Finally, the Trade Deadline is over, and what a Deadline it was! Pretenders became contenders, buyers became sellers, and baseball fans became mindless zombies satiated only by the fulfillment of trade rumors. After what is objectively the best month of the baseball season (July now has the draft, the All-Star Game, the Home Run Derby, and, usually, the Trade Deadline, with no other sports on besides baseball), we are officially in the latter half of summer. The fatigue of the heat will sift out baseball’s pre-July break-outs, leaving room for the real stars of the sport to shine. But what I love the most about August and September is the overall feeling of the sport. Teams are upping their urgencies as the chase for the playoffs reaches its highest level of excitement, culminating in what is sure to be a captivating climax to a six-month marathon that will see just twelve teams grab seemingly unreachable playoff spots. This is the time in the baseball season when things get intense, when some might start calling the Major League Baseball campaign a spectacle. Others might go as far to say that the final playoff push is romantic in a way. I would call this time in the baseball calendar “cinematic.”
It's fitting, then, that the “Field of Dreams” Game, which honors one of baseball’s most famous pieces of cinema and arguably one of the greatest sports movies of all time, returns this Thursday. Last year’s event, which saw the White Sox host the Yankees on a ballfield circumscribed by the cornfields branded into our craniums by the 1989 Kevin Costner classic, was a resounding success for the sport of baseball. At almost 6 million viewers, it was the MLB’s most watched game in more than 15 years. I remember watching the dramatics vividly, gawking as the ballplayers stepped out of the cornfields like they were teammates of Ray Liotta’s Shoeless Joe Jackson. Costner, the star of plenty of other sports movies before and since “Field of Dreams,” spoke proudly about the magic of baseball during the pregame festivities. Everything about the setting was serene, and the game itself was quite entertaining. It seemed that Major League Baseball wanted to play into the marketability of “Field of Dreams” with all the fanfare, which makes sense, considering just how much baseball fans love their sport’s movies.
There is no other sport that has as many movies that “you have to watch” as baseball. For football, I would say there’s “Rudy,” “Friday Night Lights,” and “Remember the Titans;” for basketball, there’s “Hoosiers,” “Coach Carter,” “White Men Can’t Jump,” and (ugh) “Space Jam” (no, I will not be including “Air Bud”); and for hockey, you have “Slap Shot,” “Mighty Ducks,” and “Miracle.” But here’s the extensive list of baseball movies “you have to watch,” and I’m probably missing some.
“The Natural”
“Field of Dreams”
“Pride of the Yankees”
“Bull Durham”
“The Sandlot”
“The Bad News Bears”
“Major League”
“A League of Their Own”
“Eight Men Out”
“Moneyball”
“42”
My personal favorite, “Rookie of the Year,” isn’t even on here, but you get the point. There are a million different stories to tell in the baseball universe, each for their own age group in their own genre, but all of them engaging in their own way. That’s what a lot of people don’t get about baseball: there’s a story worth telling at every point, and the entire sport is built upon storytelling. Other sports are meant to be entertaining for the eyes. Football is meant to grab your attention by the jugular; basketball is supposed to make you feel dominated by its superstars; and hockey brings out your inner grit. In a world where attention spans are shrinking by the minute and everyone is complaining about baseball’s pace of play, I’m here to remind you that sometimes, the time in between pitches is supposed to emphasize each microscopic moment of a baseball game. I, too, feel that baseball is slow. Anyone who doesn’t think that would be lying to you. But there’s more to baseball than just the game. Storytelling is an art that goes back millennia and has been engrained into the wooden, concrete, and metallic skeletons of baseball stadiums dating back to the first World Series. Baseball is structured for you to pay attention to every detail, to breathe in the lore, and to let all the stories going on at once dance around you like a ballet recital. It’s meant to entertain your heart (I know that's cliché, but just go with it).
The 2022 edition of the “Field of Dreams” game will take place this week between the Reds and Cubs, two exalted franchises that both existed at the time of Shoeless Joe’s banishment from baseball after the 1919 Black Sox scandal (which resulted in a Reds World Series championship, funny enough). The atmosphere at this year’s event is sure to feel the same as the Yankees-ChiSox matchup from last summer, full of nostalgia and the purity of America’s pastime. But to bank on those sentiments alone is unwise and unsustainable for a sport that is losing hundreds of thousands of fans per year based on a lack of entertainment value. Baseball just isn’t as flashy as the other three major American pro sports; it’s a different experience entirely. Football, basketball, and hockey are Marvel movies, while baseball is the sneaky nominee for Best Picture at the Oscars that tells the best and most enchanting story.
Nobody wants you to watch “A League of Their Own” because the 1990s is quietly one of the best decades for cinema. Nobody wants you to watch “Moneyball” because Brad Pitt is a legendary actor. The reason why these movies have the “have to watch” status is because baseball fans of all generations want to feel the same stories as fans from other generations. There’s a unity to watching baseball and embracing its storytelling aspect, which makes me wonder when the next big baseball movie that “you have to watch” will come out. For a sport that relies so much on telling stories, no big baseball movie has come out since “42” in 2013, and before that and “Moneyball,” the baseball movie boom of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. I understand sports movies in general don’t make a lot of money; they’re a niche subject, for sure. But baseball fandom is a culture that relies on stories, from the “I remember where I was for this play” type of moments to the moments that gain importance as history progresses. Movies are so pivotal in baseball culture because the stories on the big screen are stories that we can all have together. There's no subjectivity to a movie's script, so the stories of these movies are truly how we see them. It's the best form of empathy baseball has to offer.
I didn’t memorize the World Series winners as a neat little party trick. I have them memorized to contextualize the jam-packed history of baseball into measurable chapters because I want to appreciate the stories of other fans as much as possible that aren't already movies. So when you watch the “Field of Dreams” game on Thursday, just remember why the game is so crucial. The game is not about a cool way to honor a movie from 30 years ago, no matter how much publicity the MLB gets from the game’s viewership. The “Field of Dreams” game is meant to remind us that, as a fandom, we may not all connected by blood, but we are all certainly connected by the stories we experience and share. God, I love this sport.
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