<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Here is a short\u2014though by no means complete\u2014list of things I miss about being a kid: being blissfully unaware of the dangers of the world, playing with my Ninja Turtles and Ghostbusters action figures, tearing through a box of Pop Tarts in less than an hour and still managing to stay skinny, and not acting like a cynical wretch of a man. But what I miss most are the days of believing that athletics on every level were pure for-the-love-of-the-game enterprises and not billion-dollar industries. That description is uniquely suited to baseball, a game that consistently makes us reflect on our fondest memories. No two films better encapsulate that transition from innocent dream to big business than Field of Dreams and Major League, which celebrate their 25th anniversaries this month. Released within two weeks of each other, each film looked to capture a very different slice of Americana. On one hand you had a picturesque, idealistic look at a game that we were introduced to as kids\u2014a tale about the glory of baseball and how it&amp;#039;s continuously passed down from generation to generation. On the other hand, you had an uglier, more humorous side of the game that we eventually learned about as adults\u2014the one that shows how sports can corrupt and cause athletes to get greedy, become selfish, curse like sailors, and cheat (at the game and on their significant others). But when you take these two versions together, they provide an all-encompassing spectrum of the sport, one we continue to grapple with today.         score-mike-richards  As Americans, we tend to gravitate toward the former description, the censored storybook version of baseball. When you&amp;#039;re young, you learn about this untainted model when it&amp;#039;s just you and your dad playing catch in the backyard. Though you don&amp;#039;t know it at the time, your innocence is on a timer, ticking away the years, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds until your body begins to act peculiar, sprouting oily whiteheads on your face and hair on your chest. Eventually, you become an adult, and soon understand the more realistic side to the world. Innocence is important. It helps bookmark a time in your life when you are unaware of humanity&amp;#039;s more bizarre tendencies, even in the things you cherish the most\u2014professional sports included. When we reach adulthood, that disparity makes us want to constantly reconnect with those childhood moments, particularly with a sport like baseball, which has always been presented as a perfected American-as-apple-pie image. Field of Dreams asks you to take the same leap of faith you took as a kid, when you still believed in superheroes and Santa Claus. The film is about a man, Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner), who spends his life savings building a baseball field, all because some mysterious whisper in the sky told him to do it. There he is, mowing down his crops at the risk of losing his home, driving all the way from Iowa to Boston to bring a stranger to a Red Sox game, not signing over the deed to his house even though he&amp;#039;s bankrupt. Even Costner himself took a leap of faith by agreeing to star in the film in the first place\u2014a surprising move, considering he had just come off another classic baseball flick, Bull Durham. However, just like his character, Costner saw something special in those Iowa cornfields, as if he was obsessed with reconnecting to the same early memories we all try to hold on to. Major League, of course, has no such sentimentality, which is what makes it great. The film is meant to show the dirtier, funnier side to the game\u2014a counterweight to all those America the Beautiful metaphors baseball tends to evoke in cheesy ESPN commercials. Major League gives us the smog, the dirt, the dust. The film begins with Cleveland&amp;#039;s blue-collar image: sweeping shots of factories, dive bars, and working stiffs wearing construction helmets. Overall, the movie shows us what happens when a group of ragtag players\u2014alcoholics, washed-up veterans, lazy big-contract stars\u2014come together to take on their club&amp;#039;s money-hungry owner, a terrible person who doesn&amp;#039;t care about the product on the field and is willing to purposefully tank an entire season in order for the team to void its contract and move somewhere else. Obviously, not all professional athletes are greedy, drunken bastards, nor are all owners heartless criminals. However, when you get older, you begin to learn that people like that do exist, and that sports has the ability to transition into something uglier. (A perfect example of this is the current news surrounding the real Field of Dreams in Iowa, where developers are thinking of turning it into a multi-million dollar tournament park.) Sometimes, we&amp;#039;re lucky enough to see our pastime hold onto what it once was. When it doesn&amp;#039;t, it tends to spiral downward into a bucket full of dip spit and used sunflower seeds. Field of Dreams doesn&amp;#039;t ignore all the dirt, though. It discusses the infamous 1919 Black Sox scandal, where eight Chicago White Sox players were banned from the game for allegedly throwing the World Series, and deals with the reality professional athletes face when they begin to age and their bodies start to break down. In some ways, the latter is one of the similarities the film has with Major League, whose protagonist, Jake Taylor, is looking for that last shot before his knees give out. Comedy Central Then again, Major League has signs of youth, too, like the opening shot of children playing stickball, and the sequence where Jake pretends to hit a homerun in a packed stadium, imagining the sound of the crowd as he runs the bases. There&amp;#039;s also the ending: the pure unadulterated joy the team feels after they overcome the odds and beat the New York Yankees. Though Costner&amp;#039;s Kinsella never wins\u2014at least not in the strict team vs. team sense of the word\u2014he does overcome the odds, risking everything he has worked for for a small chance at his dream. That both of these films are held with such high esteem shows that we enjoy all facets of baseball, not just the one that is consistently glorified. But Field of Dreams is the one we constantly go back to, not just because it&amp;#039;s a better film, but because it manages to accomplish something we find ourselves doing every summer: tapping into our childhood source of excitement and joy. The youth-like quality is what drives Field of Dreams. At its core, the movie is about fathers and sons, masked in a story about baseball. You can feel it in the opening scene, where Kinsella describes his childhood\u2014&amp;quot;Instead of Mother Goose, I was told tales of Babe Ruth and Shoeless Joe Jackson&amp;quot;\u2014and the strained relationship with his dad\u2014&amp;quot;Do you believe that? An American boy refusing to have a catch with his father?&amp;quot; You can also feel it in the baseball-sized tears that usually come at the end of the film, when Kinsella meets his father and asks him to have a catch, reminding us all that life is one big open field full of dreams and mysteries. Last week, I went to visit my parents at my childhood home in Maryland. Whenever I go back, I take the same route into the house, walking up the driveway into a musty old garage filled with oil-stained rags and car parts and useless boxes of junk. However, it&amp;#039;s the old sports equipment I am always drawn towards: artifacts of my youth, stacked neatly in empty postal service crates, waiting to be picked up and used again. One of the many once-prized possessions in the collection is my first baseball glove, a black-with-gold lettering Wilson I learned to play the game with. Whenever I look at it, I get a shiver down my spine remembering the days gone by. I imagine it&amp;#039;s the same shiver Ray Kinsella felt as he looked out over his baseball diamond at a beautiful Iowan sunset melting off into the distance, that Wesley Snipes&amp;#039; Willie Mays Hays felt as he nailed another pair of batting gloves to his wall, as Jake Taylor felt when he bunted in the game winning run to send the Indians to the playoffs. That shiver, that sparkle you once had in your eyes as a kid, is what we are constantly after as baseball fans, whether you&amp;#039;re a kid playing catch with your dad, or a professional athlete striving for glory and money. Attaining that sparkle is what makes us play and watch the game, and what makes Field of Dreams and Major League instantly recognizable and endlessly entertaining. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a28467/field-of-dreams-major-league-25th-anniversary/>