I grew up in a baseball family, played as the catcher on my softball team for four years, and some of my fondest memories are a mix of going to Pittsburgh Pirates games or sitting on the couch with my dad to watch baseball movies. While my personal favorite Kevin Costner/baseball movie is For Love of the Game, I have a soft spot in my heart for Field of Dreams—maybe because baseball was always something I did with my dad. (My first dog was named Kendall after then Pirates catcher Jason Kendall, after all.)
Field of Dreams, while the second baseball film that Costner did (it came out in 1989, while Bull Durham came out in 1988), has become a staple for fans of the sport, and Major League Baseball has decided to honor the film by playing the Field of Dreams Game. On August 12 (tonight at 7:15 Eastern!), the game is taking place in the field in Iowa that was created for the film, brought up to major league standards.
To celebrate the movie and the star who built the field himself, Kevin Costner walked into the stadium, and suddenly, my eyes were wet.
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Is it Kevin Costner on a baseball field that did it? Is it him back on the field he built to finally play that game of catch with his father? Or is it just emotional in general? Probably all three, but seeing Kevin Costner walk out onto this field hit me in a way that I was not prepared for.
Today’s game is set between the New York Yankees and the Chicago White Sox and isn’t obviously a plan to get a man and his dead father back together, but the field still holds a kind of nostalgia for fans. While Field of Dreams is, at its most basic function, a baseball movie, it is also so much more than that. Ray Kinsella (Costner) didn’t play catch with his dad, something he regrets, and when a voice tells him to build a baseball field with the knowledge that his father’s ghost will come, he does it.
It’s, for the most part, a story about family and those moments we miss out on for some reason or another that don’t seem important until we lose someone. Telling your dad you don’t want to play catch one day doesn’t feel like a big deal, but it could be the last chance you have, and it’s just an emotional journey through pain and loss mixed with our national love of baseball, and it’s a surprisingly beautiful movie.
Seeing Kevin Costner walk out onto the field in Iowa and throw a pitch? Something that I didn’t expect to full sob over in 2021, and yet, here I am.
(image: Universal Pictures)
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