Mark Bennett: Redemption, ghost players, fun: It's Iowa

Aug. 27—Kids who'd never met took turns pitching to each other in an impromptu batting practice.

Dads in their 30s and 40s looked around to see who was watching, and then in a "what-the-heck" outburst ran around the bases, ball caps flying off their balding heads as they rounded third.

Husbands played catch with their wives in the outfield.

Buddies a decade beyond their last Babe Ruth League games hurled long pop-ups to each other, oblivious to the inevitable sore arms awaiting them.

Such a scene could only unfold at the Field of Dreams.

On the last Saturday in July, that amalgamation of baseball players assembled in the Iowa countryside. It's happened there routinely in the 33 years since the movie "Field of Dreams" made that 193-acre farm famous.

Hundreds of visitors came to the ballpark amid the cornfields of Dyersville, Iowa, a town of 4,477 residents 25 miles west of the Illinois and Wisconsin state lines. The travelers came to see the place where the 1989 movie came true — in a cinematic sense, at least. More than three decades after actors Kevin Costner, Amy Madigan, James Earl Jones, the late Ray Liotta and others brought W.P. Kinsella's book "Shoeless Joe" to life in theaters and on home video devices, the rural filming location remains a mecca for baseball romantics.

The working farm, farmhouse and ballpark are open for daily tours from May through September, but most visitors on that particular day also came to see the Field of Dreams "Ghost Players" perform.

The team dons the relic uniforms of the 1919 Chicago White Sox, the infamous "Black Sox" team accused of throwing the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds in exchange for gamblers' money. The saga forms the dark, gritty subplot of the redemptive "Field of Dreams" story, which centers on farmer Ray Kinsella's obsession to follow the direction of a mystical voice telling him, "If you build it, he will come."

In the movie, the eight 1919 White Sox players banned by Major League Baseball for life comprised the core of the ghost team that emerges from the cornfield surrounding the ballpark that Kinsella carved out of his crops, just as the voice told him. In the years since the film's release, a few actors who portrayed those original ghost players and Dyersville neighbors formed a troupe to entertain Field of Dreams visitors with an interactive Harlem Globetrotters-like performance involving kids and adults on select summertime Saturdays.

My wife and I witnessed the festivities on a weekend trip to Dyersville last month. We were among the 125,000-plus visitors the Field of Dreams attracts each year, according to figures from its owners, Go The Distance Baseball.

We walked out to the bleachers and sat in shirtsleeves on perfect afternoon, just as 1960s author Terrance Mann — the fictional activist-turned-recluse played by James Earl Jones in the movie — predicted in his now-classic "People will come, Ray" speech. We looked around the acreage. Nobody seemed to mind. Admission was free, but we paid the suggested $20 donation, again, just as Mann predicted in his speech.

The farm looks pretty much as it did in 1988, when the Universal Pictures production crew began filming in Dyersville. One alteration filled its western horizon, the temporary 8,000-seat stadium Major League Baseball erected for its 2022 Field of Dreams game between the Chicago Cubs and Cincinnati Reds on Aug. 11. By 2025, Go The Distance Baseball plans to add an $80-million sports complex around the farm and movie site. It will include nine youth fields, dorms, a hotel, fieldhouse, amphitheater, RV park, jogging trails. A $50-million permanent baseball stadium will be constructed there, too, a project that will receive $12.5-million in federal American Rescue Plan Act funds, the Sioux City Journal reported Aug. 10.

Such an expansion feels both exasperating and promising. The original Field of Dreams may seem less quaint, yet more likely to survive long into the future.

My wife and I learned much about the backstory of the movie and farm from our guide on a tour of the farmhouse last month.

For example, farm owner Don Lansing — whose family had owned it for a century — agreed to live in a trailer during the filming, as the production team remodeled his two-story farmhouse to suit the camera angles and basically took the place over that summer. Also, the closing scene with a stream of vehicles driving up the winding gravel road had to be filmed three times, because of glitches, testing the endurance of local volunteers in their 1,500. On the final try, the drivers repeatedly flashed their lights from dim to bright to create the illusion of the cars moving, even though they weren't.

And, anyone who remembers the summer of 1988 likely recalls its drought and heat. The dry-baked weather forced producers to haul water from the Mississippi River to irrigate the corn crops, which hadn't grown enough to create the scene of ghost players emerging from the rows of stalks. Once the corn started flourishing, it got so tall that star Kevin Costner walked on a platform in the rows to keep his head adequately high.

The farmhouse looks small, quaint and recognizable from the inside. That's where our tour guide told us the most lingering mystery about "Field of Dreams." Producer Phil Alden Robinson has never revealed the identity of the actor performing the whispering voice.

That's the beauty of the film. It requires viewers to suspend their disbelief. The make-believe of Hollywood works to perfection in "Field of Dreams," even in its corniest moments. Sure, ostracized, long-gone White Sox players from 1919, like Liotta's "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, could wander through a portal of cornstalks into a pristine baseball field built by a farmer on the brink of bankruptcy who, nonetheless, cuts down his perfectly good crop to do it.

And, of course, Ray Kinsella's estranged late father John Kinsella — a fictional former New York Yankees farm-club player — will arrive via that portal with Jackson, the other Black Sox, Archie "Moonlight" Graham and the other ghosts. The chance to play and relive the joy, leads John to ask Ray, "Is this heaven?" His son answers, "No, it's Iowa."

Finally, when Ray asks his apparition dad to play catch, and they do, it mends their frayed relationship. As a rebellious teen, Ray had refused to toss a baseball with his dad.

That scene, that movie, that ballpark in the corn remind us all to not wait for a cinematic miracle to do the right thing.

Mark Bennett can be reached at 812-231-4377 or mark.bennett@tribstar.com.