‘The One Constant Through All The Years …’

Iowa, it may surprise some people to learn, is not flat. Our expectations are that the breadbasket states, like Kansas and Nebraska, are perfect level plains covered in staple grains and the occasional silo. They aren’t, not entirely, and Iowa fully defies the stereotype. Hills roll across the landscape; roads rise and dip and wind to negotiate them. In a few places, wooded bluffs rise beside the roads, and you could almost be riding the Blue Ridge Parkway through the Appalachians.

It was my second annual baseball Grand Tour with Paul Golba. I wrote about the first one here last year in plenty of detail, but I won’t be repeating that daily rundown. I will say we had taken in four baseball games in the previous four days: the rooftop clubs outside Wrigley Field, Miller Park in Milwaukee, Wrigley itself, and then Target Field in Minneapolis. We had our final game at U.S. Cellular Field the next day, but that Sunday we were taking a modified form of the Sabbath.

We were going to Dyersville, Iowa, where a quarter-century ago they built a baseball diamond in a cornfield as a movie location. Field of Dreams is long past, but the Field of Dreams is still there. Fulfilling the promise of The Voice that spoke to Ray Kinsella, in a way no one anticipated, people still come.

I planned the tour around the day we would be here. We went late in the season, rather than in April as last time, so the field would be in its proper glory. The corn needs to be at its full height, tall enough so anybody who walks into it will disappear. I can’t imagine how anybody visiting in spring, with the stalks two feet high, would get the same experience.

And I wanted the experience. I needed the experience. Whatever magic that beautifully incongruous field still held, I hoped to have it touch me, infuse itself into me. I had a ghost I needed to see there. I had a rendezvous with my grandfather.

What I did not know was whether he was waiting there, or whether I was bringing him with me.

…

We lost my grandfather, William Taylor Sr., 15 years ago, but he is still part of my life. He lived long enough to see me make my first successes in writing science fiction, and his passing in 1999 pulled a story out of me that became my greatest achievement in the field. He would have been even gladder to see me writing about baseball, for reasons I grasped only dimly while he was alive.

It was not until just a couple of years ago that I learned the big revelation I am building to. It’s something he shared with his son (my uncle), and nobody else. One could plausibly contend that it was a fabrication, making himself look good in his son’s eyes. I have reasons to believe otherwise, aside from the question of why one would tell a self-aggrandizing boast to exactly one person.

Bill Taylor looked the part of an athlete: over six feet tall, with a solid build that didn’t go to fat with age as plenty of athletes’ bodies do. With his size and handsome looks, he’d bear a glancing comparison to John Wayne, or a tidier Lyndon Johnson. Later on, I’d come to think that Ted Williams might be the right comparison.

He played baseball, of course, along with basketball as a maturing youth. He had three years on the Westfield High School (N.J.) baseball team, lettering the last two. He played some third base, a little second, and some outfield. During summers he played on local teams, including American Legion ball. He was also a switch-hitter. That tickles me every time I think about it: this unexpected dimension to a man I thought I knew so well.

If baseball was a big part of his life, it didn’t yet show. He entered Colgate University in the fall of 1940, like his father before him. He wasn’t halfway to his degree when Pearl Harbor changed all his plans.

He volunteered for the Marine Corps in 1942, but was allowed to remain at Colgate in an accelerated degree program. The Marines needed men, but they also needed educated men. After he graduated in 1943, a year ahead of pre-war schedule, they formally inducted him. He received further electronics training in Boston, and presumably also went to Officer Candidate School. It would be Lieutenant William Taylor who went to the Pacific.

By the Pacific, fortunately, I mean San Diego. He served at a radar station there, and also did some MP duty. He never had to hit the black-sanded beach at Iwo Jima or fight through the dug-out hills of Okinawa. Great as was the honor to be gained there, his absence safeguarded his life, and the future existence of his family, including me.

