“Life moves pretty fast,” said the titular Ferris Bueller in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. “If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Baseball fan Zane Tackett, who paid a pretty penny for front-row seats to Thursday’s Field of Dreams game, would have been well-served by that advice.
Instead, like so many tech-obsessed millennials addicted to their phones, Tackett was too busy looking down at his screen to see Tim Anderson’s dramatic walk-off homer to beat the Yankees in a thrilling slugfest played before a crowd of 7,832 in an Iowa cornfield replicating the one from the iconic Field of Dreams starring Kevin Costner, James Earl Jones and Ray Liotta. The clip quickly went viral with sports business reporter Darren Rovell of Action Network mocking Tackett for being glued to his phone.
An early adopter of cryptocurrency, Tackett claims he was responding to a work email when Anderson socked his game-winner. To his credit, Tackett took the jab in stride, lamenting being too distracted to witness one of the more riveting finishes in recent baseball memory.
Chalk this one up to simple bad luck—Tackett claims he was paying close attention when Yankees teammates Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton homered off White Sox closer Liam Hendriks earlier in the inning.
Though some dismissed it as a gimmick, most praised Thursday’s highly-anticipated Field of Dreams event for tapping into fans’ nostalgia, reminding those in attendance as well as viewers at home how beautiful the sport can be in its purest form. Of course, as Tackett would be the first to admit, the biggest obstacles to baseball’s growth, particularly among the younger generation, is our phones.
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