“This Game is a Part of Our Past”: When James Earl Jones Delivered the Most Heartwarming Lines About Baseball History in America

There are moments of sporting history that grow into the general conscience and are more than just sporting events. “Field of Dreams” is perhaps one of those confluences. The movie is based on a novel about Shoeless Joe Jackson and a ballpark in an Iowa cornfield. But it is actually James Earl Jones who takes the cake in one of the final scenes of the movie.

The movie’s plot is based on an Iowa farmer who dreams of a baseball player (Shoeless Joe Jackson) asking him to construct a baseball diamond on his farm. Already under considerable debt, Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) still undertakes the project and builds the ballpark. He subsequently undergoes a litany of problems with his field. Already in debt, he isn’t able to fund the ballpark, and that’s when the scene is captured.

James Earl Jones iconizes the quintessential American sport

James Earl Jones is possibly one of the most iconic voices in cinema. Having already lent his baritone to a variety of characters, his statements form a part of all our cinema psyche. May that be as Darth Vader from Star Wars, Mufasa from the Lion King, or as in this case, Terence Mann.

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Terence Mann in the movie is portrayed as being a soft-spoken individual who is a fan of the game. Mann speaks to Ray to convince him to keep the ballpark and not to sell his cornfield.

“People will come,” he says.

“People will turn up to your doorstep, innocent as children,” he says. Referring to people coming up to his cornfield to watch the players engage in a game of baseball. Mann goes on to speak about how not even charging them a fee for the visit to the field will dissuade them. “For it is money they have, and peace they like,” he said.

Mann goes on to mention that the people that come to watch the game on a perfect afternoon will take their seats along the baseline and watch the game develop. “All of a sudden it’ll be like they were children who cheered their heroes,” harkening to a sentiment we can all relate to.

Baseball and America

But this is when Mann really speaks about how integral baseball is to the American zeitgeist.

He speaks about how baseball has always been a part of the American psyche. How even though America has gone by like an army of steamrollers, the game has endured. How even though the blackboard of America has been wiped and rebuilt over and over, this game has always been there to see it.

“Baseball has marked the time,” Mann adds. The diamond and the field have become a, “part of their past.”

To Mann, the field and the game remind him of, “all that once was good, and could be again.”

He ends the line with his famous baritone-sounding ominous words, “People will come Ray. People will come.”