People will come, Ray

"Baseball is what we were. Football is what we have become."

-Mary McGrory

In about twelve hours from this post time, the biggest college football game of the year will start. Michigan vs. Ohio State, the #1 and #2 teams in the nation, will face off in a contest that is so hyped that stories have appeared in mainstream news about celebrities who are unable to acquire tickets. The hype all week has been akin to the Superbowl, and this is just a regular season game.

Were I writing a football blog, I'm sure I'd be in heaven now. I'd have probably started this in MS Word for easier editing. I'd go through several drafts to ensure not only the complete absence of spelling and grammatical errors, but also to make sure my prose has the correct tone and flow. When finally posted here, it would clock in at a few thousand words and would (in my mind, at least) be worthy of an essay contest, of something you'd see in Sports Illustrated.

But alas, this is a very narrowly focused baseball blog, concentrating on a mid-level club of my passion that is struggling to become one of the big boys in the Major Leagues.

Therefore, I have little to write about.

But right now, I am watching "Field of Dreams." And that's all the reason I need to write tonight.

This movie is a chick flick for guys, a tear-jerker that women just can't grasp in the same way we can. Sure, there are women out there who love this movie, women who are moved by it, women who even count it among their favorites. But while the movie can be enjoyed by all, the experience of it is very distinctly male.

And it could not have been made about any other sport.

This has nothing to do with the father-son angle, or the Iowa cornfield, or any other plot in the movie. It is solely due to the poetry, the lyricism, of baseball. Baseball transcends the boundry between life and art with a fluidity not found in any other sport or game on this planet. And it's hard to say exactly what it is that lends baseball to this predisposition.

I've seen every major pro sport played in this country live. In the 1990's, I went to more NHL games than I did MLB games. My dad and I used to have season tickets to the LA Rams, before they abandoned us for the move to St. Louis and we both quickly learned to hate them as God hates sin. I've been dragged to a couple Laker games at the Staples Center.

With that, I've played every sport. Little League baseball. Pick-up basketball with my friends in high school. Pre-season JV football, before some idiot lost control in the weight room and dropped a 45 lb. weight on my foot from shoulder height. And hockey. Boy, did I love to play hockey. I'm one of the few in Southern California who learned to skate on ice, rather than roller blades. I started playing ice hockey when I was 15 years old, right before it became popular, and continued on and off for nearly 15 years, until my Army injuries forced me to stop. I loved playing hockey.

More, even, than I loved playing baseball.

But of these sports, it is only the baseball diamond that I romanticize. When I went to see the Rams, I didn't dream of running out of that tunnel like Daniel E. "Rudy" Ruettiger. I didn't dream of hopping over the boards at the old Great Western Forum and skating on the ice in front of 16,005 seats, empty or filled, wearing my old CCM Tacks. And I certainly never dreamed of lacing up a pair of Air Jordans and shooting some free throws on the hardwood at the Staples Center.

But there's not a ballfield I've been to that I didn't want to touch the field.

I'm an adult now. I'm thirty-two years old, and even if I had been blessed with the size and talent necessary to play baseball in the Major Leagues, it's far too late to make that a reality. My dreams of pitching a no-hitter, or hitting that walk-off home run in the 7th game of the World Series are long gone.

But every time I enter a Major League park, I feel as though I'm entering a cathedral. I want to feel how spongy the grass is beneath my feet. I want to hear the grinding crunch of the infield dirt as I walk on it, and feel abrasive grit of it as I rub a handful into my palms. I want to step on the first base bag, toe the pitching rubber, run back toward the wall and feel as the grass turns into warning track beneath my feet.

I can't go to a baseball game without having to fight an urge to make a run for it, to see how much of that I can experience before the police tackle me to the ground and arrest me.

And that's just one reason why baseball has a deeper connection to my soul than any other sport.

Would anybody have cared if Ray Kinsella had plowed under his cornfield to build a gridiron? My guess is the audience would have thought he was as crazy (and stupid) as his brother-in-law (played by Timothy Busfield) did. Would it have been a great movie if he had put in an ice rink? Would Terrance Mann (or, in the novel, J.D. Salinger) have come to Iowa to see the basketball court the voices told him to build?

The baseball diamond is the only reason this movie worked. We bought into a magic baseball field spawning long-dead ballplayers from the rows of corn because we know that a baseball field has a magic to it all by itself.

This was demonstrated in "Field of Dreams" by Shoeless Joe Jackson, the Black Sox, and eventually, Ray's dad John Kinsella appearing.

It's demonstrated in our lives every time we walk up a tunnel in our nearest Major League stadium and see the sunlight glinting off the grass and hear the crack of a wood bat hitting a ball.

A few years back, I made a January trip to Baltimore to visit an old friend I served with in the Army. Having never been to Baltimore, I was anxious to see the city, visit Edgar Allen Poe's grave, eat some crab cakes.

But more than anything, I wanted to see Camden Yards. The grass was brown, we were the only people walking the brick street between the stadium and the B&O Warehouse where, in the summer on 1995, the numbers switched from "2130" to "2131" as Cal Ripken Jr. became baseball's ironman against (you guessed it) the Angels.

I was amazed at how narrow the alley was. I always envisioned it as a wide street that separated the stadium from the offices, but it's a rather narrow pathway. I loved the little brass plaques embedded in the ground for every home run hit out of the stadium on the right field side. I pressed up against the bars, trying to squeeze myself through like Robert Patrick in "Terminator 2" as I stared in at the empty ballpark. And though it had been more than three months since a game had been played there and would be a few more before the season began again, the faint echoes of the crowds, the muted cracks of Louisville Sluggers, the distant calls of hot dog vendors, they all rang distantly in my ears.

A few blocks away was Ravens Stadium, and I didn't care a bit.

"Ray, people will come Ray. They'll come to Iowa for reasons they can't even fathom. They'll turn up your driveway not knowing for sure why they're doing it. They'll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past. Of course, we won't mind if you look around, you'll say. It's only $20 per person. They'll pass over the money without even thinking about it: for it is money they have and peace they lack. And they'll walk out to the bleachers; sit in shirtsleeves on a perfect afternoon. They'll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they'll watch the game and it'll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they'll have to brush them away from their faces. People will come Ray. The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh... people will come Ray. People will most definitely come."

-Terrance Mann (James Earl Jones)
"Field of Dreams"