Remembering his on-screen tribute to Boston baseball
James Earl Jones. Iconic actor of stage and screen. Huge smile, huge voice. He was Darth Vader, of course, but he also carved out an unforgettable place in the world of baseball, appearing in two beloved baseball-themed movies—Field of Dreams and The Sandlot—and reciting a spoken-word version of the national anthem at the 1993 All Star Game, while being backed by the Morgan State University choir.
His Terrence Mann wasn’t the main character in Field of Dreams. That would be Kevin Costner, whose character, Ray Kinsella, explains in a voiceover at the beginning of the movie that he attended college at the University of California, Berkeley to get far, far away from where he grew up.
I watched Field of Dreams in a theater in San Francisco when it was released. Those words resonated with me because on that trip out west—far, far away from my little New England town—I found out where I was going to go to college. For me, it was UC Berkeley, just like Ray Kinsella, and it was for the same reason. The yellow T-shirt with BERKELEY in blue letters that Ray sports in the movie is the same one I have, but mine has the colors reversed. The production crew and I were there in the ASUC gift shop on campus in the same fashion cycle. This movie has resonated with me on several levels for as long as it’s been out.
People will say Field of Dreams is not about the Red Sox, and it isn’t. Characters’ favorite teams include the White Sox, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and there’s even a Cubs sticker on the underside of the sun visor in Ray’s VW bus. Most ballplayers in the movie wear White Sox uniforms, but we see New York Giants, Cincinnati Reds, Philadelphia Athletics, and St. Louis jerseys too.
I love this movie because it loves baseball, and so do I. This movie isn’t judged to be Jones’ best, though he called it “magic,” nor is it even Costner’s best baseball movie. But as much as it is a love letter to baseball, it’s equally in love with Boston.
Boston’s skyline, the T, and Fenway, back when the Green Monster had no ads. Boston icons, all featured in the movie. Though Field of Dreams was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Picture, some would say it’s not even the best movie shot at Fenway Park (both Moneyball and The Town have their supporters).
Some folks quibble with the movie’s accuracy. For some, it’s driving the wrong way down Lansdowne Street; for me, it’s scoring the game with a Sharpie and the fact that Jones and Costner (as Terrence and Ray) leave the Red Sox game super-early—judging by Ray’s scorecard, it’s the bottom of the third inning. Ray’s scorecard also shows that Dwight Evans hit a single, and that seems totally on point. Jim Rice (like me, a huge Dewey supporter) isn’t visible on there, probably because he was hitting further down in the lineup.
Steve Buckley, noting that he grew up just a couple of miles from Fenway, wrote a great piece for The Athletic that honored Jones’s role in the movie and examined the filming of the Fenway scenes more closely. He writes of the kindness and respect Jones (and Costner, for that matter) showed to everyone involved in the Fenway shoot, particularly the Fenway staff. Jones sounds like a delight, a true professional, a good person.
Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were extras in the crowd. Everyone in the stands was an extra, since the movie was shot while the Sox were on the road. Are those silhouettes heading toward their seats on the first base side shaped like Damon and Affleck? Is that Affleck’s chin behind James Earl Jones?
This is a movie that loves to tell you who’s good, who’s bad, and when to cry. Its supernatural brand of magical-realism is often used to elicit emotion. The movie swells all its orchestral strings and pushes all the buttons and dammit if it doesn’t make me cry in all the places where it wants me to!
Not that it doesn’t have some big, worthy points to make. Here’s Dr. Archibald “Moonlight” Graham, commenting as an old man on his all-too-brief baseball career, which lasted one game: “It was like coming this close to your dreams and watching them brush past you like a stranger in the crowd.” If we don’t recognize that feeling from our own lives, we certainly see it every baseball season in the DFAs, the callups that don’t pan out, the promotions that never come.
Even though sentimentality is part of the point of the movie, Jones’s portrayal of Terrence Mann, a fictional celebrity-author, mostly avoids it. Mann’s signature on-field monologue about the importance of baseball as part of our collective, American past comes close. It pulls all the levers, but Jones sells it with that authoritative voice, balanced by casual yet convincing hand gestures. It’s certainly what I’d like to believe about baseball and my relationship with it, and the relationship it’s had with previous generations…and that it might continue to have for future generations, if the powers that be continue to usher it into our twenty-first century world. I’ve already written about how my uncle’s love of baseball was foundational for me, and one of the many joys of our World Series win in 2004 is that my grandparents hadn’t lived to see it, but I was witnessing it for them. That’s a powerful narrative thread.
Despite the fact that Mann can see the ghostly ballplayers (not everyone in the movie can), he lives pretty firmly in the real world. He isn’t an idealist anymore. In fact, he is the only character to walk bravely and happily into the cornfields, with no schmaltz or sentiment in either his portrayal, or as an expected emotion from the audience. No, he’s almost giddy at the possibility of discovering what was behind that wall of corn.
Jones had some great lines (“Oh, there are rules here? There are no rules here!” as he comes after Costner with a crowbar) but he didn’t have all the best lines. When you watch it again, note how Ray Liotta, as Shoeless Joe Jackson, scoffs “Owners!” and see how that lands these days, given recent disagreements with our own ownership.
No matter how it strikes you—classic, overrated, or something else—I’ll go back to where we began, with Ray. He’s speaking literally about his baseball field, but it’s more than that. He’s talking about this entire situation, the faith of the ballplayers who are somehow able to return from who-knows-where, the love of the fans, and the game of baseball itself.
“It’s more than that. It’s perfect.” —Ray Kinsella, Field of Dreams
Thank you, James Earl Jones, and RIP.