There's a town called Dyersville in eastern Iowa where they build farm toys and play baseball. Pick up most any toy tractor and look for who it's made by. If the maker is The Ertl Co., Scale Models or Spec-Cast, then it came from Dyersville.
Walk in a straight line out from the center of Dyersville in any direction and you'll soon be in a corn field. Keep on walking and there's a chance, if you luck onto the right bearing, that you'll come to a clearing and walk out onto a baseball field.
If it's baseball season and it's the last Sunday of the month there's likely to be a ballgame in progress between two teams dressed in turn-of-the-century Chicago White Sox uniforms. Looking at the crowd of spectators gathered on wooden bleachers and hearing the solid "kah-lok!" of a bat making contact, you might think you've stepped back into a simpler, happier time.
The ballfield straddling the properties of two farmers outside Dyersville was built a few years back as a setting for the movie Field of Dreams. In that movie an Iowa farmer is compelled by a voice he hears to build a ballfield for ghostly ballplayers.
When the movie folks moved on, the ballfield remained behind. Now the local folks gather on that field regularly to shag flies and round the bases.
Just as the toy tractors Dyersville's residents make are often replicas of yesterday's machinery, so the baseball they play is a recreation of the country hardball once common across America.
Abner Doubleday didn't invent baseball. It began with groups of farmhands and sharecroppers playing bat-ball games wherever they could find a clearing. It began with country kids tossing peach pits in the air and swinging at them with willow branches. It began with rock throwing contests.
It's no accident that baseball season begins at the same time as spring planting and concludes during autumn harvests. The nine innings of a game could represent the nine months from the first days of spring to the onset of winter and the four bases of the diamond are like the four points of a compass -- north, south, east and west.
Baseball is played on a "field" instead of a court and follows the natural course of "innings" rather than the mechanical movements of a clock. Its runs are counted like wheat in a granary and batting averages parallel comparisons of yield and profits.
But win or lose, and whatever the final score, the game can begin anew with the promise of spring. The cycle of baseball repeats itself like seasons, over and over again, endlessly.
The public image of baseball may be broadcast via satellite from shining new ballparks in cities where they sign athletes to million-dollar contracts for afternoon play. But the soul of baseball still lives in places like Dyersville where the game is played for the same reason they make toy tractors: just for fun.
