Baseball Movie or Movie With Baseball In It: Field of Dreams
I love baseball. It’s as simple as that. My father was a semi-pro baseball player. My first date with my wife was a baseball game. I got married at Tropicana Field before a Rays game. It is America’s Pastime and I love it.
I also love baseball movies, obviously.
I’ve begun my yearly tradition of watching all of my favorite movies during spring training, getting ready for the long season that lays ahead. I was watching Major League the other night and zoned out as I usually do when the non-baseball scenes came on. While they are part of the story, they don’t really play an integral part in moving the plot forward.
Which got me thinking: in what other baseball movies could you ignore the romance or drama scenes and still have a cohesive story? At what point is a movie a “baseball” movie and not just a movie that is set in the baseball world?
A movie like Major League is undisputed in being a baseball movie. If I can remove all the scenes about Jake Taylor’s relationship and tell basically the same story, then it’s a baseball movie with some love scenes thrown in.
On the other end of the spectrum we have a movie like Trouble With the Curve. Clint Eastwood is a baseball scout, yes, but that detail really plays second fiddle to him being an absent father. There are baseball scenes, but the people actually doing the baseball aren’t particularly important to resolving the main conflict. It’s a father-daughter relationship with baseball as a side note.
That’s why I have decided to look at some of the most famous baseball movies of all time and take a closer look at whether they are actually baseball movies or simply movies with baseball in them, starting with Field of Dreams.
Why It’s A Baseball Movie
Unless you’ve actively gone out of your way to avoid it, everyone has seen or at least knows the plot to Kevin Costner’s love letter to baseball. Ray Kinsella, played by Costner, is an Iowa corn farmer who plows under his crops after hearing otherworldly voices saying, “If you build it, he will come.” and seeing an image of a baseball field with Shoeless Joe Jackson standing in the middle of it.
The entire premise of the film is based on baseball players and the game itself. The presence of Shoeless Joe Jackson drives the narrative forward. One of baseball’s most infamous people ever, without Shoeless Joe and his broken relationship with the game, there is no plot. The field was built for him, after all.
Then we introduce the character of Terrence Mann, the author who had wanted to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers as a child. One of his characters was named John Kinsella, the name of Ray’s father, who was a devout baseball fan and had a troubled relationship with his son.
The voice returns and tells Ray to “ease his pain”, who he takes to mean about Mann, and he sets out to find the author. Kinsella and Mann attend a Red Sox game, where they both hear the voice tell them to “go the distance” and see an image that leads them to another character in the movie, Moonlight Graham.
Baseball plot devices at a baseball game. Baseball.
Graham played in one game in 1922 and retired to become a physician in Minnesota. Ray and Mann find out where he lived, only to find that he had passed away. As they leave town, they run into the young hitchhiking spirit of Graham, who’s looking for a game to play in. We find out on the trip back to Iowa that Ray stopped playing catch with his father after reading Mann’s books, completing the connection.
Baseball relationships talked about by baseball-loving people. Again, baseball.
At the end of it all, we find out the field was never meant for Shoeless Joe and the other players. It’s revealed that the catcher for the team of spirits was John Kinsella all along, the troubled father who wanted to play catch with his son one more time. There is nothing more baseball than a good old game of catch.
We are also treated to one of the best speeches about baseball of all time. James Earl Jones’ famous deep voice in the role of Mann says:
“The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time.”
It’s a movie entirely dripping with baseball. It’s about the game itself, the love that we as people and individuals can have for a game that defines an important part of American history. It’s a movie about our relationships with the game in many forms and the relationships we have with one another because of the game.
Why It’s Not a Baseball Movie
It’s those same relationships that makes Field of Dreams not about baseball, too.
While the movie is moved forward by people tied to the game, the actual conflict in the movie was within Ray himself. He’s a middle-aged corn farmer who feels like he hasn’t accomplished anything and fears growing old and missing his chance.
He hears the voices out in the very corn field he sees as his lack of accomplishment and puts his family in financial peril to chase a delusion of grandeur. This is a man going through a severe midlife crisis and wrangles in various baseball figures because he feels guilty for not playing catch enough with his father.
There are even some theories that Ray is actually dead in the movie and the entire plot is predicated on the idea that he is passing into the afterlife, hence why he can see spirits. The other characters are merely the last firing synapses of his mind as his great regret of time not spent with his baseball-loving father grasps at people he most associated with the game.
Even the character of Moonlight Graham, whose young spirit was raring for a game, left baseball when he was so close to his dream and lived happily as a physician. There is more to life than baseball and the game is not as important as we fans like to make it out to be.
It’s a story about regret and acceptance of our future that happens to be set around baseball.
Final Verdict
So, is Field of Dreams a “baseball” movie?
I may be biased due to my love of the game and feeling nostalgic for the times that I played catch with my own father, but there may not be a movie more about baseball to me.
We baseball fans may not all share the same memories of the game, but there are some constants. We all can remember the crack of the bat as it hits a ball into play. We recognize the smells of leather gloves and hot dogs in the air. We can feel the excitement rise in us when we relive the great moments in the game we witnessed.
And that is what this movie is all about.
As much as it’s a movie about a father-son relationship, it’s also a movie about the relationship America has had with the game. Even when we lose our focus on the game and move to football or basketball for a while, baseball will always be there to toss the ball around with us.
