Leave It: Shoeless Joe

Leave ItShoeless Joe Clayton Trutor (bio) W. P. Kinsella ruined me. He ruined baseball for me just as I was learning to love the game. Hell, he ruined me before I'd even heard his name or read his altogether amusing novel about a farmer in Iowa named Kinsella. Ray Kinsella. Ray is an ex-Berkeley radical who looked to put his past behind him by mixing his hands with the soil of the heartland. Kinsella hears a voice that tells him to turn his cornfield into a ballpark with teleportation powers. He then runs the roads with J. D. Salinger and catches up with Moonlight Graham and a cadre of dead-ball-era baseball greats. I might be mixing some of this up with the movie. It's been a while. I read Shoeless Joe on a bus ride sometime in the mid-2000s, surprised to see James Earl Jones's character in the wildly popular 1989 film version of the book, Field of Dreams, displaced by one Jerome David Salinger. In Kinsella's hands, Salinger seems rather Holden Caufield. I'd always thought of Jerome as more Seymour Glass or Lane Coutell. Without reservation I can recommend Shoeless Joe as a perfectly pleasant way to pass the time on the Buffalo-to-Albany Greyhound bus. But when I think about that book, I don't really think about that book. And neither do you. I think about, and you think about, what the book hath wrought, which is that movie that had as much impact on any sport as any sports movie ever made. Shoeless Joe and Field of Dreams were the tempters that calcified many of baseball's diehards into a world unto themselves. Unwilling to look away from their own renderings of the game's past, they turned baseball's present over to a now well-established cognoscenti that has perfected professional baseball to the point of unwatchability. Like most people that have read Shoeless Joe in the last three decades, my impressions of the book were framed primarily by my viewing of the Kevin Costner flick Field of Dreams. I've seen it at least ten times in part or in full. I [End Page 13] first saw Field of Dreams during February vacation in 1990, just as that year's baseball lockout started looking serious. I was down in the dumps that there would be no Spring Training games for me to watch on WPIX or WWOR, the two over-the-air stations we got at the time in Burlington, Vermont, that regularly carried Major League Baseball games. My doting mother tried to fix my down in the dumps with a side trip to the video store during her weekly grocery foray to the local Grand Union. On the first night of vacation, Mom let my brother and I each pick out a movie to rent. My brother picked Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, which we watched a half-dozen times over the next forty-eight hours, taking particular glee in the exploits of Napoleon, whose behavior at the ice cream parlor and the bowling alley formed much of the basis for my sense of public decorum. I watched Field of Dreams intently and by myself. Nobody else in the Trutor household had time for this wistful, elegiac tale. I, on the other hand, ate it up like Napoleon ate fourteen scoops of ice cream to earn Ziggy Piggy honors in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. In less than two hours, Field of Dreams director Phil Alden Robinson had transubstantiated baseball for me. He took my favorite sport and remade it into a sacrament, one I could only receive in its present adulterated form. I would have to wait in joyful hope for the return of a simpler time and a simpler game. I could get a taste of it in books and documentaries, in Terry Cashman songs and reruns of Home Run Derby. I could put Brooklyn Dodgers caps and sets of Baseball's Immortals cards on my Christmas list and tell people that Honus Wagner was my favorite player. This religion of baseball's past, inability to appreciate its...

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