Field of **** off

 

No, the title of this post isn't about the game.

The less said about that, the better.

Look, I'm all for whatever "good" it did for baseball but, honestly, it was otherwise another Thursday night baseball game in August, albeit at a really cool site.

The game was a gut punch that I saw only a few pitches of. But I saw the last pitch, grabbed my backpack, and left the Dutchess Stadium office before any rage poured out of me. I kept my Olympic Phone Throwing skills to myself.

No, I'm here for the "Field of Dreams" slander that has gone on in the days leading up to the game and in the hours after it was over.

And seriously, screw each and every one of you sanctimonious clowns.

Wholeheartedly, please eat a decroded piece of...whatever, to paraphrase Napoleon Dynamite.

I get it. "Field of Dreams" isn't "The Godfather." It's a bit of a schmaltzy, syrupy story involving a field and family dynamics and "Murica" and James Earl-freaking Jones essentially playing J.D. Salinger (the character actually is Salinger in the book the movie is based on).

Yes, I know, Ray Liotta plays Shoeless Joe Jackson incorrectly. Duly noted. That's annoying but go look at the mistakes in literally every sports movie. Lou Gehrig didn't say he'd hit two home runs in the World Series for a kid in the hospital.

I have my own love/confused relationship with the film and I, frankly, don't need your I'm-too-good-for-this-baseball-movie hate.

And I'm happy to tell each of you high and mighty dopes that to your face.

Though, let's be real. "Field of Dreams" has baseball as a part of the story. The truth is it's more than that. It's about the father/son relationship and some of the torture that Ray Kinsella has lived with since his father's passing. 

So, tell me, haters...

Did your father die a mere month before the film was released?

Did you sit, unknowingly, in the theater in the Jefferson Valley Mall to watch it?

Did you know what it was about or what the ending was under those circumstances?

Did you grow up a crazy Yankees fan?

Did you grow up obsessed with baseball?

Would you do anything to have a catch once more with that father?

Did your father have arthritis so bad that he couldn't run around and have a catch with you? 

Yeah. That's my story.

I remember ONE game of Wiffle ball with my father, jackwagon. ONE. I might have been three. Perhaps four. His body was mostly a jigsaw puzzle not long after.

So when Dwier Brown shows up as John Kinsella, wearing an early 20th Century Yankees uniform in the film and he's asked by Kevin Costner if he wants to have a catch how would you feel?

Might you -- you self-righteous ass -- feel a little differently about "Field of Dreams?"

Might you need time to pull yourself together and be the last one to leave that theater in Jefferson Valley, NY that late spring night in 1989?

When you're all of 20 years old and your world has essentially been ripped apart?

You've gone to this little movie that baseball plays a role in because you're hearing the buzz about it and it seems to involve Shoeless Joe Jackson and a field and Darth Vader and you have no clue -- not in the least -- how it's going to wreck you at the end.

You might have at least an appreciation for the movie.

Save your Twitter hatred for something else that matters.

This is my clap back.

Leave Ray Kinsella, Annie, Karin, Terry Mann, and Moonlight Graham alone.

Simply the speech at the end of the movie about how "people will come" should be enough. It encapsulates so much about baseball and the romanticism with the game.

For what it's worth, I basically can't watch the final scene. Even now. Over 32 years later. I become a quivering, shaking mess generally because I miss my own father with every fiber of my soul and continue to mourn how he never heard me become a broadcaster or see me become a man or a father or meet his grandson and a whole lot of other things in which I could have used his wisdom and laughter.

"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."

That's the redeeming value of baseball and of our world.

Maybe now you can understand why I'd be a little defensive of "Field of Dreams."

Sure, you're entitled to your opinion but why ruin it for others?

If you don't like the schmaltz and the positivity of that message, then keep walking, bud.

You're part of the problem.

Take two tablets of bleep you and don't call again.

Get lost.

It is heaven.

In Iowa.