Root root root

Okay, so first thing’s first: James Earl Jones has the greatest speaking voice ever bestowed upon a man. There’s a reason why he was chosen to do the voice-over work for Darth Vader. I could listen to him read the assembly instructions for an Ikea bed frame and be completely enamored; his robust baritone is the therapeutic equivalent of dunking a set of eardrums into a soothing hot bath with eucalyptus bubbles. I’d stop myself before the imagery gets too disturbing, but I think that ship has sailed.

“Field of Dreams” would still be a good movie without him. The 1989 Kevin Costner fantasy about ghosts who haunt a baseball diamond in an Iowa cornfield is a classic – a strange and unsettling classic, but a classic nonetheless, tailor-made for anyone with a sense of baseball’s mysterious, almost mythical history.
But Jones is the scene-stealer, the thingamabob that stirs the whatever. Not that it’s hard to steal scenes from Kevin Costner; the man once played Robin Hood, and in two-and-a-half hours, the only word he managed to pronounce in an English accent was “sword.” It marks the only time in film history when the merry bandit sounded like he’d just stepped off the boat from Rhode Island.

Anyone who’s ever sat in a cool breeze at a minor league ballpark in May and felt completely at peace knows about Jones’ goosebump-raising soliloquy at the end of “Field of Dreams.” It’s the kind of speech that makes roughneck cowboys blubber like ninnies. Predicting that far-flung travelers will be inexplicably drawn to the spectral exhibition games played in that mysterious cornfield, Jones talks about baseball as though it had been laid at humanity’s feet by the Greek gods of Olympus. All in a voice that could melt a stick of butter.

Only baseball can inspire that kind of poetry. You don’t hear a lot of stirring odes to synchronized swimming, or intercollegiate water polo.

At this point, you’re in one of two camps: Those who can relate to baseball’s romanticism, and those who think the sport is as boring as John Kerry reading “The Iliad.” (The third camp – those who couldn’t give a rat’s patootie – have already moved on to a sudoku.)

Summoning my powers of objectivity, I can see how the uninitiated might consider baseball less than enthralling. In a lot of ways, it’s an anachronism – it has no earthly business being played in a century dominated by 30-second commercials, movies on demand, and cheeseburgers prepped so quickly they cause a ripple in spacetime. Baseball doesn’t fit into a world of instant gratification; its pleasures are slow, doled out not by the foot, but by the inch.

That’s what makes it great.

I’m reminded of this every spring, right around the time I first hear that gratifying wood-on-cowhide crack. The sound is like a pair of snapping fingers jolting me out of a state of deep hypnosis; not being much of a winter sports enthusiast, I tend to spend those frosty months actually being (gasp!) productive, which is the antithesis of what summer’s all about. Summer is a season for wasting vast stretches of time eating ice cream sandwiches while watching minor league mascots lose footraces to four-year-olds.

When I was about 10, my father gave me one of those kid-friendly books filled with factoids about the history of baseball. That history is what sets the game apart from, say, hockey, which I believe was invented by the penguins of the Arctic circle. Or football, which was created in a lab by pumping gamma rays into a petri dish filled with bull testosterone.

The story of baseball is the story of the country’s industrial revolution; it’s the story of pickup games played in the streets of Harlem in the late 1800s, of steel-jawed immigrants hitting and catching their way out of coal mines. It’s the story of the Civil Rights movement (Jackie Robinson, anybody?), and of late 20th Century excess. It’s the story of cheaters and their punishments – the story of fairness.

But why am I proselytizing? James Earl Jones’ “Field of Dreams” character, in a speech to his friend Ray, said it far better than I could:

“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, is a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and that could be again.”

Insert wistful sigh here.

To truly appreciate that, maybe you had to grow up with a sock tied around your brand-new baseball glove to get just the right curve in the webbing. Or felt a tingle rush up your arms as you connected with your first fastball. Heck, maybe a vendor in the stands once pelted you in the kisser with a bag of peanuts – that would do it too, I suppose.

Whatever the reason, it’s got a grip on those of us susceptible to its charms. And yes, the cliché is true: We love peanuts and Cracker Jacks, and we don’t care if we ever get back.