Field of Hollywood Dreams: Actors and Their Baseball Roles Beyond the World’s Most Famous Cornfield

Kevin Costner’s place in the Hollywood-baseball paradigm is as evident as a thunderclap during an Iowa rainstorm. In four movies, Costner uses the national pastime as a cornerstone for stories about love and regret.

• He’s a retired ballplayer hosting a sports radio show and pursuing love with Joan Allen’s character in The Upside of Anger.
• He’s an aging pitcher attempting a perfect game and pursuing love with Kelly Preston’s character in For Love of the Game.
• He’s a veteran minor-league catcher tutoring an undisciplined pitcher and pursuing love with Susan Sarandon’s character in Bull Durham.
• He’s a farmer transforming his cornfield into a baseball field for dead ballplayers who are somehow resurrected in Field of Dreams.

So ingrained is Costner in baseball’s cultural fabric because of the Iowa-set movie that in 2021 he was invited to make a grand entrance before MLB’s inaugural “Field of Dreams Game” at the shooting site in Dyersville. Costner watched from behind second base as the White Sox and Yankees emerged from the cornfield just as Ray Liotta and his fellow actors had while portraying Shoeless Joe Jackson and the Black Sox.

Field of Dreams and Costner’s other baseball movies indicate a deep love of baseball. But the star is not the only cast member from Field of Dreams who had screen time in other movies with a baseball theme.

 

 

James Earl Jones plays Terence Mann, a revolutionary author whose work in the 1960s influenced a generation of Baby Boomers. In Shoeless Joe, W.P. Kinsella’s 1982 novel that served as the source material for Field of Dreams, the author was J.D. Salinger. Mann is a fictional character whose monologue towards the end of the movie succinctly captures the romance, perseverance, and appeal of baseball: “The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s 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 us of all that once was good, and it could be again.”

This brief discourse, with Jones’ baritone voice exuding authority, is the heart of the movie. The actor known for being the voice of Darth Vader and CNN boasts a lengthy resume heavy on roles reflecting an authoritative presence. Among them: Admiral Greer in The Hunt for Red October, Jack Jefferson in The Great White Hope, and Senator/President Douglass Dilman in The Man. Baseball fans, however, will also note Jones’s roles in The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings and The Sandlot.

Bingo Long, a 1976 film, stars Billy Dee Williams and Jones as the pitching-catching battery of Bingo Long and Leon Carter. Long, star pitcher of the Negro National League’s St. Louis Ebony Aces, a fictional club, creates Bingo Long’s Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings after Carter, a slugger with the Baltimore Elite Giants, talks about workers needing to seize the means of production from the owners. Aces owner and funeral home mogul Sallison Potter is the villain, a tightwad who mistreats his players on every day that ends in Y, inspiring Long to go his own way with the barnstorming squad.

Reviewers found Jones’ performance notable. The Alexandria-Pineville (Louisiana) newspaper Town Talk called attention to the “noisy bravado” of the Carter character. United Press International described Williams and Jones as being “in peak form.”2 Jones also received praise in the Macon News:. “[W]hat an incredible performance he gives as he moves from the joyous, scheming delight of forming a team, to depths of sadness as the team is threatened with extinction.”3 The San Pedro News-Pilot lauded, “He apparently can play any kind of comedy or drama with equal skill and veracity.”4

In an interview concurrent with the film’s release, Jones addressed the issue of characters performing as showmen in addition to ballplaying, including dancing in the streets when they go to a new town. He noted a basic reason for the tomfoolery that occurred in the Negro Leagues. “Because there are black people who are still sensitive about seeing black people clown around—and the sensitive ones, I have found, tend to travel in intellectual circles that I neither understand nor trust—doesn’t mean you can’t show a time when black people used clowning around as a survival technique.”5

When Bingo Long premiered in 1976, the Negro Leagues were considered a curious footnote in baseball history, and only five players who spent either all or most of their careers in the Negro Leagues had been inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown: Cool Papa Bell, Josh Gibson, Judy Johnson, Buck Leonard, and Satchel Paige. As of 2023, there are 34 such inductees, scholarship on the Negro Leagues is flourishing, and MLB itself is promoting Negro League history through a partnership with the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri.

