Field of Dreams and the Selling of Baseball Nostalgia

"If you build it, he will come."

That line, whispered by a disembodied voice to an Iowa corn farmer played by Kevin Costner, became the most famous sentence in baseball cinema. Phil Alden Robinson's 1989 film, adapted from W.P. Kinsella's 1982 novel Shoeless Joe, grossed $84 million and earned three Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture. It turned a cornfield in Dyersville, Iowa, into a permanent tourist destination. In August 2021, MLB held an actual regular-season game at the Field of Dreams site, with the White Sox and Yankees emerging from the corn to play on a purpose-built diamond. The game drew approximately 5.9 million television viewers.

The film's plot is simple. Ray Kinsella, a Berkeley-educated farmer experiencing a midlife crisis, hears a voice telling him to build a baseball diamond in his cornfield. He does. The ghosts of Shoeless Joe Jackson and the other banned Black Sox players appear and play ball on the field. Ray then drives across the country with a reclusive author (James Earl Jones, in a role based on J.D. Salinger, whose lawyers expressed his displeasure at being portrayed, prompting the producers to fictionalize the character) and a small-town doctor (Burt Lancaster, in his final film role) before the film culminates in a reconciliation between Ray and his dead father, who appears as a young catcher on the ghost field.

The film works through restraint. Robinson never explains the mechanism of the magic or argues that Shoeless Joe was innocent, instead presenting baseball as a space where the past is accessible, where fathers and sons can meet across the boundary of death, and where the game itself is the bridge.

Jones's monologue near the end of the film, in which he describes Americans traveling to Iowa to watch a ball game, has become the most quoted passage in baseball cinema. "The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball," Jones says. "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."

Robinson wrote the speech, not Kinsella. Jones nearly turned down the role, and Costner, Robinson's first choice for Ray, was initially unavailable. Robinson shot the film in the summer of 1988, and the production crew built the cornfield diamond on a real farm owned by the Lansing family.

Field of Dreams is the film most responsible for the idea that baseball is more religion than sport. It is also, when examined closely, a deeply conservative film that idealizes a past that never existed and papers over the historical reality of the Black Sox scandal in favor of a comforting myth. Shoeless Joe Jackson, as presented in the film, is a gentle, grateful ghost who just wants to play ball. The real Jackson was a complicated man whose role in the 1919 fix remains debated by historians.

The film doesn't care about that debate. It cares about fathers and sons, memory and loss, and the sound of a ball hitting a glove on a summer night. That's why it works, and that's why MLB built a stadium in a cornfield 32 years later.