5/6/2023 0 Comments Field of dreams stadium![]() ![]() They come to touch what they saw and felt in the movie. Only when the sun sets do they stop coming, but they wouldn’t if Lansing ever decided to turn the field lights on at night.” Now the visitors come in a steady stream. It was a very impractical thing for a farmer to do, but there it is.Īs I wrote in 2007, “Visitors were once so rare that Lansing suspected every car that drove to his farm carried a salesman. Twice a week he manicured the field and mowed the grass to playing length. Each morning he dragged and raked the infield, swept home plate and set the bases. Lansing, who worked in the John Deere plant in Dubuque during the day, found himself mingling with visitors in the mornings and evenings and tended the field like a real-life Ray Kinsella. His neighbor, Al Ameskamp, who owned the property in left field, did just that.īut then the people began showing up. ![]() He said he fully expected to put the field back in corn the following year after plowing it up for the movie. “I didn’t know it was going to turn out like this,” the farm’s owner, Don Lansing, told me in 2007, some 18 years after the movie was released. They played catch and roamed the field for three hours. Four brothers gathered from around the country to meet on the field. One couple came from Texas to renew their wedding vows on the field. They walked into the corn that borders the outfield, as if testing the magic of the movie. Some 10,000 people came during the summer months.Īs noted here in a 2007 column, children ran the bases, and fathers and sons played catch. As many as 300 people came to the farm a day. People visited the field from as far away as Mexico, Canada, Australia, Germany, Japan and from around the U.S. The movie ends but in Iowa it was just beginning. They’ll arrive at your door, innocent as children, longing for the past.”Īnd that’s what happened in the movie and in real life. ![]() They’ll come to Iowa for reasons they can’t fathom. In the movie, Mann says, “People will come, Ray. The movie resonated with audiences and played out long after it ended. The movie was about the opposite of all that. They give us overproduced variety shows because our modern attention span requires constant stimuli. The game isn’t enough there must be dancers and mascots and loud entertainment on the big screen and half-court shots by fans and a barrage of loud music and fireworks. Look at professional and collegiate sports these days as one example. Baseball is the medium for a lot of other things - a return to the simple, to the understated, to the basics, to relationships, to the real reason we do things, right down to playing a game simply for the joy of it. The movie isn’t about baseball of course. One MLB official told USA Today that he believes the game will become an annual event and that the stadium will become the site for Little League, high school, college and minor league games. The stadium is described as temporary, but the field, dugouts, bullpens and fences will remain. It is typically American - loud, commercial, overdeveloped, overproduced. Major League Baseball paved a cornfield and put up a parking lot. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. “America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. Did the people in the front office of MLB even watch the movie? Did they understand what it was about? Do they remember these lines uttered by the Terrence Mann character in the movie? ![]()
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