At Phillies Field Of Dreams Game, Baseball's Spirituality Pervades

DYERSVILLE, IOWA — In "Shoeless Joe," the book that inspired the movie that inspired the game in the cornfields of Iowa Thursday night, W.P. Kinsella comes closer than perhaps anyone ever has to putting language to baseball's spirituality.

"Once you've been touched by the land, the wind never blows so cold again, because your love files the edges off it," he writes.

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There might be a Philadelphia fan or two that would take issue there, should you apply that characterization to Phillies baseball. The closer the Phils get to Red October, it seems, the more bitter the maelstrom of defeat that swirls the Delaware Valley.

But in all the hype that's gone into Major League Baseball's massive production with Netflix to bring a Phillies regular season game to the "Field of Dreams" movie site in Iowa, the deeper themes of Kinsella's masterwork are easily ignored.

The book, like the movie, centers the infamous Chicago Black Sox and Shoeless Joe Jackson, who were banned from baseball forever for conspiring with gamblers to throw the 1919 World Series. Kinsella's take, however romanticized, blamed gamblers and the underpaying White Sox owner, Charles Comiskey, for the scandal. And the film, a heartbroken Shoeless Joe tellingly says "I'd have played for nothing."

The Iowa cornfields, wavering green and gold symbol of heartland Americana, hold the spirits of the players. The spirits do not emerge from concrete colonnades of Comiskey Park. They do not come onto the field to cameras and radio announcers broadcasting all over the world, they do not have an audience of millions. There are fewer seats in the stands than a little league's bleachers. There are no glories and riches beyond the game itself. Only the land is truly witness. And that is more than enough.

The distinction Kinsella makes is intentional, between the game and the product, between a raucous Fenway Park, visited in both book and film, and a silent field in the middle of Iowa hundreds of miles from any major city. Between something akin to a religious rite, and the corrupt institutions that waft over it like so much pesticide. It's not the 1927 Yankees or the 1976 Reds that emerge from the stalks to demonstrate some sort of historic excellence. The fanfare Thursday night will surely risk implying that. No, it's a scorned collection of outcasts who have been stripped of their souls and who seek a rediscovery of childhood virtue that is infinitely more lasting than any bauble or ring.

Baseball's spirituality is its staying power. It's a spirituality rooted in the innocence of the game as we all first experience it: in childhood. It's why baseball has always been America's pasttime, regardless of the tremendous popularity of football and basketball. It's why a magical realist story like "Field of Dreams" carried tremendous mainstream appeal, far beyond the world of athletics. The chanting of Gregorian monks is not done at Coachella.

"Baseball is a ceremony, a ritual, as surely as sacrificing a goat beneath a full moon is a ritual," Kinsella writes later.

The Phillies and Twins game Thursday night will be an international spectacle. Millions of dollars have been poured into it. Its marketing taps vaguely into the nostalgia of the 1989 film. A full convert would suggest here wisely that this is not the reason for the season.