The film eloquently captures faith, family, beauty and baseball, unlike any other sport film to date. It’s remarkable ability to show baseball for its natural beauty, as a great human connection is tremendously insightful. The story centers around Iowa Farmer Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) and his passion for the game of baseball, passed down to him from his father. Kinsella begins to hear voices in his cornfields and takes it upon himself to build a baseball field in the middle of his farm. Shortly after the field is completed the ghosts of the 1919 Chicago White Sox begin playing ball on Kinsella’s farm. The voices continue sending Ray on various journeys until the film’s end, when Kinsella is reunited with the spirit of his father, as they play catch in front of home plate.
“If you build it he will come.”
When Terrance Mann (James Earl Jones) first arrives to Ray Kinsella’s farm in this timeless masterpiece, Mann is in awe to see his ghostly heroes from the past playing on a cornfield baseball diamond in the middle of Iowa.
“Unbelievable” Mann says to Kinsella. “It’s more then that.” Kinsella replies.
“It’s perfect.”
It is perfect! The game, the connections, the continuity, the struggle for victory, it is all perfect.
“Hey Ryan What do you think of the Bonds indictment?”
“Hey Ryan, What’s your take on Roger Clemens?”
“Hey Ryan, how about that Mitchell Report?”
All questions friends and colleagues ask me every day.
I AM DONE! TAPPED OUT!! ! HAVE NOTHING MORE TO GIVE!
I am sick and tired of talking about it, writing about it, taping it, drawing it, eating it, sleeping it, and breathing it. This will be the final article I ever write on the issue of performance enhancing drugs in professional sports.
I have been reporting on the use of drugs in sports since I was a junior in High School in 1998. I wrote an editorial for Highlights News on Mark Mcgwire’s use of adrostendione. The article covered the dangers of steroids in sports, while Mcgwire and Sammy Sosa were both chasing the single season homerun record. A year later I did a cover story for KHS-TV on steroids, interviewing coaches and athletes while once again recognizing the steroid issue in professional sports.
Now ten years later the rest of the media world has joined me in covering the story.
Not only has the rest of the media joined me, now it’s all they talk about! Now we are all being subjected to the 24-hour news media and the steroid era all in the same breath. In its infant phase of human existence, Internet, CNN, ESPN News, and individual sports channels, all give creditability to stories that are nowhere near news worthy. These stories include, but certainly not limited to, 24-hour coverage of the steroid era in baseball, and Tony Romo and Jessica Simpson. (Another sports story completely un-newsworthy.)
The original purpose of my reports almost ten years ago was to shed light on the dangers of drugs in professional sports; and to attempt to hold organizations accountable for players who would take such short cuts. Not to exploit athletes or to repeat the facts until readers and viewers are blue in the face.
Besides, no one cared ten years ago.
In the summer of 2001 I drove better then 2949.15 miles from my mothers house in New York to San Francisco California. Among my many stops during the two-week excursion, was a trip to Pac Bell Park to watch Barry Bonds in his attempt to set an all-new single season homerun record. Bonds was attempting to surpass Mark Mcgwire and Sammy Sosa’s records from just three seasons earlier. On Tuesday night August 14th, I watched from the upper deck on the third base side, as Barry Bonds hit an absolute line drive rocket over the right field wall and into Mccovy Cove for a three run homer. It was his 51st long ball of 2001. (His 51st of 73 in 2001.) I remember thinking as I watched the ball fly out of the park (fastest I have ever seen any ball leave any field of play) that maybe this was too much. Maybe the records and the numbers were all growing irrelevant. Maybe the on field accomplishments weren’t as genuine or authentic as they once were.
Two years later the BALCO scandal rocked San Francisco and the baseball world.
And now there is Roger Clemens.
Mentioned in the Mitchell report as a user of HGH during baseball’s steroid era, Roger has done more this week for 24-hour news networks then the E-Entertainment channel! His story has become a colossal disgusting mess. Congressional hearings, tape-recorded conversations, he said she said verbal lashings, 60 minutes, and press conferences, all just a remote control click away. It's a juicy gossip story, getting great coverage as a result of the winter lull in professional sports. If the Yankees were playing four games against the Red Sox this past week, the Roger Clemens story would have been put on the back burner. If the Cubs and White Sox were about to match up for inter-league play no one would have spent more then two minutes on the Mitchell report.
For me the case is closed.
Baseball now has a drug policy, with very strict consequences. It continues to grow its policies and adapt them to the times. Some players like Andy Pettitte and Jason Giambi have admitted to using steroids and have moved on. Others like Barry Bonds refuse to admit to taking steroids and now face the penalties for perjury.
Either way the issue of performance enhancing drugs in baseball has concluded. The negative spin needs to stop, and athletes needs to get back to playing the game between the base lines.
So when Terrance Mann and Ray Kinsella are standing in awe of the game of baseball on the Field of Dreams. They see only the pure beauty of the game, and the people playing it. Not the fact that Babe Ruth can’t be the greatest homerun hitter of all time because he played during a sports era of segregation. Or that Pete Rose was less of a batting champion because he was a degenerate gambler. Or that Bonds and Mcgwire and Clemens maybe liars and or drug users.
They simply see a perfect game played by perfect people.
It’s the world outside the baselines that is imperfect.
