Also the only game I have watched this season (I wish I saw Waiwright's complete game this week). I enjoyed it. I hate manufactured schmaltz, and there was plenty about the broadcast that was overdone. The whole thing is kinda weird, but the fundamental thing of it, baseball in a timeless setting, with a small crowd, rang true. And you could see it with the way the players were enjoying themselves and were really into the game. It was fun to watch players playing the game like that, and the crowd enjoying the game like that.
And Craig's story of strangers playing catch as they waited for the gates to open was pretty great too. That can only happen at a game with conditions like that, where there is space, and the time and space allow for it. I hope they continue to do games like this. But I also hope they don't ruin it. What worked, in my opinion, was the way they protected the experience and made for that time and space. That is the guts of what they got right from the movie. But that can and should be done in other places, and it doesn't need to keep having a strong movie tie-in. You could do a protected timeless game in any of the rural places baseball used to be played - in the mining areas of the Appalachians, upstate New York, In the lumber mills of the south. I'm sure the people here could suggest hundreds of places MLB would do well to host these protected games that would be visually beautiful and would celebrate the ancient history of the game. They could still call it the Field of Dreams game because they would be building the field, and people would come.
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