Father, Son Seek ‘Heaven’ to Find Past

He seemed bigger, somehow, when we played our daily games of front-lawn catch so many years ago. Or perhaps I was just smaller.

He was well into his 50s by then, but my father’s fastball still stung the 10-year-old hand of his only son, his “child of my later youth.” And his late-1970s fly balls still leaped from the 31-inch Louisville Slugger and soared far beyond the boy who used to be me.

Today, beginning his 77th year, he descends stairs tentatively, flexes knees stiffly. He takes heart pills and wears a hearing aid, grooms a salt-and-pepper beard all but emptied of the pepper.

And he, like so many, has grown disillusioned with baseball--with Bonds and Bonilla and Belle, with $30 box seats and ballpark bond issues and words upon words from our sponsor. Around 1990, in protest, he began staying away from the Pirate games we loved.

So, earlier this summer, I came to a realization: I wanted to find a way for my father to enjoy baseball again for a moment, before time renders such a notion forever wishful thinking.

Late August, then, finds us in a rented Chevrolet, the endless pavement of I-80 before us. I tell him only that we are going west, nothing more.

West. Toward Iowa. Toward a patch of land willed into being by 150 years of baseball truths and legends, by an author’s eloquent fictions and a Hollywood dream factory’s millions. West toward the pastoral, the breadbasket, the realm where cliches aren’t cliche yet and the letters S-T-A-D-I-U-M still spell nothing.

With a weathered mitt, a cracked old bat and a scuffed baseball in the trunk, we go west toward the Field of Dreams.

*

What is it about baseball diamonds? Few things so basic evoke Americanness so viscerally. I remember, at age 12, returning from a year abroad and peering out a 747 window, craning to glimpse familiar terrain. I saw a ball field far below and knew I was home.

But grass grows weeds, and people grow up. How unexpected, then, to learn that the diamond carved from the cornfields a decade ago for “Field of Dreams,” the movie based on W.P. Kinsella’s novel “Shoeless Joe,” really existed and had become, as in the film, a place of pilgrimage, a heartland Lourdes of secular spirituality.

“People will come,” Kinsella’s protagonist is told in the movie. “They’ll turn up your driveway, not knowing for sure why they’re doing it, and arrive at your door innocent as children, longing for the past.” And they did.

In real life, they still do--thousands each year.

They come from all corners of the land: elderly men who once played in dusty leagues long forgotten, college students on ballpark barnstorms. Like the characters in the movie, they come to play catch: fathers and sons, fathers and daughters, husbands and wives, Canadians, Europeans, Japanese. Even a local team of “ghost” players who wander onto the diamond from the cornfields beyond and, bedecked in faux-antique uniforms, play an earnest round of ball.

Each has a story. Like Ray, the protagonist of “Shoeless Joe,” each seems to be looking for something, some shred of long-gone innocence that perhaps never quite existed.

The field, appropriately, is a place constructed for elaborate fakery, rendered real by 10 years of people trying to sample a dream. Rendered real by the authentic baseball legends, the Reggie Jacksons and Rollie Fingerses, who sometimes play here and breathe life into the scenery.

“I’m still trying to grasp all this,” Kinsella wrote in a recent essay.

The field has two owners: Right field is part of Don Lansing’s property, as is the white farmhouse used in the film. Left and center are owned by the Ameskamps, Al and Rita. They and Lansing disagree at times, but enough detente exists to keep the field open and free to visitors.

Rita Ameskamp gushes when she talks of the most famous of her 133 acres of soybeans and corn. She gushes about the boys who rode their bikes for three days from western Iowa to play ball. She gushes about the Japanese tourists who come from so far. She gushes about the Americans who take hundred-mile detours to smell grass and dredge up memories of youth.

“You look at them looking at the field and wonder what they’re thinking about. They just look,” she says. “And everybody treats everybody like they’ve known each other all their lives.”

Tracking Down the Myths

This amalgam of American myths I had to see. And my father did too. Because when I think of baseball, I cannot help but think of him.

I am less of a sports fan than I was; big business and small minds have ensured that. But when I began pondering this, it surprised me how much baseball permeated our relationship.

This is but a sliver of the wisdom transferred from one father to one son by horsehide osmosis:

That Earl Averill of Snohomish, Wash., his Cleveland Indians hometown hero, had eight .300 seasons. That Bill Wambsganss committed history’s only unassisted World Series triple play, for the Indians in 1920. That names like Charlie Spikes, Sherm Lollar, Sad Sam Jones and Gus Suhr must be committed to memory. That a night under the mattress breaks in a Rawlings mitt like nothing else.

That sometimes a dad won’t rat you out when your ball breaks a garage window. That chewing tobacco is revolting: When, at 11, I wanted to be Sparky Lyle and try a chaw, my father promptly procured some Mail Pouch. I took a hit, swallowed some spit and reverted to bubble gum for good. He, of course, knew I would all along.

That while watching my mediocre pre-adolescent outfield ministrations for the Hampton Township Mets of suburban Pittsburgh, he’d whisper a mantra whenever a fly ball headed my way: “Catch it, Teddy. Catch it, Teddy.” This he told me much later.

