‘Field Of Dreams’ Is America’s Hope For A Diamond In Rough Times

On what would have been pro baseball’s opening day this year, the sound baseball fans live for — a crack like lightning as bat smacks ball — was a dashed dream across America, silenced by the new coronavirus.

Baseball as Americans know and love it just isn’t anymore.

Not yet.

MLB is stretching for a shortened season and working through curve balls thrown by the coronavirus. It's shooting to begin July 4 or so, but nobody really knows how it will all play out.

Perhaps nowhere in America is the return of Major League Baseball anticipated more than in Dyersville, Iowa, on a diamond of dirt in the middle of America that is right out of the movies — to be precise, “Field of Dreams,” the 1989 blockbuster starring Kevin Costner, James Earl Jones, Amy Madigan, Ray Liotta and Timothy Busfield.

The New York Yankees and the Chicago White Sox are scheduled to play there Aug. 13.

The game is a pretty big deal in Iowa, which has never hosted a Major League Baseball game.

But a Major League game riffing off a movie that put the town of 4,000 on the map?

That’s heaven, to borrow a line from the movie after the main character heard voices coming from his cornfield telling him, “If you build it, he will come.” Costner’s character, Ray Kinsella, interprets that to mean he should plow up his cornfield and carve out a ballfield.

Sure enough, the ghosts of “Shoeless” Joe Jackson and the other seven members of the disgraced 1919 White Sox team show up and play ball. And as the messages continue, Kinsella seeks out 1960s author Terence Mann, played by Jones, who helps him understand their deeper meaning.

To many Americans, “Field of Dreams,” based on the W.P. Kinsella book “Shoeless Joe,” is one of the all-time greatest baseball movies.

It’s not really about baseball, though.

“It’s about the pursuit of one’s dreams, redemption, just being able to persevere past all of the trials and tribulations people face throughout their lives,” said Roman Weinberg, the director of operations for Go The Distance Baseball, which owns the Field of Dreams Movie Site.

“It gives them hope,” he said. “It’s so simple yet so powerful, because the movie presents it in such a simple way.”

As hope for the Yankees-White Sox game hangs in the balance, the curious are still cruising by, Weinberg says. Some get out and walk the bases. Others play catch. Almost everyone snaps a couple of pictures.

And the powerful, real-life stories that have played out among the tens of thousands of people who make annual pilgrimages to the farm? Fantasy fiction doesn’t come close.

Play Ball — Maybe

The coronavirus hasn’t stopped work on the temporary stadium under construction for the Yankees-Sox game, within eyeshot of the preserved baseball field carved out of real-life farmer Don Lansing’s cornfield for the movie.

How — or if — fans will maintain social distancing in the ballpark is among the issues still being worked out. The game is still on, MLB said in an emailed statement to Patch.

“Construction is continuing, and we are following all CDC and state protocols regarding recommended safety practices, including social distancing, washing hands and temperature checks before arriving to the site,” MLB said. “Safeguarding public health is our top priority. We are monitoring ongoing events and plan to remain as flexible as these circumstances demand.”

Hope is all Major League Baseball fans have in the upended 2020 season.

Enduring Spirit

The story of how Iowa landed the game is a fantasy come true.

And Denise Stillman was the dream maker.

No one more than Stillman wanted MLB to commit to a game in Iowa. She almost willed it to happen from the moment her Go The Distance Baseball company bought the movie site in 2012 until her death in November 2018, Weinberg says. The MLB deal was close then but not yet inked.

“She had a passion and desire to see the field be preserved and succeed like no other,” he said. “She put every ounce of her blood, sweat and tears into this field. We’re extremely excited we were able to get this across the field.”

If MLB is striving for perfection in the Aug. 13 game, technology wizards would superimpose a ghostly vision of Stillman emerging from the cornfield — just as the White Sox players’ apparitions did in the movie.

Given the aura of kismet some visitors say envelopes the field, it’s not that far-fetched to believe Stillman will be watching over the game — even without a cinematic fool-the-eye trick.

Dreams Are Built

Don Lansing, the farmer who owned the field used for filming, won’t argue the last three decades of his life have been a magical journey.

The fourth generation of his family to till the land outside Dyersville, the bachelor farmer was just living life in late 1987 when, out of the blue, someone from Iowa’s film office showed up and asked if he’d move out of his house for the summer and lease both it and the surrounding cornfield to Universal Studios for a movie.

What? Lansing thought. Was he being pranked?

“It took me totally off guard,” he said, “I thought, ‘Are you dreaming or what? This is way out here in the middle of nowhere.’ ”

In other words, it was perfect.

