BEAVERTON, Ore. – This year, the movie turned 30 years old, and while CBS used to air it every year, there may be an entire generation of people who have never seen Field of Dreams – the 1989 Kevin Costner vehicle that combined magical realism while leveraging baseball’s Americana, creating a new brand of sports storytelling. Perhaps baseball’s wane as a cultural touchstone will leave the movie forgotten.
Yet there is an image at the end of director Phil Alden Robinson’s movie that would inspire chills in any sports fan: that of a line of cars, extended through the Iowa prairie, being inexplicable drawn to Ray Kinsella’s farm, where the young father has risked his family’s livelihood to, in response to voices from his fields, build a baseball diamond.