Field of Dreams Is Crowned Our Best Baseball Movie

In the battle of sap vs. stupid, sap prevailed, in modest voting.

Championship

Field of Dreams 54%, A League of Their Own 46% (49-41)
At this point (Moneyball and A League of Their Own gone), yeah, might as well have the sentimental favorite win it all. The Allstate guy playing voodoo Cuban and Serial Assaulter Thing can regroup back in the locker room and see if they can bring the Wahoos a win next year.

Field of Dreams’ Road to the Championship

164-21 over The Stratton Story
68-56 over Bull Durham
219-160 over A League of Their Own
49-41 over Major League

For those, like WIN, who claim to never have watched the film all the way through, let this synopsis seduce you.

Field of Dreams (1989)
Brett Ballantini

What folks don’t seem to get about Field of Dreams is that it is a sports fantasy. There are ghosts. A reclusive writer (J.D. Salinger, changed for the movie because, well, J.D. was a bit of a curmudgeon, yeah) decides to join a farmboy stranger on a quixotic quest to “go the distance.” Yes, if you live in the boonies and your kid is choking on a hot dog, you may well need to summon a ballplayer ghost doctor like the delectable Burt Lancaster to save her. Ray Liotta turns Joe Jackson into a righthander. Dead players come to life. Father and son “have a catch.”

But hey, it’s a fantasy. Get past it. Sure, the movie trips a bit over a Hallmark line, but if you watched Ray Kinsella and his father “have” that catch toward the end without a tear in your eye, you are a robot.

This was a lot of fun during a dead week in the freezing cold of winter. Let’s do it again next year, with a field expanded to 32.

As such, please remind us of the movies we missed, one more time, below. All suggestions will be noted, even the dumb ones.

We’ll pause just a minute to catch our breaths before our final vote of the preseason: our fifth annual White Sox Hall of Fame vote. (Bonus categories are back!)