Outside Baseball

“It’s baseball, Ray.” This quote from Field of Dreams is one of the all-time great pop-cultural koans, perhaps second only in cinematic history to “Forget it, Jake—it’s Chinatown.” As an explanation for the persistent tug of America’s pastime, the quote is both inadequate and perfect, as though nothing more need be said—though, of course, much more has been said, and is said, and will be said, in that movie and elsewhere. Like most memorable movie quotes, “It’s baseball, Ray” is actually a misquote, much like “Play it again, Sam”; the actual line from the film is “The one constant through all the years has been baseball.” And that line comes nestled in a longer, languid, mellifluously sentimental bit of speechifying by James Earl Jones. “America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers,” he intones in his famously resonant voice. “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...