MLB’s ‘Field of Dreams’ game yields cash crop of nightmares
The Yankees and White Sox played a game in an Iowa cornfield Thursday night, an homage to the 1989 movie “Field of Dreams.”
Did MLB pull this off, tugging at the old heartstrings of ball fans while avoiding the appearance of a cheesy marketing gimmick?
That is tricky, because the game is a cheesy marketing gimmick.
For instance, MLB got hipster chef Guy Fieri to invent a ballpark snack: a hot dog wrapped in an apple-pie crust. Get it? No doubt these were hawked by vendors dressed as Mom.
Also, there is an actual cornfield maze between the original field built for the movie and the field built for this game. The path through the maze is cut to form a giant MLB logo, and fans wandering midst the stalks heard bits of dialogue from the movie soundtrack blaring from loudspeakers in the corn, providing a mystical ambiance similar to that of waiting in line for a ride at Disneyland.
If I’m paying up to $9,000
for a ticket to this game, I’m already sufficiently invested in the mystical nature of the event; I don’t need Kevin Costner’s voice reminding me what I should be dreaming about as I wander the maze.
Do I sound cynical? Sorry, baseball gods.
When “Field of Dreams” debuted in 1989, I was one of those guys dabbing away a tear at the end, as Costner and his dad “had a catch.”
Back then, apparently, I was not yet a grinch, grouch or realist.
“‘Field of Dreams’ will not appeal to grinches and grouches and realists,” film critic Roger Ebert wrote back then. “It is a delicate movie, a fragile construction of one goofy fantasy after another. But it has the courage to be about exactly what it promises.”
When I rewatched “Field of Dreams” a couple of years ago, I had some questions that didn’t occur to me three decades earlier, like:
Why are Costner’s Iowafarmer blue jeans so tight? Did he misread the sizing chart in the Sears catalog?
Wouldn’t it be weird to suddenly be the same age as your dad? Doesn’t that make it awkward for him with mom?
Who says, “Let’s have a catch”? In my neck of the woods, it was, “Let’s catch.”
Did farmer Ray (Costner) really get his wife’s blessing to plow under half their cash crop so he could build a baseball field in order to lure the ghost of some guy named Shoeless Joe? Why does the wife not say, “Ray, I suspect you’ve been growing something besides corn out there in your field”?
What would I have to smoke to enable me to make sense of the movie’s plot? Didn’t they drop in the Moonlight Graham character just because he had a fun nickname?
If this movie is about heavenly reward for men who were deprived of their big-league dreams, why didn’t the script writer throw a bone to Black players?
(In my remake of the movie, which Hollywood continues to reject, Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson arrive at Ray’s farm with a team of Negro Leaguers, they kick Ray’s team’s butt and win the deed to the cornfield.)
What I’m trying to say is, if “Field of Dreams” really is a special sports movie, a representation of baseball’s spiritual place in our hearts, why can’t the movie be left on its own rather than repurposed as a Disneyfied marketing vehicle?
When I got ready for this more-than-a-game game, new questions popped into my head.
Who will throw out the ceremonial first pitch? The Jolly Green Giant?
The throwback unis are a nice touch, but why not go with throwback gloves, too, those ancient slabs that looked like a Mickey Mouse hand run over by a freight train?
Wouldn’t it add a comforting realism if the White Sox players actually conspire with real gamblers to throw this game?
Why does Rob Manfred celebrate an Iowa cornfield being a viable place for a major-league ballpark, while insisting that the Oakland Coliseum site is viable?
What if Dave Kaval grows corn in the Coliseum parking lot?
If the three Yankees currently on the COVID list die before the game, will they later saunter in from the cornfield?
If Manfred and his MLB soul-of-baseball people really want to pay tribute to a great piece of historical baseball entertainment, why don’t they have a “Who’s on First?” game, with all the players renamed?
PA announcer: Now batting for the Yankees, No. 33, What. Fan 1: Who?
Fan 2: No, Who’s on deck. Fan 1: I don’t know.
Fan 2: Shut up and get me a beer.
Fan 1: Bud?
Fan 2: Don’t call me Bud. You’re Bud, I’m Lou.