While my contemporaries’ fathers proffered Mays and Mantle memories, my father had real recollections of Ruth and Gehrig. His trivia ran the generational gamut, from Willie “Hit ‘em where they ain’t” Keeler to Manny Sanguillen, the Pirates’ exuberant Panamanian catcher whose philosophy, someone once said, was “hit the ball and run until you’re out.”

When I was 3, my father showed up as they were razing Pittsburgh’s aging Forbes Field and secured a chunk of masonry that sits on my bookshelf today. When he moved into the new University of Pittsburgh building erected on the same site, he’d walk me to the ground floor; there, under glass, the old ballpark’s final home plate sat preserved like some baseball Mao.

Fathers and sons bond over sports, the theory goes, when they can’t find other ways. For us, baseball was simply part of the relationship, not instead of other intimacies, but in addition to them.

And it is an intimacy I’d found myself missing.

The farmland of Illinois behind us, we cross the Mississippi. Finally we see a sign: Dyersville, next right.

He looks quizzically at the cornfields and rural roads. Then we turn up that familiar movie driveway. Look ahead, I tell him. He sees the house, the corn, the diamond, and his eyes fill with recognition.

“I wish I had this in my backyard,” Logan Breed says, tagging David Rundle’s off-speed pitch into the Iowa sky. But his face falls when the ball lands squarely in left-center--deep left-center, but apparently not deep enough.

“I wanted to hit it into the corn,” Breed says.

Breed, Rundle and their friend Taylor Rowlett, University of Virginia seniors all, arrived at the Field of Dreams with a mission like others before them: to play a little ball. They took the field and recruited every new arrival, child or adult, into their pickup game.

The trio was barnstorming across the country, trying to visit every major-league ballpark they could before classes began. At Shea Stadium, they saw Mark McGwire belt his 50th homer. Now they were St. Louis-bound to see the Cardinals and the Brewers.

To them and many others, Dyersville counts as a major-league park, a repository of all the baseball history it never experienced. Fiction pushed into fact.

“I have a dream about every two years where I’m a kid again and I’m playing,” says Jim Marr, 74, a printer, as he stands near first base. His memories flow: He once pitched (in the low 90s) for the Atlanta Crackers during World War II. His manager was Hall-of-Famer Kiki Cuyler.

Everyone has a memory, real or wished. “That’s because this is America and baseball is American,” Breed says. “My great-grandmother immigrated from Croatia and listened to Cardinals games every night to become more American.”

Says Rowlett: “It’s just our game.”

Rundle turns to my father and me. “C’mon out here,” he beckons. “Play some ball.” My father begs off; I take second base.

Later, after most everyone has left, we take the field, just the two of us. My father rears back gingerly, throws the ball. I catch it. It does not sting. I smell it. It smells like ball field.

He picks up the bat to hit me a few fungo style, without a pitcher. The first he whiffs. The second connects with an old ball’s thud, sharp and dull all at once; it is a dribbling grounder, as is the third. The fourth, a pop-up, lands behind the mound.

“I’m worn out,” he sighs, and we return to Room 118 of the Dyersville Super 8. He begins to read “Shoeless Joe.” By 10, he is sound asleep.

From the other bed, I watch him snore.

The next morning, we return to the field. It is empty, quiet. He carries bat and ball to the plate, dispatches me to shallow left and swings. This time the sound is all crack, no thud. The ball soars over my head toward the corn and lands, soaking itself in dew. I study him as he watches it roll.

He was, is, a father in so many ways. He was always around. He didn’t hit me. He taught me to sing “Down by the Old Mill Stream.” He took me to dime stores on Saturdays and bought me the best mixed nuts, the ones with less than 50% peanuts.

Sentimentality isn’t a bad thing; hackneyed is in the eye of the beholder. And what’s more worthwhile than the tidbits of soul and generational continuity that such moments quietly transmit?

I don’t buy the wax-pack wisdom of the George Wills and their pastoral metaphors of baseball eternities. I don’t sing the unconditional rhapsodies of the Bart Giamattis, though I envy their lyricism. I’m a sentimentalist, but enough of a pragmatist to see that baseball’s not about life. It’s about baseball.

Like everything else, the answer lurks in the details: how you play, who you play with, what you take, what you leave behind. Baseball is no grand human metaphor; it’s merely another window to peek through and see either the sun outside or the intimacies of some treasured inner room.

“The amazing thing about this place, I think, is that nothing really happened here,” Kinsella wrote. “But for all these people, it means something. It’s real enough that they have to try to touch it.”

Back in the rented Chevy, Iowa far behind, my father marvels at his 76-year-old hands and the one hit that sailed over my head. “I didn’t know I could still do that,” he says, and falls asleep in the passenger seat.

“I always liked baseball,” he informs me later. “I just stopped liking the idiots who ran it. But I look at that field and I realize: There may be a bunch of idiots running things, but they can’t ruin the game.”

The house where I grew up is just ahead. I pull in, see the front lawn, realize again that our time, today and the future, is limited. There will probably be no more games of catch here, at least not between us. But with Dyersville’s corn fresh in my nose, I search my heart and find no regrets.

“Maybe,” Kinsella wrote, “all of us are helped along by the solid Iowan earth.”

Maybe so. But my father and I needed no ghosts, no disembodied voice, no director to yell “Action.” We had our summer, he and I. It was a long one, longer than most. We even got to revisit it briefly, thanks to some people with good hearts who blurred the real and the imaginary.

And both times, I think, we did right by it.