Thirty years ago, baseball dominated the summer landscape. In the August 1991 issue of Sports Illustrated for Kids, slugger Darryl Strawberry posed next to a giant version of the fruit with the headline "Fresh!" as he played his first season for the Los Angeles Dodgers. In SI that week, longtime baseball writer Tim Kurkjian marveled at the wild AL West race. His lede: "There is only one way to follow this wacky pennant race in the American League West. Build a satellite dish the size of the Kingdome, purchase a remote control unit and click from game to game. Take your eye off this division even for a day and anything can happen."
Baseball card mania gripped the nation, one of the apexes in the industry's history. San Diego Padres stars Tony Gwynn and Fred McGriff posed for the cover. The upstart Atlanta Braves were going from worst to first, making TBS a must-watch television channel every night. ESPN's SportsCenter led with Ken Griffey Jr., while the "Baseball Stars" video game was a hit on Nintendo. Nolan Ryan fired his absurd seventh no-hitter at the age of 44. Thirty years ago, baseball ruled the summer.
The buzz and national relevance of MLB has waned dramatically since then. Pennant races have been replaced with NFL training camp battles. Sports media is far more likely to cover NBA free agency. Kids play FIFA on Xbox and watch basketball trick shots on Instagram. Baseball has been elbowed out. Which is why Thursday night's "Field of Dreams" game was so important.
When MLB announced this concept back in 2019, it felt artificial and hokey. The league was going to chase the nostalgia of -- ahem -- a movie to draw attention? This would be like the NFL holding a game on a prison lawn for "The Longest Yard" buzz. On top of that, the contest wouldn't even take place on the original diamond from the film. Baseball would build a second field next door, with outfield walls, a huge scoreboard, and thousands of seats in the stands -- unlike the film. It seemed like a desperate stretch, an idea cooked up by some marketing firm whose employees assume the Texas Rangers were named after a Chuck Norris television show.
Baseball was trying to recreate a winner that hockey unearthed. The NHL had stumbled upon gold with its Winter Classic a dozen years ago. Hockey rarely captures the American public -- especially during the regular season. But viewers loved to watch players skate outside, wearing winter beanies and blowing smoke just like they grew up doing on backyard ponds and outdoor rinks. The athletes embraced it as a wistful nod to their youths, and the NHL had a breakthrough event. The Winter Classic matters. Hockey matters in those moments.
Baseball was following this concept, although tweaking it certainly. Most kids don't grow up playing in the middle of cornfields. Yet the backdrop was supposed to remind us of the beautiful simplicity of the game. Much like the film, it was meant to tap into the timeless magic of baseball. The pandemic postponed the "Field of Dreams" game until this summer, so coming into this week, it was still hard to predict how this would come off on the screen.
The answer turned out to be, spectacularly. Social media can rarely agree on anything, but almost all circles applauded MLB's efforts. Usually salty media members, programmed to rip Rob Manfred and the owners for every decision, admitted it was great. When Joe Buck and John Smoltz waxed poetic over how special it felt to be there, it was believable. It certainly looked like it was. Baseball has suffered from a lack of truly meaningful athletes and events. Watching Tom Brady and LeBron James feels historically necessary -- their greatness is so overwhelming, they demand attention. Sadly, Mike Trout has never felt that way, even if statistically he is one of the greatest of all-time. Steph Curry and Patrick Mahomes transcend their sport. Mookie Betts and Jacob deGrom do not.
The 1991 World Series has been called the greatest of all-time, a seven-game supernova between those up-and-coming Braves and Minnesota Twins. It garnered an average of 35 million viewers per game, peaking with an insane 50 million for the epic Game 7. The last pre-pandemic World Series also went the distance. But in 2019, the Washington Nationals and Houston Astros averaged just 14 million viewers, topping out at 23 million for their Game 7. Thirty years had eroded more than half the audience. Some of that has to do with the ways television changed -- cord-cutting occurred, and social media siphoned off fans. But part of the cause is, baseball just feels less relevant these days.
That's why the "Field of Dreams" game was a victory for baseball. Even if for just one night, you felt like you had to watch. What would the corn look like? How would home runs sail into the farm? What would a regular season game between two potential playoff teams feel like with just 8,000 seats available? It was beautiful, one of those perfect Midwestern summer nights with a soft purple sky. The New York Yankees and Chicago White Sox threw hard and smashed homers, and looked like they had a blast doing it. An Aaron Judge moonshot sailing into thousands of rows of corn looked even cooler than you could have predicted. Thursday night, people watched. Friday morning, they talked about it. And that's the way it used to be.