I know that the baseball diamond at the Field of Dreams movie site is now covered with snow because at least once a week I go to the EarthCam website and look at it.
Via other cameras installed in other places, all arguably more scenic, I could be watching the ships dock at the Port of LA in real time, or looking out across New York City from the Top of The Rock at Rockefeller Center.
Instead, I tend to stick to the Field of Dreams movie site in Dyersville, Iowa. This isn’t a unique practice, it turns out: there are over 4.5 million views on this EarthCam, which is positioned as far as I can tell on the front porch of the house from the movie.
Yesterday, there was work being done close to the old homestead, obscuring the view of the empty field.
Most of the year during weekdays in the warm months, from sunup to sunset, there are people out there throwing fake pitches while batters swing imaginary bats hard towards the cornfield in right. Others mill about the infield or take photos or walk through the corn. Catch is played in the outfield or along the foul lines to deter from errant baseballs and lawsuits and such. It is, in an ambient way, fascinating to watch.
And every weekend from May to September, championship games of youth baseball tournaments are played on the field, which may explain some of the views on this EarthCam, but certainly not all of them.
4.5 million views.
Of what? What are we looking at this indistinguishable baseball diamond for? Why was that damn voice right, and we are still arriving here, by wheel or website?
I went there as a kid, maybe even before I had seen the movie. We did all of the usual things. I wore the first of three baseball mitts I’ve ever worn and played catch with my brother. I remember it being crowded there, late-90s.
Mostly we were there to prove that we had gone at all, and so we bought things, like this mug.
Now when we find these mugs in thrift stores, we buy them. I am not interested in knowing what chemical reaction it takes to make the baseball players appear, then fade back into the corn corresponding with the temperature of the liquid held inside of them. Nor am I interested in knowing the short and long term side effects of ingesting these transformative paints on a regular rotation during my formative years, and now with a more intermittent frequency here during my middle innings.
I’d like to think that the revitalizing downtown of Dyersville has been funded by selling one scene-shifting coffee cup at a time.
But it’s mostly been Major League Baseball.
Where the ghosts first walked through in the movie now holds a path to a new multi-million dollar baseball complex where MLB has been playing one game a year for the last two seasons. For those outside of Iowa, it’s impossible to quantify the impact of this single baseball game on a town/state with no professional sports team of its own. This was American marketing on another sphere, the kind of barstool scheme too pure to be trusted, and too sweet to contradict. So on they pushed, and they built a baseball field in the corn. Again.
Imagining that meeting at MLB headquarters is worthwhile. It probably mirrored the screenplay pitch that made the idea of a game there possible in the first place. Something like this: “What if we played professional baseball there, near the diamond built by a man in a movie filmed 35 years ago, an expat liberal at that, trying to make it as a farmer in the heartland, married as he is to a fire-and-brimstone feminist whose primary adversary, besides the bank of course, is a Moms For Liberty prototype at a book banning meeting at the school?”
That guy then embarks on a real hero’s journey across space and time to find that to-be-banned author, kidnap him, and usher him along back to Iowa to resurrect a dead doctor’s fledgling baseball career. Not only that, but also to redeem the entire 1919 Chicago Black Sox for their real and alleged transgressions, and finally to forge a bond with his father via one final sunset catch.
The movie and Major League Baseball’s yearly game both bank heavily on America’s generational ability to consume baseball as something more than sport, one of the few shared cultural heirlooms that we have left. If sport is our shared cultural distraction, sports movies, even bad ones, are the secret menu items. And Field of Dreams is not a bad sports movie. As the EarthCam says, it was nominated for three Academy Awards.
It’s just that the film is more relevant now than ever: book banning, rural brain drain, identity politics, struggling single family farms, belief in the power of non-conventional thinking. And to find his way through it all, Ray Kinsella follows his own secular sense of spirituality to save everyone and everything.
By the way, as for the emotional aspect of Major League Baseball’s presentation, it worked: at the game last year, a guy I work with walked through the corn rows in right, carrying his dad’s ashes in one arm and his son in the other.
I understand that Kevin Costner these days is playing a cowboy. Or cowboy adjacent. I’ve not seen a single episode of Yellowstone despite massive familial and advertiser urging. In the promotional material, he’s always wearing that sort of constipated look that rogue American individuality is supposed to supply. I’m told to watch it by purportedly strong straight men presenting it as an example of successful modern conservative media. I’ve seen this Yellowstone Costner included among all the usual right wing suspects as part of their online iconography.
But good old Kev himself has been a capital D Democrat since 1992. He even endorsed Pete Buttigieg for president at a rally here in Indianola way back before the fall. It’s almost like playing a farmer impaled by Reaganomics made him reconsider the whole thing. From his time here and his frequent appearances every few years after for reunions and anniversaries, he probably realized that under decades of Republican leadership, Iowa’s “Fields of Opportunity” have turned out to grow mainly combination gas-and-pizza places and many, many dollar stores.
I could be very wrong about all this. I am about a lot of things. I’m sure Yellowstone, is a delightful television show. I just know too many people who watch it, and the fading permanent red flags kept up out in their yards.
Part of baseball’s allure is in its constancy. It has over a century of statistics to organize and file teams and players. Unlike nearly all of our society or sports, for the most part, the baseball of a hundred years ago is pretty much the baseball of today. If, for example, ghost players walked through the corn field during the next MLB game in Dyersville, they would recognize it and be able to compete.
But, what baseball has been showing us as of late is that even it can be amended. With video replays and challenges, pitch clocks, and even the discussion of future robot umpires, MLB is showing a willingness to update the game for a modern audience. This is a jarring development to a society composed now entirely of legislative deadlock, ideological impasse, and general malaise. Surprisingly, there’s not been a real “They’re coming for our baseball” moment, though I’m sure anyone saying that probably watches Yellowstone.
I imagine it’s been tough for that crowd to be confronted with experiencing the benefits that sometimes come with foundational change. I’m not naive enough to see minor adjustments to the monolith of baseball as indicating more coming cultural improvements, i.e. universal healthcare, worker’s rights, protected bodily autonomy, well-funded public schools, and, oh, I don’t know, less mass shootings.
We are supposed to be happy enough with faster baseball games.
Yesterday I watched on the EarthCam while a father and two kids ran the bases, each of their footsteps leaving dark holes in the snow. Both of the kids tried hard to beat their dad around the bases and sometimes slipped rounding a corner.
They took a couple of laps, captured some selfies, and were gone. From what I can tell, apart from the folks performing maintenance, they were the only ones on the field all day.
That makes this a photograph of ghosts. Kind of.
I don’t want to think about what that makes me, watching them, taking screenshots.
But, if you want to meet me in the spring when the snow is gone to have a catch on the field and get caught by this EarthCam also, let me know so I have some time to dig my glove out of the garage and watch the goddamn movie again to remind myself what it’s all supposed to mean.
Somebody’s got to stay behind and take a picture, though.
I really don’t need any more of these mugs to remember it by.
Avery. Please reach out. rdwleonard@gmail.com
Very nice...