Demobilization after the surrender of Japan was not quick, so my grandfather was discharged in April of 1946. Back home in Westfield, his life slid back into normal patterns. As 1946 ran to its close, he had a job lined up at NCR, probably with help from his electronics training in the Corps. He also had a fiancée, Elinor Engel, who had come east from Chicago to help look after a friend’s family. The foundation for a good post-war life was laid.

That’s when the New York Yankees came calling. They wanted to sign Bill Taylor to the minors. The high minors. Right to Triple-A.

Now, 1946 had been the first year that Triple-A existed as a minor league designation, the minors presumably expanding to accommodate all the players coming back from the service. The Yankees might still have needed some extra bodies to populate their farm clubs, which included two Triple-A teams in Newark and Kansas City. But to start somebody that close to the top, one step away from the Show, points to more than filling a roster.

It was a shining prize they dangled in front of him, the chance of a lifetime. And he turned them down.

…

Every leg of our trip so far had suffered delays—the entire Midwest sometimes seemed under construction—but our drive through Iowa unwound smoothly, even faster than our GPS navigator’s estimate. For all that, the broad cornfields that had begun in Minnesota, stretching on and on, made 60 miles an hour seem a dawdling pace. We were both hurrying and tarrying, and it made a knot of my nerves.

Past and present mingled along the road. Run-down shacks with paint peeling or gone stood right alongside modern farm buildings in pristine, pre-fab, sterile newness. One modern three-bladed windmill stood tall and motionless; two non-modern windmills, wood blades and vanes on wood towers, spun happily. Above it all, fleecy clouds marched in battalions across the sky, almost as a novice painter would portray them on canvas, and their shadows striped the fields.

Dyersville itself followed the theme of juxtaposition. Its population is over 35,000, a good-sized town. There were sprawling suburban developments coming in, along pristine paved roads. Going out was the familiar long stretch of farmland, the road surface quickly turning to dirt, where you could see distant cars first by the plumes of dust they raised.

W.P. Kinsella would probably smile at it all. Shoeless Joe, the progenitor novel for Field of Dreams, makes much of reaching back from our high-tension era to a simpler time, or at least the best of that time stripped of its own faults. The continuity of baseball throughout the decades is his bridge, his proof that a gentle bucolic core remains beneath the layers of hustle and anxiety we have laid over modern life.

And it is there. Take the road east out of town, away from the crossing of highways and the rise of suburbia, make a couple of turns, and there on your left it stands. The white farmhouse on a fenced hill, the ranks of corn rising tall from the soil—and a baseball diamond. A joyful incongruity; a dream kept alive and tangible because it is shared.

“Field of Dreams Movie Site” is the official name, assuredly for reasons of copyright of the kind that keep you from using the name of the NFL championship game in any sort of commerce. Four or five cars stood in the parking lot, really a dirt road clearing, when Paul and I arrived. We would have neither the pristine solitude of an empty field nor the jostle of a big crowd that would please the folks now running the land, including the souvenir stand abutting the parking lot.

The field itself is a little changed from its original state. There are now two sets of bleacher benches instead of one, down each line, doubling seating capacity from 72 to 144. (Maybe 300 with standing room.) There’s a building in left field foul ground, where a souvenir bat-stamping business does its work. The flagpole in right, its American flag snapping, doubles as the right-field foul pole.

Like the rest of Iowa, it’s not as flat as you’d expect. There’s a notable rise toward the corn in center and right field. Left field is pretty level, which makes sense. The movie location scouts may have worried more about Joe Jackson’s stomping ground than the rest of the outfield.

Joe wasn’t there to greet us, but other ghosts were already on hand.

There were three of them, two actually in 1919 Chicago White Sox uniforms or close enough. Those two had fielding duty, while the third pitched to a cycle of visitors from in front of the mound. These ghosts are not timeless: the hair peeking beneath their caps was gray or white. They are part of a legend of the field.

They were members of a town ballclub, itself a fitting touch of nostalgia for the setting. Not too long after Field of Dreams came out, they were finishing up a ballgame nearby when someone told them the movie site ballfield was thronged with visitors, all these potential players with no game. Going to the edge of the property in their uniforms—by happy coincidence, something that could pass for the Black Sox at a distance—they slipped into the cornfield, walked through, and emerged from the corn with the perfect cinematic flourish.

