Actor Ray Liotta’s recent passing at 67 has of course brought about a spate of retrospectives on his filmography, including but not limited to his turn as the ghost of “Shoeless” Joe Jackson in 1989’s Field of Dreams. The popular cable-TV standard has long been relatable to those essaying to be Latter-day Saints, since after all it centers on a Temple–because that, after all, is what that expensive and otherworldly baseball field connecting this world to the next really is: a Temple.

This cornfield Temple is even constructed specifically to perform Work for the Dead (since its purpose is specifically to allow disgraced and/or forgotten ball-players to find Redemption), whose construction is prompted by a still small voice whispering “If you build it, they will come” to the poor Iowa farmer who must sacrifice and risk all to obey it. This Temple even becomes a loci of Family History Work, as the film ends with the revelation that one of the ball-players visiting from the next life is that of the farmer’s late, estranged father; the film ends with the two playing catch, “turning the hearts of the children to the fathers and the fathers to the children.” As such, for a certain generation of LDS movie-goers, this film is up there with William Wordsworth’s “trailing clouds of glory” and John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” as honorary Mormon productions that surely must have been inspired by the Holy Ghost and LDS doctrine, even if only inadvertently.

For that matter, the sheer hokiness of the film, its unapologetic schmaltz and cornball cheese, is right on the same wave-length as most mainstream-LDS art. It took an actor of James Earl Jones’s caliber to somehow sell with a straight-face that nostalgic speech about how baseball is America’s secular religion–and even then, he sells it just barely, and only if you don’t think about it, which is a fairly good way to describe so much of our art as well. If Field of Dreams never quite goes completely over-the-top, its also thanks to actors like Ray Liotta, who brought just enough of an off-kilter edge to his revenant to keep things feeling genuinely otherworldly.

Not that the film’s treatment of baseball as a metonym for America was unique or novel–by sheer coincidence, I was finally tackling Don DeLillo’s 1997 Pulitzer-winning novel Underworld when Liotta passed away, wherein I swiftly realized that, for all of its postmodern pretension and “high”-literary bona fides, this is a book as obsessed with baseball and America as Field of Dreams was.

The novel concerns the attempts of its protagonist to track down the homerun baseball hit by by Bobby Thompson in 1951 to win the National League pennant for the New York Giants against the Brooklyn Dodgers. The expansive novel features numerous other themes, historical events, and subplots as well, but ultimately the force of the narrative is centered upon baseball. Underworld is perhaps a less-overtly cornball than Field of Dreams, but it still ultimately shares its same deep-seated commitment to the American mythology of baseball’s grand and epic importance. (Indeed, when you consider that DeLillo names his novel for Odysseus’s journey into the land of the dead, you can also argue that Underworld shares with Field of Dreams a conflation between baseball and the Work of the Dead).

Which just causes both projects to share a twinge of melancholy from the perspective of 2022, when baseball’s ratings and popularity remains in steady decline, and when there are maybe a half-dozen major league teams at most actively trying to be championship contenders each year, largely run by hedge-funds and failson-owners more interested in short-term profits than the long-term health of the sport. Both James Earl Jones and Don DeLillo had posited baseball as the one constant amidst the constant churn of American life across the 20th century, but now in the 21st baseball itself is the artifact in danger of permanent disappearance.

I suppose we could draw a gospel lesson from how these two pieces have aged–how our most sure foundation should be in God, not in baseball, or perhaps how the pursuit of filthy lucre ruins our secular religions as much as it does our real ones. I am tempted to make a comment about the Church’s ginormous hedgefund, or to compare baseball’s contemporary struggles with the religious world’s generally and ours in particular, as we became a little too complacent and self-satisfied with the Church’s purported exponential growth forecast at the turn of the century. I will let the reader draw their own conclusions.

For now, I will only note that what our faith shares with both Field of Dreams and Underworlds’ conception of baseball is a deep and abiding concern for what happens after we die. Even if both baseball and religion are threatened with death, that by no means that the dead are silent–nor that they can’t resurrect from the dead.