Can you accept the premise that baseball great “Shoeless” Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta) would return to play if only a simple Iowa farmer would build him a diamond? Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) and his family believe and plow through prime acreage, and through their savings, to build such a first-rate ball field.
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One night the actual Shoeless Joe emerges from the left field corn asking, “is this heaven?” “No, it's Iowa,” responds Ray as he listens to Joe describe the ache following his banishment after allegedly participating in the 1919 Black Sox scandal. Ray invites Joe to bring others so they can play actual games as Joe insists, “but not (Ty) Cobb. I couldn't stand the SOB when he was alive.”
As the games continue, Ray's banker brother-in-law (Timothy Busfield) fails to see the humor in all this, and also fails to see the ballplayers because he doesn't believe.
To learn the true purpose of the voices and the field, Ray seeks out reclusive writer Terrence Mann (James Earl Jones). When they return to Ray's field, Mann delivers a moving speech that baseball, “reminds us of all that was good, and that could be again. Oh people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come.”
The review of this Movie prepared by Angry Jim Magin