Ever since, almost a quarter-century now, the Ghosts have been coming to the field to play a little ball with the visitors. You can see even see them on some of the souvenirs up for sale. The perfect one is the polarized postcard, where you can turn the card a little and watch the Ghosts appear or disappear in the corn. Yes, I bought one, for an in-law who envied me for this leg of my trip.

During a pause in the BP, Paul and I went onto the infield, capped and gloved. Picking up one of the spare baseballs, we proceeded to have ourselves a catch, backing away a couple of feet at a time to stretch out our arms. Recreating the final scene of the movie that way is almost a station of pilgrimage, a rite of devotion for visitors to this beloved site.

Give it a long thought in this self-aware era of ours, and you might dismiss it as Hollywood-flavored kitsch. I wasn’t giving it that thought. I was enjoying the moment, enjoying sharing it with a good friend. But though the knot in my stomach had dissolved once we arrived at the field, I didn’t feel any closer to the answers I sought, and I was starting to worry that they wouldn’t be there.

…

Ever since I learned of the fork in my grandfather’s road that he did not take, questions had haunted me. Did he make the right decision? Should he have taken the chance, even knowing what it might cost him? Worst of all, did he regret the choice he made?

Signing with the Yankees’ system would almost surely have lost him the NCR job. The company could do better than someone working for them half of the year, especially with so many veterans still to be reabsorbed into the workforce. Whether it would have cost him my grandmother is a matter of speculation, but I’ve come to believe he thought it might. A young man with steady work is a different prospect from a young man chasing a dream at low pay, as a lot of women who have loved minor-leaguers have learned.

Then again, in baseball terms he wasn’t that young. Had he signed, he would have played his first professional inning at the age of 25. Even with the war distorting the usual patterns, that did not portend a long and fruitful career. He’d have to prove himself pretty quickly.

He may also have suspected the offer was a bait-and-switch. Rope him in with the prospect of Triple-A, then after spring training or a few weeks with the Newark Bears or Kansas City Blues, shuffle him down a level or two, or three. If something seems too good to be true, after all, it often is.

His refusal might also have come from a clear-eyed assessment of his own talents, and the level he’d have to reach to make the big leagues. I have virtually no evidence of how able a player he was, aside from the offer itself. He may have decided he just wasn’t that good, at least compared to who he’d have to beat out to break the New York Yankees’ lineup.

Having topped out at six-foot-two, he was no longer a natural infielder. Even had he tried to stick at third, the Yankees in 1946 had seen the return of Billy Johnson from service. His lone previous year in the majors, he’d finished fourth in MVP voting playing the hot corner at Yankee Stadium. Edging wartime place-holder Snuffy Stirnweiss out of the spot, he looked a lock for long-term residency at third.

As for the outfield, he could scarcely have faced longer odds. New York’s starting outfielders in 1946 were Joe DiMaggio, Charlie Keller, and Tommy Henrich. That is one of the greatest outfields ever put together, an Everest for any ambitious player to climb. Who can blame anyone this side of the true elites of the game for thinking it too great a challenge?

Of course, Keller would wreck his back midway through the ’47 season, and never be the same again. But who could have known?

One more pitfall lurked: just because the Yankees signed him up doesn’t mean they would have kept him until he panned out or washed out. Instead of a spot in the Yankees’ dugout, his fate could have been a trade and a few grim years with the Senators or the Browns. It would have been the majors, and it might have been good money, but it would hardly have been glory.

Therein lies the counterbalance to all these sensible arguments, one that became obvious only in retrospect. New York had gone three straight years without a pennant, as long a dry stretch as they’d had since Babe Ruth arrived. Team star Joe DiMaggio’s 1946 had been merely good, his weakest year in the bigs: some thought three years away from the game had cost him his touch. When Bill Taylor said no thanks, the Yankees weren’t all that special.

