parent and child.
That, is baseball at its purest.
These days it's rare to see kids in the schoolyards, parks or streets playing improvised games like New York stickball or pinners and fastpitch in Chicago. Many kids prefer to stay inside and play baseball on the computer. Those who do play real baseball, play the organized variety, complete with coaches, umpires, uniforms, and well tended fields. Don't get me wrong, in the right hands, that kind of baseball is most satisfying both to watch and to play. In the wrong hands, that is to say, when adults get too much in the way, it can become a nightmare.
That's especially true in the more competitive travel leagues where parents expect a payoff for their efforts, at the very least getting their kid good enough at the game to earn them a free ride in college through a sport's scholarship. For their part, many of the coaches at this level care more about winning than anything else, including the health, well being, safety and sanity of their players.
The sad truth is, unlike what Terrence Mann says in his soliloquy, baseball and other sports do not represent all that is good.
That's just a myth.
In his novel, W.P. Kinsella takes great pains to compare baseball to a religion. And like any religion, baseball is filled with myths, including its own creation story.
The location of the most significant temple to the game, The National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY, is a testament to the power of baseball mythology.
Comforting as the image may be, baseball was not born in the idyllic little town in upstate New York in 1839. That was a story based on scant evidence concocted by the powers that be in the game at the turn of the last century who wanted to make it be known far and wide that baseball was purely an American game, born and bred in the USA.
The reality is that baseball was around far longer than that, having evolved from an English children's game called rounders which was itself a spinoff of cricket. It has no particular ties to rural life, it was played in big cities, small towns and down on the farm alike.
But there's a history in this country of disdain for cities and a romanticization of rural life that goes back to Thomas Jefferson and beyond which is what makes carving a baseball diamond out of a corn field so appealing to many Americans. In the novel, Kinsella the author paints a bleak picture of urban life. During his namesake character's road trip to New Hampshire to find J.D. Salinger, he stops in Chicago, Cleveland and Pittsburgh to go to ballgames, and has nothing good to say about any of those places.
Would Field of Dreams have been so heart warming had Kinsella the character built his ball field upon a weed strewn vacant city lot with ghost players materializing out of abandoned buildings? Perhaps, but it would have been a much different story.
I find it ironic that in the movie, the character of Terrence Mann as played by a black actor tells Ray that baseball represents our past and reminds us of all that once was good, while standing in front of a field populated by only white players, which reminds us that all was not good with our country and with baseball. In their time of course, black players were not allowed to play "organized baseball".
As an aside, my major criticism of both the film and the movie is they dropped the ball in that respect by not addressing the issue of the color line in baseball. All they had to do was introduce a few black players from the era into the mix. After all, they more than anyone, were denied the right to fulfill their baseball playing dreams.
Perhaps the game played last week in Iowa was sort of a redemption for the movie
and the novel as many of the players on the teams appearing on the field through the cornfield just as they did in the film, would not have been allowed to play in the big leagues one hundred years ago because of the color of their skin.
As far as baseball as a religion goes, strange as it may sound, I kind of buy into that. Back when I was involved in the Catholic Church, I spoke with several people who lamented the fact that they never felt the rapture as many Christians do, of being swept away by the Holy Spirit. I never felt it either but frankly the very idea scared the pardon the expression, bejeezus out of me. But several times in my life, I have been swept away in pure rapture by the game of baseball, especially when it involved my son.
After not taking the game seriously for years, baseball was reborn for me while sitting at the ballpark with my pregnant wife and it dawned on me that one day I'd be playing catch with my boy. It came to full fruition fourteen years later when as a coach, I witnessed him pitch the last inning of his house league team's championship season, retiring the side in order. It happened again when together we watched the Chicago Cubs win the World Series. And again when he rode upon the shoulders of his best friends after he won the home run derby at a picnic commemorating the end of their last baseball season together. And yet again when toward the end of our best summer ever of playing and watching baseball together, on a perfect evening after a ballgame at beautiful PNC Park, we stuck around after the game as parents and kids were invited to go onto the field to play catch. We didn't bring along our gloves so we just stood there and watched. I'll never forget the look on his face as we caught a glimpse of each other. No words were exchanged at that moment but I know we were both thinking the same thing:
Is this heaven? No, it's Pittsburgh.
A lot could have gone wrong with the game last Thursday night, it could have rained. Or a player could have been seriously injured as happened last night in a game here in Chicago. Or it could have been a lousy game. Or a bull could have gotten loose and started charging the players. Fortunately none of that happened, although the bull might have been kind of cool.
The Sox got off to a big lead which they held until the ninth inning with their closer Liam Hendriks coming in. But the damn Yankees staged a two out rally in the top of the inning and took the lead. Then it was the White Sox turn and catcher Sevy Zavala coaxed a one out walk. Up came Tim Anderson to the plate and he took Zack Britton's first pitch on the outside corner to the opposite field for a walk off home run. Redemption indeed as well as sweet justice as Anderson is the only US born black player in the White Sox starting lineup. In his typical fashion, he stood there and admired his drive disappearing into the corn stalks in right field, then went on to celebrate as he rounded the bases.
The traditionalists may have not been happy by that display of pure joy but all in all, I think the baseball gods were pleased.
The next day my boy and I talked about the game. I mentioned that Kevin Costner (the star of Field of Dreams who was instrumental in the conception of this game) looked a little lost to me when he came out onto the field before the start of the game, as if he got off the wrong exit on I-80, looking for the Farm and Fleet.
But then I said when the players began appearing from the corn field out in center field, I got a little misty eyed.
"So did I" said my son.
We're obviously both true believers.
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