In The Sandlot, a 1993 film, Jones plays Mr. Mertle, who doesn’t appear until a key scene at the end. A group of kids play on a southern California sandlot field separated from Mertle’s property by a fence. They believe him to be a mean recluse with a dangerous animal known as “the beast.” Scotty Smalls, new kid in the neighborhood, joins the games although his baseball knowledge is so deficient that he thinks Babe Ruth is a woman. This creates a problem when he takes his stepdad’s Ruth-autographed baseball for the group to use, and it is hit over Mertle’s fence. Smalls tells them about the autograph and gets a quick education about Ruth’s icon status.

The kids attempt to retrieve the ball by means of various shenanigans, ultimately sending the fence crashing down on “the beast,” which turns out to be an excitable but kind English mastiff named Hercules. Thankfully, the canine is okay. Benny “The Jet” Rodriguez and Smalls—respectively the best and worst players—apologize to Mertle. To their surprise, Mertle was a ballplayer who palled around with Babe Ruth and knew him as George. After learning about the ball, which Hercules has chewed up, Mertle offers one signed by all of the 1927 Yankees and proposes an exchange: “You guys come by once a week and talk baseball with me, we’ll call it an even trade.” The epilogue shows Smalls, now a Dodgers broadcaster, announcing Rodriguez as a pinch runner and calling his game-winning steal of home.

Many reviews of The Sandlot included critiques of Jones’s scene, specifically his character’s claim that he would have beaten the Babe’s home-run record if he hadn’t gone blind from getting beaned. Detractors claimed that this was historically inaccurate because the dialogue implies that Mertle would have been the first Black player in the major leagues. They were too quick to judge. David Mickey Evans, the movie’s screenwriter and director, has said that Mertle is referring to hitting more home runs than Ruth but while playing in the Negro Leagues.6

Jones also appeared in the sequel The Sandlot 2.

 

 

Art LaFleur is another alumnus of both Field of Dreams and The Sandlot. He played Chick Gandil, one of the eight Black Sox players, in Field of Dreams. He portrayed a more eminent role in The Sandlot: Babe Ruth himself. The Sultan of Swat appears to Benny in a dream and advises him to make the most of his gifts, beginning by hopping over the fence and retrieving the ball.

In 2011, LaFleur recalled the audition. “When I went to read for the part…I had just read The Babe, a biography of Babe Ruth. So when I went into the audition I went in ‘as’ Babe. I wore a newsboy kind of hat. I went in with a cigar…the Babe always had a cigar. Babe Ruth, when he would see kids, he would always say, ‘hi keed.’ He would always use the word ‘keed’ for kid. And he had a habit of slurring his words. When he would talk about baseball he would say ‘baysh-baw.’ I went to read for [writer/director] Mickey David Evans [sic] and about halfway through he said, ‘he’s the guy!’”7

LaFleur also appeared in 1992’s Mr. Baseball, starring Tom Selleck. His film and television career began with a small role as a Russian villain in the 1978 TV- movie Rescue from Gilligan’s Island, and included the sports movies The Replacements (football) and Speed Racer (auto racing). Art LaFleur suffered from Parkinson’s disease and died in 2021.

In Field of Dreams, Timothy Busfield played Ray’s brother-in-law, Mark, who wants Ray to sell the property before it goes into foreclosure. Busfield also took on the role of Minnesota Twins slugger Lou Collins in the 1994 film Little Big League. He informed his performance with real-life experience. Although he is most prominently known for his Emmy-winning portrayal of fun-loving artist and advertising executive Elliot Weston on thirtysomething—which ran on ABC from 1987 to 1991—Busfield played semipro baseball for the Sacramento Smokeys for nine seasons. His pitching record was 30-12.8