That, of course, is when they began the greatest glory run in baseball history, maybe the history of professional sports. They won the Series in ’47, scuffled for one year, then reeled off five straight championships. With the continued success they had for 11 years after that, they cemented their place as the jewel in baseball’s crown. It made their lowliest players famous, and their stars into legends.

William Taylor gave up his chance to be part of the legend. It would take an unusual man not to look back at that road not taken. From scattered hints, I became persuaded that my grandfather, having lived his life forwards, came to rue it looking backwards.

…

When people are getting tossed batting practice, you can do one of three things. You can watch, you can wait your turn at bat, or you can grab your glove and help with the fielding. After a few minutes of watching from the first-base bleachers, my reluctance to insert myself vanished. Paul was holding down third base. The least I could do was hold down first.

“Least” is probably the best word to describe it. I love baseball, but it doesn’t love me enough to grant me any playing skills. If I have a magnet glove, it’s only because the baseballs carry a like charge and get repelled by it. As for throwing, on the standard scouts’ 20-to-80 scale, my arm rates about a -10, projecting to -15.

What did that matter? I put on my glove and took the field.

The basepaths were dry and hard, almost a bit baked. One would blame a hot and dry summer, except that the grass of the field was thick and flourishing, perhaps too much so. I’d hear from the pitching Ghost later that the field wasn’t be as meticulously maintained that late in the tourist season. My idea of coming when the corn was at its height, perfect for vanishing ballplayers, is apparently a minority view.

The conditions didn’t affect me much: I was going to be a butcher no matter what. Balls past me; balls off me; balls over my head. My lone grace—it’d be excessive to call it saving—was that I can run, or at least will run. Anything that went by or through or over me, I charged after like it was a tie in the ninth. The pitching Ghost even gave me a passing compliment on it, one not really necessary. Why not give my best? What was I saving it for?

(The way my legs felt the next day might provide an answer, but again, what did that matter?)

Other folks had their ups; Paul got his chance at the plate. Finally, my turn came around. I choked up a bit, hoped for the best—and did not wholly embarrass myself. It helps that the pitcher was a friendly ghost, serving up nice easy BP. I was pulling everything to left, likely indicating that I was crowding the plate—Paul, smart fellow, had me played there—and making some solid contact.

My streak of success lasted about until the time I realized that I was doing OK for myself. Then, like Wile E. Coyote looking down to realize he’s run off a cliff, gravity asserted itself. I limped to the end of my turn at bat, extended by the pitcher insisting I finish up with a fair ball. Considering how long it had been since I’d swung a bat at an actual baseball (Wiffle Balls do not count), I still felt quite all right.

Soon after, the Ghosts departed. Earlier visitors went on their way also, but others took their place. One family with two very young boys had been off to the side, dad pitching to the tykes. Several folks pulled in on motorcycles, serious cruising machines. One’s impression of the average biker is someone pretty tough, and pretty impervious to the sentimentality and nostalgia that this place nurtures. Something else beyond the flatness of Iowa to reassess.

There wasn’t anything to do that moment but look at the field, or look at the people off the field. For this place, that is enough … except for what I had come to find.

Was I expecting something supernatural? Did I think I was going to see my grandfather, younger than I had ever known him, materialize out of the corn in right field, the interlaced “NY” on his chest and at his brow? Did I expect some vision telling me that his shade was living the dream he had turned aside? Or that turning it aside had not wounded him as I feared it had?

Truth is, I didn’t know what I expected. I deliberately left myself open to accepting the extraordinary, as the fictional Ray Kinsella did when he heeded a voice and ploughed under acres of corn to make a ballfield for an unnamed someone. But you can open a door without anyone walking through.

Perhaps it wasn’t going to happen. Or perhaps it needed one last nudge.

I went out to left field, Paul forgotten behind me. With only a little hesitation at the edge, I walked into the corn.

…

William Taylor had a good life. He saw his three children make successes of themselves. His marriage to Elinor stood strong for 47 years, until she died in 1994. The pain of losing her would be ameliorated by a reconnection to Phoebe from his high-school days, an Indian summer in his love life. He would eventually slide into dementia the last few years of his life, and there had been other agonies here and there before that, but it’s a life that most people would be happy to have had.

