James Earl Jones, who died Monday at age 93, will be remembered by baseball fans for the stirring, soulful words he spoke in the 1989 film “Field of Dreams.”
Jones, starring as fictional writer Terence Mann, is nominally speaking to Kevin Costner's Ray Kinsella, but he's really speaking to everyone in the audience who's long wondered what happened to the baseball cards they collected as a child. He's speaking to everyone who's wondered what Babe Ruth hit today or Shohei Ohtani hit yesterday. He's speaking to everyone who's ever held a baseball glove to their nose and smelled the leather.
We know this is true in part because of the setting — Mann stands facing the camera on the edge of a baseball field carved into an Iowa cornfield — but the real magic comes from Jones, whose rich baritone voice makes us want to go out and build one.
The only thing that has remained the same through the years, Ray, is baseball. America has passed like an army of road runners. It has been erased like a chalkboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has stood the test of time. This stadium, this game, is part of our past, Ray. It reminds us that baseball was once good, and that it can be good again.
Those words became baseball's music-free anthem, much like when Jones recited “The Star-Spangled Banner” accompanied by the Morgan State University choir before the start of the 1993 All-Star Game at Oriole Park at Camden Yards.
But Jones wasn't a baseball fan growing up, nor did he become obsessed with the sport thanks to his roles in baseball-themed films like “Bingo” (1976), “The Sandlot” (1993) and Phil Alden Robinson's “Field of Dreams.”
But Marlon Brando wasn't a mob boss before The Godfather, and Margaret Hamilton wasn't a witch before The Wizard of Oz. In Jones's Field of Dreams we see an actor with the requisite dramatic levers and pulleys at his disposal. Become Baseball fans, or in my case, the kind of baseball fan I remember as a child growing up just two miles from Fenway Park.
In the scene where Kinsella somehow convinces Mann to watch a Boston Red Sox game at Fenway, Jones is shown watching a game, a moment that struck me the first time I saw Field of Dreams. While Costner's Kinsella is busy writing down the name “Moonlight Graham” on the scorecard, Jones' Terence Mann looks serious and a little quiet as he watches the game. People watched baseball before cell phones, waves, beer stands and walk-up music. It's a small thing, but Jones gets it.
Yes, that “the crowd will come” pep talk at the ballpark in Dyersville, Iowa, is what launched Jones into baseball stardom. But it was the moment just before that speech that made me want to stand up and applaud the first time I saw Field of Dreams. When Kinsella's brother-in-law (played by Timothy Busfield, who happens to be a baseball fan) comes charging in to tell him Ray is bankrupt and has to sell the farm, we see Mann holding The Encyclopedia of Baseball. In the days before the Internet, it was the bible of baseball. And Mann treats it as such. It's in his lap, open to a page that is probably the career stats of Shoeless Joe Jackson, Eddie Cicotte, Buck Weaver, or whatever ghosts play on the field.
The story struck a chord with Larry Cancro, a senior vice president for the Red Sox who has worked in marketing for nearly 40 years. Cancro recounted a time when he was about 10 years old and his family was visiting relatives in Melrose, Massachusetts. “I was sitting with my three sisters, and my dad's cousin had a copy of The Encyclopedia of Baseball. It was the first book I'd ever seen, and I started to read it. Then I got a few more copies. If you watch that scene in Field of Dreams, James Earl Jones is proudly holding the book. Only a true baseball fan would be sitting there looking at The Encyclopedia of Baseball.”
Cancro helped shoot the Fenway Park scenes for “Field of Dreams,” which were filmed while the Red Sox were on the road. Costner and Jones are seated in Loge Box 157, PP row, seats 1 and 2.
Cancro is pleased to report that the two actors were “kind and friendly” to all the Red Sox employees involved in the shoot. Cancro also remembers the bond that Jones developed with the late Joe Mooney, a longtime groundskeeper at Fenway Park who was a standoffish old-fashioned cantankerous man with a standoffish attitude toward strangers. Mooney also showed exaggerated indifference to celebrities he perceived as not being true fans and/or unaware of Fenway Park's history.
“The way Joe was, if you were there and you were showing off or trying to be a big shot, he didn't want anything to do with you,” Cancro said. “Obviously, Joe was a nice guy if you knew him, but he and James Earl Jones really hit it off. And Kevin Costner did too. But with James Earl Jones, they were laughing and having a good time. Joe liked him. That's the whole reason James Earl Jones was at Fenway Park.”
Now, teeth Some baseball purists will have issues with “Field of Dreams” — the late Ray Liotta's Shoeless Joe Jackson bats right-handed (Shoeless Joe was left-handed) and Kinsella reverses a Volkswagen bus down Lansdowne Street behind Fenway Park — but there's no denying what Jones brought to the project, from his recitation of baseball's national anthem to his highly convincing portrayal of Terrence Mann, who grew up dreaming of playing with Jackie Robinson at Ebbets Field.
Going deeper
“Something that has remained the same for many years”? The Field of Dreams speech meets 2020
Jones has often said that he considered himself more of a stage actor than a film actor. He has won three Tony Awards, and “Field of Dreams” is not his best-known film role; his role as the voice of Darth Vader in the “Star Wars” series pretty much ended that discussion. In terms of accolades, he received an honorary Academy Award in 2011 and was nominated for Best Actor for “The Great White Hope” (1970).
He won Primetime Emmy Awards for Heat Wave (1990) and Gabriel's Fire (1991), a Daytime Emmy Award for Summer's End (2000), and a Grammy Award for “Best Spoken Word” for Great American Documentary (2000). With three Tony Awards and an Honorary Academy Award for his work in The Great White Hope (1969), Fences (1987) and a Lifetime Achievement Award (2017), he joins the rare circle of actors who have achieved EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Academy Award, Tony) status. In Fences, he plays Troy, a former Negro League baseball player. His other notable film appearances include Coming to America (1988), Claudine (1974), Cry, the Beloved Country (1995), and providing the voice of Mufasa in The Lion King (1994).
However, in an interview for the 25th anniversary of “Field of Dreams,” he called the film “one of the few films I've done that I really cherish.”
Looking back on the film, Jones said, “Magic happens if you don't force it and just let it happen, and that's what (director) Phil Robinson chose to do with Field of Dreams.”
The same can be said about Terence Mann's performance: he just let it happen, he didn't force it, and that allowed his voice to carry the time.
(Photo: Kevin Winter/Getty Images via Motion Picture Association of America)
