“If you build it, he will come.”

“Ease his pain”

“Go the distance”

I would think I was going crazy too if I started hearing these voices in the middle of a corn field.  A wonderful story with likable characters, “Field of Dreams” is just like the title says.  A field where one man gets a chance to hit against major league pitching.  Another man gets his chance to relive his days of watching baseball games at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, New York.  And another man, well, I don’t want to give that away.

Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) hears these voices.  Builds a baseball field for “Shoeless” Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta).  A player that was banned from baseball who was on the famous 1919 Chicago White Sox team.  Him and seven others were banned for throwing the 1919 World Series.  Ray then travels to Boston to bring a writer, Terence Mann (James Earl Jones) into the mix to help “ease his pain.”  They both see that their next stop is to Chisholm, Minnesota to seek Archibald “Moonlight” Graham.

All three have baseball as their common thread that binds them together in this well played plot.  It will hit you at your very core.  Anyone who remembers being a kid and either playing catch with your dad or going to the ball game.  You remember almost every detail about it.  The smells, the sounds, the feeling you got when you caught the ball in your glove.  The sound of the bat hitting the ball in just the perfect spot.  The smell of the freshly cut grass and the dirt flying into the air.

This is my favorite sports movie simply because of the father son connection.  I’m not going to give anything away if you haven’t seen it, but if you have, you know exactly what I’m talking about.  You remember that time you played catch with your dad.  You remember dreaming of playing in the big league and having your dad watching you play.  I have since chosen a different career path, but I will never forget that feeling I get when I recall those days.

It was recently re-kindled this past year.  I took my father to an Angels game this past May, just a month after he was released from the hospital.  He was at UCI medical center for the last month of his two month hospital stay.  UCI is just down the street from Angel Stadium.  Suffice it to say the view was much better in May as me and him were two rows behind the Angels dugout.  Watching “Field of Dreams” brings that feeling back to me every time I watch it.

The quote by Terence Mann towards the end of the movie really optimizes the meaning of baseball for almost all of its fans.  I’ll leave you with that quote and I thank you for reading each and every post of my top 10 sports movies that I’ve seen.  The list will be left on the main page of this website.