Despite that, did he wish he’d had another?

One sign that he might resided, not in presence, but in absence. He didn’t have many photos and articles about himself in his athletic days. The few he did leave behind centered on his basketball playing. Even my mother found this strange. Where was the baseball stuff?

The answer that occurred to me was that he had discarded it all, as aching reminders of what he’d made himself reject, or even as a proof to his new wife that he was beyond that silly idea of playing pro ball. It was impossible to know, and impossible not to speculate.

One could say he got rid of that stuff because it didn’t mean much. Aside from other evidence I have to the contrary, there’s one fact that stands against the notion that baseball didn’t mean much to him: he was a switch-hitter. That does not happen casually. You invest long, hard hours into that. It isn’t something you do for a forgettable, disposable hobby.

Besides, not everything got discarded. I have the proof.

I picked up the hobby of baseball card collecting during its peak in the early 1990s. (Trust me to come in at the top of the market.) After one of the card shows I attended, my grandfather, perhaps only then realizing the part baseball had in my life, gave a surprising gift to me, some memorabilia of his own.

He had been a camp counselor one summer in his teenage years, and the camp had a big baseball game. He was the star of that game, which by luck earned him something. The father of one of the camp’s attendees happened to work as a lawyer for Colonel Jacob Ruppert, owner of the New York Yankees. That man donated a prize for the game’s MVP: a team-signed baseball.

He didn’t recall the exact year, but with my copy of Total Baseball and some squinting, I pinned the ball down to 1937. It wasn’t in good shape, having resided inside an old stiff sock for God knows how long, but it was good enough. The downward swoops of twin G’s marked the faded autograph of Joe DiMaggio, and right on the sweet spot the manager and team captain were much more bold and visible: Joe McCarthy and Lou Gehrig.

Time has since dimmed those names even more, despite the ball residing now inside a protective cube rather than old laundry. But I will never get rid of it, and never sell it. Set aside the plausible fear that it might be a “clubhouse ball,” signatures faked by whatever attendant happened to be handy. Even if it were authenticated down to the stitches, it could never be worth as much to any collector as it is worth to me. Not for who signed it, but for who had it before me.

The ball may also hint at how the signing offer came, seemingly out of nowhere, in 1946.  Scouting in 1937 wasn’t the rigorous science it is today (why do I hear snickering?), still having some ad hoc tendencies.  A colleague of the owner mentioning a promising kid he saw playing would still have been thought a legitimate source of information.  A quiet process, nine years in development, may have begun when that ball changed hands.

Still, there is something sad about that baseball. Such a prize was stuffed into an old sock, and presumably stuck in the back of a drawer for decades. It was forgotten by design, yet remained with him. The symbolism is so potent it may overwhelm the truth, but I can only call it as I see it.

Passing along that baseball was an act of communication. Part of it was open, the things older generations always do for the younger. Another part, I believe, was deeply veiled, impossible to understand just looking forward. It spoke of something that, for him, still could not be spoken.

The reserve isn’t incomprehensible, though to some today it would seem so. John Wayne, or Ted Williams, doesn’t lay open his woes. He keeps them inside. In the Duke’s case, he shows a stoic front to the world; in Ted’s, he snarls at those who would dig into his life, keeping them at arm’s length.

William Taylor never told me these things, not in a way I could grasp. Only when he was long gone did I learn that there were questions that needed answering. I could piece together my theories, but I would never have a definitive answer … not without help from a touch of the supernatural.

…

The sensation within the cornfield was familiar, touching memories long dormant. I lived in Lancaster, Penn., for about 18 months when I was young. Our growing development encroached on some old farmland, and there was an actual cornfield beyond my backyard and that of over a dozen other houses. I wasn’t the only boy in the neighborhood playing games, or just exploring, in its depths.

