If You Build It, They Will Watch

Talk about your unlikely combinations! Hollywood and Major League Baseball held a marketing demonstration last week that appealed to Middle America.

What’s more, it was smashingly successful.

Last Thursday the Field of Dreams baseball game saw the Chicago White Sox defeat the New York Yankees in a game that attracted almost 6 million viewers.

That’s the highest viewership total for any regular season MLB game since 2005.

What made this game different?

You can start with no politics. And add no moral exhibitionism.

Instead fans in the stadium and viewers at home were treated to a game that featured tradition, nostalgia, show biz and oh yes, baseball.

The game was inspired by the 1989 film ‘Field of Dreams’ starring Kevin Costner. Costner played an Iowa farmer who built a baseball stadium in a cornfield and saw long–dead players materialize out of the corn and walk on the homemade diamond to play one last game.

The Field of Dreams MLB game followed the script perfectly.

The 8,000–seat stadium was built a baseball toss away from the set used for the movie. Kevin Costner was there to start the festivities and the real–life White Sox and Yankees emerged from a cornfield in the outfield to applause from the fans in the stands.

Then — instead of using the game as an opportunity to propagandize a captive audience — MLB shut up for once and let the players play.

We wonder where the 24/7 wokesters that infest Hollywood and the front offices of professional sports were during the planning stage for this game?

Maybe they were at Obama’s birthday party using their sophistication of ward off the virus.

Regardless, the fans were the beneficiaries of their absence.

The baseball teams in the movie were all–white because black players weren’t allowed in the majors then.

But no one donned a hair jersey and pontificated about it because the two modern teams playing that night demonstrated that American baseball no long has a color barrier.

This should be an object lesson for professional sports organizations that have been busy driving their audiences away.

Unless the NBA’s goal is to become a niche sport for the wealthy woke, it could benefit from taking politics off the basketball floor and concentrating on playing the game.

The same goes for the NFL.

Instead of its new apartheid music program (Black National Anthem and the (white?) National Anthem), Goodell’s minions could take the divisive bumper stickers off the helmets, stick to the real national anthem and let the players politic on their own time.

It certainly couldn’t hurt NFL ratings and it just might help.