"People will come, Ray. They'll come to Iowa for reasons they can't even fathom. They'll turn up your driveway, not knowing for sure why they're doing it, and arrive at your door, innocent as children, longing for the past. 'Of course we won't mind it you look around,' you'll say. 'It's only twenty dollars per person.' And they'll pass over the money without even looking at it. For it is money they have, and peace they lack.They'll walk out to the bleachers and sit in shirtsleeves in the perfect evening, or they'll find they have reserved seats somewhere in the grandstand or along one of the baselines - - wherever they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. They'll watch the game and it will be as if they'd dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they'll have to brush them away from their faces.
The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game . . . it's a piece of our past. It reminds us of all that once was good. And that could be again. People will come. People will most definitely come."
Terrance Mann, from the movie "Field of Dreams".
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"The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time."
Did you watch the Ken Burns miniseries on PBS years ago, "The Civil War"? At one point part of a letter a soldier (Union I think, but I'm not sure) had written home was read, that some of the men in camp had gotten up "a game of ball called base". That struck me how far back baseball goes in our history.
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