So the closeness of the stalks didn’t oppress, even with narrow rows and the tops well over my head. The firmness of the soil underfoot, holding its moisture in shaded ground, was no surprise even in a dry season. Only the sound of insects chittering and whirring all around didn’t strike a chord of memory, but it still fit the scene.

I soaked it all in, two dozen rows deep … and nothing happened. No voice spoke; no vision materialized before my eyes. I nearly went in deeper, but where would I have stopped? What a temptation there was to keep walking into the cornfield, to eternity or the property line, whichever came first. But it passed, and not too long afterward I walked out of the corn.

I wasn’t taken for a ghost, or even a local ballplayer. Nobody noticed me emerging. They were too busy playing ball.

The little kids and their parents had moved to the diamond, with Paul fielding. I watched this for a little while from the third-base bleachers, until one of the boys, four or five years old, came rounding third, Paul in less than full-speed pursuit.

I did the proper thing. Leaving my glove and notebook behind, I raced ahead of them to home plate, and set myself the way umpires are supposed to do before making a call. As the boy slid across home, right smack on his tush, I threw my arms out and barked out “Safe!”

After that, what could I do but rejoin the game? With Paul holding down third, and someone else on the right side of the infield, my slot was pretty clear, if not ideal.

“Shortstop is not my natural position,” I observed as I passed Paul.

“You don’t have a natural position,” Paul said, proving he had seen me field earlier.

I had my response ready. “Sure I do. Batboy.”

This got laughs, which I ascribe to the general good feelings everybody had simply by being on the Field of Dreams. We weren’t there to play well, we were there to play, to make memories, and to celebrate baseball as part of our lives, even the shortest ones.

Here it all came together for me. The realization had peeked through earlier, even before I looked for my ghosts in the corn, but now it blazed forth. This field may recapture past glories, or provide a look down a road not taken, but its beating heart is nurturing continuity. Continuity of the game; continuity of the culture in which it exists.

William Taylor may have turned his back on the Yankees, but he did not turn his back on baseball. He still played in on local teams for years, roaming the outfield. After that, he turned to umpiring. Another memento I have of him is his old strike-ball-out indicator, the metal so light you barely feel it in your palm, but the snap of the turning wheels still crisp after decades. However he may have felt about his chance not taken, baseball remained part of my grandfather’s life.

That was the answer I needed. That was how I could let go of the regrets I felt, the need to answer a question now so old as probably to be beyond answering. What he might have done could remain a hypothetical, but now I could look at what he did.

And what I, in my turn, could do.

I might be no player, but I could still pass on the joys of baseball, and all that it means to people. Hopefully I’ve done some of that writing here for the last two-plus years. That moment, though, I was doing it on a more intimate scale, with a couple of parents who will treasure this day, and a couple of little boys whom I can only hope will remember it.

It was one of those boys who hit a little grounder to me at short. I fielded this one cleanly, turned left to make a throw, and instead began dashing over. “Who’s covering first?” I shouted. Nobody answered, and nobody covered.

The tyke rounded first, being at the age where running the bases means running them all, with no thought of stopping. Having been very late to the bag, I pivoted to make a throw to the fielder vaguely around second. Eyewitnesses probably assumed I botched the throw intentionally, to let the kid keep running. I didn’t disabuse anybody at the time.

Naturally, the boy scored. I kept with the play as long as it lasted, but managed to master my competitive urges so that I never could quite get him out. It would have been no fun otherwise. It wouldn’t have been a good memory otherwise.

That’s how I forged one little link in a great chain—a great weaving braid of chains—that keeps baseball part of our common experience. Everyone else who visited the Field of Dreams that day did the same. So did the Ghosts, who now have a long stretch of that chain behind them. Hopefully, there’s some local team that will step up in a few years and carry on what they’ve done.

Such acts might seem insignificant, cast against the tens of thousands in stadiums or the millions watching World Series games. On that field in Iowa, however, it’s easier to see how small things like that matter.

So yes, my grandfather was waiting for me on the Field of Dreams … because everybody else brought him with them. And to anybody there for whom my presence let them make their own connection, backward or forward, I tell them it was my pleasure and my privilege.