After the movie crew moved on, Lansing said he “could’ve plowed it over,” but decided to preserve the ballfield for friends and neighbors who were proud "Field of Dreams" had been filmed in their backyard.

“Before long, the people of the world were my friends and neighbors,” he said. “Just think, if I wouldn’t have been home that night, there would be no field there, and there would be no people coming out to make their dreams come true.”

Lansing didn’t know a lot about tourism and marketing, but he knew the movie had become ingrained in people. He understood the gravitational pull of lines such as “Is this heaven? ... It’s Iowa” and “If you build it, he will come.”

1,000 Visitors, 1,000 Reasons

The movie premiered in Dyersville on April 20, 1989, and within a few days, Lansing’s first new friend showed up. It was a fellow on a cross-country trip from New York to California.

“There were no road maps or signs identifying it, but he found the place,” Lansing said. “That’s what was so magical about the first year. This movie meant so much to him, he went out of his way quite a bit to see it.

“He had a New York Giants hat and said, ‘Take this in remembrance,’ ” Lansing recalled. “He insisted that I keep it. I still have it to this day. It’s a remarkable feeling to know how much this field meant to him.”

In the movie, Costner’s character waited too long to make amends with his father. In real life, something happened one day on the field that was so close to the movie storyline that Lansing’s eyes misted over.

A real-life dad estranged from his sons invited them to the Field of Dreams, hoping the symbolism would jump-start a reconciliation. “Before the day ended, they were friends and talking to each other, playing ball and treating each other like they should’ve been,” Lansing said.

Another time, two brothers who had been separated when they were adopted as youngsters showed up completely by chance at the same time and recognized each other.

“It’s a miracle they met,” Lansing said. “There’s a healing power to this place.”

The first year after the movie, 7,000 people visited the baseball field in the middle of the cornfield. The crowd doubled the next year to 15,000, then to 30,000 the year after that.

“Everyone is drawn to the site in their own way,” Weinberg said. “If we get 1,000 people, we get 1,000 reasons of why they came.”

‘I’ve Been Waiting For You’

Becky Lansing had her own reasons for visiting in 1994.

She was living in Boulder, Colorado, and had fallen about as low as a person can after her husband’s death three years earlier.

“I was 36 years old and absolutely lost,” she said. “For three years, I lived in a darkness I hope to never have to repeat.”

She swears the story of her Field of Dreams Movie Site sojourn is true.

She woke up one morning in September 1994 and “something had changed, a switch had been flipped,” she said. “Something drastic happened to my soul, and I felt the light coming back and felt alive.”

A few weeks later, she dreamt she had been summoned to the Field of Dreams at midnight on New Year’s Day, right down to minute details of holding a hot dog in one hand and a root beer soda in the other. She had the dream again, she says, and then a third time.

So, on Dec. 27, 1994, she and her aunt got in the car and headed east out of Boulder toward Dyersville.

“You don’t know me,” she began after finding Lansing’s number and giving him a call.

Lansing listened to the story and was moved by it. Becky and her aunt could stop by, he said.

“I immediately went up to him, stuck out my hand and introduced myself,” she said. “He reached for my hand and said, ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’ ”

Their love story is practically an epilogue to “Field of Dreams.”

After trips between Iowa and Colorado for six months, Becky took a leave of absence from her job so she and Don could spend the summer together.

On July 27, 1995, Don proposed. They walked hand-in-hand to the ballfield. They stopped at home plate for meditative reflection. They walked to first base and did the same. They repeated the ritual until they made it around the field.

And, Amen: Now 77 and 65 years old, Don and Becky Lansing will celebrate their silver anniversary later this summer.

They worked the tourism business as best they could, building a foundation for a larger, more-focused organization to take over when the time came.

That was in 2012. The farm had been in Lansing’s family for 108 years by the time he sold it to Stillman’s Go The Distance Baseball.

The Lansings live in town now, but their roots remain firmly planted on the farm-turned-movie-site.

“It’s a sacred place,” Lansing said. “People really respect the place; that’s what’s nice.”

“It’s been an honor to be the ‘parents’ of this farm for so many years,” his wife added. “People come to the farm and say, ‘Oh my, this is so beautiful,’ and Donnie and I obviously look at it that way; but with every visitor, we gain a visual, as it were, to an entirely different view of the farm.”

The couple are 100 percent behind MLB’s plan to introduce big-league baseball to Iowa.

Brightview Sports Turf, the league’s go-to general contractor for ballparks around the world, is building it.

If coronavirus ends, baseball can begin again.

And for the first time in their lives, Iowans will hear a Major League umpire yell, “Play ball!” on their home turf.

It’d be a hell of a strike against the coronavirus.

We can still dream, can’t we?