HoraceClarke66: An’ Anudder T’ing!

 From the whirlwind mind of HoraceClarke66...

No, I’m not letting that awful, “Field of Dreams” excrescence go. 

 It was a celebration, first of all, of a movie that badly mutilated the book in some awful ways—starting with the use of (the civil rights) Bob Moses as a prop. 

James Earl Jones’ character is a thinly disguised depiction of the recently departed Moses, organizer of the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964, as brave and dedicated an American as there’s ever been…and a product of the Bronx.

 Not Iowa.

 For that matter, the original Hateful Eight on the Chicago Black Sox didn’t have anything to do with Io-way, either. They were streetwise guys who actively sought out gamblers to finance their fix. 

 (For an excellent movie on them—also excluded from Jack Curry’s woeful list of best baseball films—check out John Sayles’ Eight Men Out.)

 Who saved the game? Why, New Yorkers, of course. 

 The colonels, Ruppert and Huston, who owned your New York Yankees, and brought Babe Ruth to the biggest stage in sports. The Black Sox scandal was forgotten overnight, as New Yorkers rushed to see the Bambino, giving baseball its first million-fan gate.

But hey, in the endless media pandering to “the heartland,” somehow saving the game Chicago nearly wrecked becomes all about Iowa, where “the mighty Yankees” are the bad guys.

 The corn is as high as a pig’s eye.