I would arrive hours before a game and watch the groundskeepers groom the field like a prize animal, then stay after the game when in the cool of the night the same groundsmen appeared with hoses, hoes, and rakes, and patched the grasses like medics attending to wounded soldiers. I made trips to Minneapolis and one or two other cities where the stadiums still have natural-grass infields and outfields. It took me three seasons to hone that grass to its proper texture, to its proper color. My intuition told me that it was the grass that was important. There was a left-field wall, but only about fifty feet of it, twelve feet high, stained dark green and braced from the rear. There was no backstop or grandstand, only one shaky bleacher beyond the left-field wall. It is a tribute to his hero, the legendary Shoeless Joe Jackson, whose reputation was forever tarnished by the scandalous 1919 World. The bases were stray blocks of wood, unanchored. When Ray Kinsella hears these mysterious words spoken in the voice of an Iowa baseball announcer, he is inspired to carve a baseball diamond in his cornfield. The pitcher’s rubber rocked like a cradle when I stood on it. Home plate was made from pieces of cracked two-by-four embedded in the earth. It was really only left field that concerned me. I laid out a whole field, but it was there in spirit only. Building a baseball field is more work than you might imagine.
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