Reviewed by Tim Rask

Midway through the summer of 1989, two friends (Ross Burkhart, currently of Boise, Idaho, and Glenn Richardson, now of Kutztown, Pennsylvania) and I took a break from our graduate studies and embarked on a mini-baseball pilgrimage of sorts. We spent a long weekend in Chicago, taking in games at Comiskey Park (the old one, not the park currently known as U.S. Cellular Field) and Wrigley Field, and capped the weekend with a side trip to County Stadium in Milwaukee.

On this brief trip, we managed to cram in a bundle of great baseball memories. We saw the White Sox defeat an imploding Yankees squad in the first game of a scheduled doubleheader, while a seething George Steinbrenner stewed in his luxury box. As we glimpsed him through our binoculars, we fantasized that any minute he would place the call to the dugout that would doom manager Dallas Green’s job (although it would be another month before Bucky Dent stepped in to replace Green).

During the rain delay that would wash out the second game, we relaxed with our fellow baseball fans as we had the surreal experience of watching the Cubs-Dodgers game on the scoreboard’s big screen. (Since when has any non-derogatory reference to the North Siders been welcome at 35th and Shields?).

The Cubs returned to Chicago the following night, and we saw the Cubs top the Giants in a thrilling, come-from-behind 4-3 game. Pitcher Les Lancaster, of all people, drove in the winning run in the 11th on a double just inside the third base line. Too bad for us Cubs fans that the North Siders didn’t come out on top of San Francisco when the two clubs later met in October of that year.

From Chicago, we moved on to Milwaukee where we tailgated with the Brewer faithful, then moved inside a sold out County Stadium to witness a spirited border battle as the Twins pounded the Brew Crew, 6 to 1. For my friends and me, it served as a memorable climax to weekend spent in three classic Midwestern ballparks. I’m sure any baseball fan could offer up a similar tale (or two or three).

But our trip didn’t end there. After an all-night drive back home to Iowa from Wisconsin, we decided to make one last stop before returning to Iowa City—the movie set of that summer’s hit film, "Field of Dreams," located just outside Dyersville, Iowa. After the film had wrapped production the previous year, farmer Don Lansing, who owned the land where the baseball diamond sat, decided to leave it alone, so that the curious could come to see where Hollywood had worked its magic in this corner of northeastern Iowa. My friends and I arrived shortly after noon. The field was curiously askew (neighboring farmer Al Ameskamp, who owned what had been left and center fields, had decided to replant corn on his portion of the baseball field). Despite the oddly asymmetric dimensions (a row of corn grazed the top of the infield between second and third), the field was clearly recognizable as the magic diamond from the movie. The small backstop caught stray balls. A few spectators lounged on the tiny bleachers along the first base side. And the white farmhouse stood watch atop a small hill.

What were three baseball-loving friends to do when confronted with this scene? We reached into the trunk of the car, fished out our baseball gloves, and took the field. As one hour turned into a second, then a third, we melted into the landscape of the field and just enjoyed baseball. We turned double plays, albeit not as gracefully as Dunston to Sandberg to Grace. We fielded a few pop-ups, and perhaps dropped a few more. We ran out grounders and cheered as our shots to left field landed in the corn (it didn’t matter to us that “left field” began even before the outer edge of the infield on this diamond). We lobbed fat, slow pitches to toddlers so their fathers could help them make contact, then we slowly fielded their feeble hits and tossed the ball in great arcs to first so that the happy running youngsters could beat out the throw for a single. We left the field late that afternoon with sore arms, parched throats, and happy souls.

As it turns out, my two friends and I were on the leading edge of a trend. The summer of 1989 marked the beginning of the transformation of a little baseball diamond outside a little town in northeast Iowa, from erstwhile movie set into a national pop icon, a regular “corn cathedral” that continues to attract thousands of fans every summer. The story of how this transformation occurred, and how the Field of Dreams continues to tug at the hearts of both baseball fans and non-fans alike is the subject of Brett H. Mandel’s book, Is This Heaven? The Magic of the Field of Dreams (Diamond Communications, 2002).

Regardless of what you think of the movie, "Field of Dreams" (and my own love of the film has waned over the years), there is no question that the movie has come to represent something very special to a great many people. With the film’s basic message of reconciliation, redemption, and the image of a simpler, bygone era, it’s easy to see why people would want to visit the place fictional events were acted out. In a slim volume that can easily be read the next time your favorite team is rained out, Mandel skillfully manages to illustrate just how this movie managed to work itself into the American popular consciousness.

Mandel provides an excellent background to the field’s existence. He gives us the hard facts of how writer/director Phil Alden Robinson adapted W.P. Kinsella’s novel, Shoeless Joe, and also introduces us to a host of ordinary folks who have felt the lure of the Field of Dreams. Most of the stories really yank at the heartstrings, so if you have a low tolerance for sentimentality, you may want to steer clear. But, if you are one of those folks who felt a bit weepy when Kevin Costner’s Ray Kinsella asked his resurrected father if he’d like to have a catch, then this book will further explain just why the Field of Dreams has been such an enduring attraction.

And what exactly is the nature of that attraction? Is it a matter of people trying to capture their own version of the film’s story of a father and son coming together? Is it a natural extension of baseball’s status as a quasi-religious institution? (My own reference to my baseball trip with friends as a “pilgrimage” would seem to support that one). Or does it have something to do with Americans’ seemingly endless inclination to reflect upon a simpler time?

Ultimately, each reader can decide on a final verdict, but I’ll take Mandrel’s comment that, “In the end, the Field of Dreams has not declined into a playground for a chosen few. It has not become about well-heeled visitors enjoying a private spectacle or rich fans enjoying a tour of a private game reserve or baseball safari. It is an open and unpretentious pickup game that goes from dawn to dusk, involving the athletic and the awkward, the young and the young at heart, and the mainstream and the marginalized.” Or, perhaps better yet, as the late Al Ameskamp put it, the field is “a bunch of strangers playing together like they’d known each other all their lives. That’s just the way it works out here from morning to night.”

Where’s my glove?

Tim Rask lives in Iowa City, where W.P. Kinsella’s novel, Shoeless Joe, was set. Tim wishes Hollywood would turn its lens on his favorite Kinsella novel, The Iowa Baseball Confederacy.