Iowans go to bat replaying ‘Field of Dreams’ : Ghost players emerge from a cornfield to re-enact film miracle for a host of awe-struck visitors.

They stood on the grass of the little baseball field, several hundred visitors hostage to a dream, old and young, mitts and bats in tow, and they waited, silent and reverent, for the ghost players who lived somewhere beyond the outfield wall of corn.

It was a silly vigil, really. After all, why should the cornfield hide anything but corn?

Then it happened. The head-high corn parted the other Sunday and there, moving wordlessly through the tasseled stalks, were the ghost players, a dozen men in the woolen uniforms of the 1919 Chicago White Sox. The crowd gasped and drew back.

“Play ball,” someone shouted.

Welcome back to the “Field of Dreams,” where miracles keep happening, five summers after Hollywood went home.

You may remember a line from the movie: “If you build it, they will come.” Ray Kinsella, a failing farmer played by Kevin Costner, kept hearing those words from a voice advising him to plow under his corn and build a ballpark so that the White Sox’s Shoeless Joe Jackson--disgraced in a betting scandal--could return with his long-dead teammates to play a game of redemption.

Build it he did, and the players did come, and Iowans by the thousands descended on Kinsella’s farm to visit the mythical ball field. Their donations saved the farm.

Real life reads like the script this summer. By season’s end 40,000 people will have traveled to Dyersville, 25 miles west of Dubuque, come down the gravel road to Don Lansing’s farm--the setting used in the movie--and gazed across the emerald green baseball diamond that stands in a sea of corn. For some, the journey is nothing less than a pilgrimage.

“It’s hard to explain the hold the field has on the public’s imagination,” said Lansing, a bachelor farmer and fork-lift operator at a nearby John Deere plant. “People come and just stand for 30 minutes, staring off past the corn. Some get misty-eyed. One couple got married here. Over on home plate, that’s where we spread the ashes of one man who asked to be buried on the Field of Dreams.”

Cars from a dozen states were parked on both sides of Lansing’s gravel road.

Dave Yurcisin was playing catch with three friends in the outfield, having flown in from Trenton, N.J., courtesy of his girlfriend’s present for his 33rd birthday--a trip to the Field of Dreams.

Sixteen-year-old Willie Quale of Lynchburg, Va., strolled the infield in his Boston Red Sox jersey, having persuaded his parents to make a side trip to Dyersville after a family reunion in Wisconsin.

Frank and Linda Coats, having driven in from Mukwonago, Wis., stood along the first base line, where Frank waited to bat against the ghost team that had emerged from the corn and taken its positions on the field.

“I turned down that gravel road and saw the diamond, sitting there in the cornfield, and I got goose bumps,” said Coats, 48. The ghost players, as they call themselves, are a group of local residents--farmers, teachers, businessmen and a veterinarian, ranging in age from 21 to 45--who re-enact the fulfillment of Ray Kinsella’s fantasy and spend a couple of hours on the field; anyone in the stands can take a turn at bat against them. Seven of the ghosts had roles in the Universal Studios movie, and despite antics that delight the crowds, each is an accomplished player.

“The end result of everything we’ve done is we’ve had a helluva lot of fun,” said catcher Marv Maires, 42, a farmer and construction worker. That fun has included making a Wheaties commercial, a Japanese video and making appearances from Nevada to Mississippi. Next on their schedule: a benefit to raise funds for flood-ravaged Chelsea, Iowa.

On out-of-town appearances, the ghost players usually ask only for expenses and enough compensation to make up for the day or two they’ve lost at work.

In fact, no one’s making a killing on the Field of Dreams. The farmers who own the property, Lansing and his neighbors, Al and Rita Ameskamp, don’t charge admission and turn down requests from groups wanting to rent the field for a game. It’s just there, for anyone who wants to wander by, to play catch or sit and dream, night or day. “After the movie people left, I turned my side of the field back to corn,” said Ameskamp, whose property runs through half the outfield. “But I got so many notes in my mailbox saying, ‘Please bring back the Field of Dreams,’ the next year I plowed up the corn and went back to grass. I don’t know what got into me in the first place. Just a bad decision, I guess.”