Kevin Costner's Baseball Trilogy

Kevin Costner has appeared in three baseball movies. Together, they constitute the most sustained engagement any major actor has had with the sport on screen, and each film captures a different version of what baseball means to the people who play it.

In Bull Durham (1988), Costner plays Crash Davis, a career minor leaguer who has been in professional baseball long enough to know he will never make it and not long enough to quit. The film is about the minor leagues, the bus rides, the bad pay, the shared apartments, and the reality that most professional baseball players never reach the majors. Crash is smart, funny, and deeply aware of his own limitations. The film was written and directed by Ron Shelton, who had played five years in the Orioles' minor league system. It made Costner a movie star and is consistently ranked as one of the best sports films ever made.

In Field of Dreams (1989), released just one year later, Costner plays Ray Kinsella, an Iowa farmer who builds a baseball diamond in his cornfield after hearing a voice. The film is about memory, fathers, and the past. There are no bad bus rides. There are no salary disputes. Baseball, in Field of Dreams, is not a job. It is a spiritual practice, a connection to the dead, and a metaphor for everything Americans have lost and wish they could recover. The film was nominated for Best Picture.

In For Love of the Game (1999), Costner plays Billy Chapel, an aging Tigers pitcher who throws a perfect game in what turns out to be his final start. The film, directed by Sam Raimi and based on a Michael Shaara novel, intercuts the game with flashbacks of Chapel's failing relationship with a woman played by Kelly Preston. It is the weakest of the three films. Critics found it sentimental and structurally predictable. But the baseball sequences, particularly the late innings of the perfect game, are convincing, and Costner, who was 43 during filming, looks plausible on the mound.

Taken together, the three films trace an arc. In Bull Durham, baseball is work. In Field of Dreams, baseball is religion. In For Love of the Game, baseball is elegy. Costner ages through the trilogy from a man trying to hold on to the game to a man using the game to hold on to life.

No other actor has defined baseball on screen the way Costner has. Robert Redford had The Natural. Tom Hanks had A League of Their Own. But Costner returned to the sport three times across eleven years, each time finding a different story to tell. He is the most important figure in the history of baseball cinema, and the cornfield in Iowa is his monument.