“It’s a pretty long list of milestones that we need to hit to stay on track to peak on Aug. 12,” said Annemarie Roe, the president of BaAM, an event management company that designed the new facility. “The perfect field, the corn at the perfect height, the time of the game with the sun in the right direction setting down, the lighting working exactly as planned — and then bringing 8,000 people plus staff onto a site that doesn’t typically have anything but a tractor rolling through.”
Of course, the inconvenience of the location is part of the charm. Driving through miles of highway bordered by cornfields, a visitor is reminded of a similar trek to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. — much hillier and windier, yes, but the sensibility is the same.
It seemed only fitting that Josh Rawitch, who starts next month as the new president of the Hall of Fame, drove here on Wednesday with his family as part of their journey from Scottsdale, Ariz., to upstate New York.
“We planned our whole trip across the country and tied it to this game so that we could be a part of it,” said Rawitch, a former executive with the Arizona Diamondbacks.
“My daughter hasn’t seen the movie, and as we were driving, I was explaining it to her and I literally got choked up telling her about playing catch with your dad at the end. And I kind of laughed — like, I can’t believe I’m getting choked up talking about this — but something about this pilgrimage to the Field of Dreams, it connects you with previous generations. That’s what the movie intended to do. It wasn’t just Ray Kinsella and his dad, it was generations of baseball. That’s what Cooperstown does, too.”
Dwier Brown, the actor who played Ray Kinsella’s father, lost his own father a month before filming began in 1988, giving extra emotional heft to the role. When the movie was finished, Brown found himself and his co-stars weeping as they watched the screening for the cast.