“Tim Busfield came in really late,” explained screenwriter Adam Scheinman. “We had cast a guy [for the Lou Collins role] named Brad Johnson, who was about 6-foot-4 and just looked like a Mike Trout-type guy. In my mind, that character was always like Lou Gehrig. He didn’t talk very much. If he spoke, it was a big deal. But [Johnson] couldn’t get out of his commitment. He had a TV pilot and right at the last minute, they wouldn’t let him out. We were really strapped.”9

For Busfield, a Lansing, Michigan, native and devoted Tigers fan born in 1957, playing in a major- league ballpark fulfilled a fantasy. “It’s a dream come true, really. Even in Field of Dreams, I didn’t have to play ball. To be able to work out with a major-league team after spending my childhood wanting to play Major League Baseball [sic], and realizing I just wasn’t good enough, to have that opportunity to play ball and to be at a pivotal moment in a movie that still plays, was a great experience.”10

Little Big League includes cameos from 17 real-life MLB personalities as themselves, including Randy Johnson, Ken Griffey Jr., and Lou Piniella. New York Times film critic Stephen Holden praised the scenes filmed at the Metrodome. “Adding to the realism are the appearances of a number of major league players as the Twins’ opponents. The glow and cleancut [sic] innocence of these scenes evokes the magic of the game as seen through the eyes of a youthful fan.”11

The last entry in our cast list is Steve Eastin, a former high school pitcher, who played disgraced White Sox pitcher Eddie Cicotte in Field of Dreams. In Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, the second film in the three-film series starring Mike Myers as the titular superspy, Eastin plays an umpire.

With its nostalgia and wish fulfillment, Field of Dreams has been a warm introduction to baseball for many people since its release in 1989 and it remains a perennial favorite. Hopefully, future screenings will prompt curiosity about baseball beyond the Black Sox Scandal, MLB’s annual game in Dyersville, and Ray Liotta’s inverted portrayal of Shoeless Joe Jackson as a southpaw in the field and a righty in the batter’s box. The cast’s interconnection with other baseball movies has allowed Field of Dreams to resonate further both in baseball and popular culture. 

DAVID KRELL is the Chair of SABR’s Elysian Fields Chapter. His books include 1962: Baseball and America in the Time of JFK and Do You Believe in Magic? Baseball and America in the Groundbreaking Year of 1966. He does not understand why Charles Ebbets is not in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

 

Notes

1. David Foil, “‘Bingo’s Traveling All-Stars’ Solid, Satisfying Showmanship,” Town Talk, July 21, 1976: C-4.

2. David Dugas, “Black Baseball Comedy Gets Laughs,” Sacramento Bee, July 18, 1976: 9.

3. Madeleine Hirsiger “‘Bingo Long:’ Interesting To Many Local Extras,” Macon Telegraph & News, July 18, 1976: 8B.

4. Don Lechman, “‘Bingo!’ Universal has a winner,” San Pedro News-Pilot, July 9, 1976: E1.

5. Susan Stark, “The Times Are Changing; So Is James Earl Jones,” Detroit Free Press, July 25, 1976: 7C.

6. David Mickey Evans to David Krell, February 15, 2023.

7. Mike Smith, “Interview with Art LaFleur,” Media Mikes, https://mediamikes.com/2011/01/interview-withart-lafleur, (last accessed February 13, 2023).

8. See “Timothy Busfield,” Trivia inset, Internet Movie Database, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0124079. Busfield was nominated for an Outstanding Actor in a Drama Series Emmy Award every season. He won for the final season.

9. Tom Dierberger quoting Adam Scheinman, “An oral history of Little Big League,” Bally Sports, https://www.ballysports.com/north/news/an-oral-history-of-little-big-league-3709392, October 14, 2020, (last accessed February 14, 2023).

10. Tom Dierberger quoting Timothy Busfield, “An oral history of Little Big League,’ Bally Sports, https://www.ballysports.com/north/news/an-oral-history-of-little-big-league-3709392, October 14, 2020, (last accessed February 14, 2023).

11. Stephen Holden, “When a 12-Year-Old Fan Inherits a Baseball Team,” The New York Times, June 29, 1994: C21.