He wasn’t there in person this time, but he was there in spirit. And spirit is what the night was all about.

Kevin Costner provided the narration for an intro to tonight’s Field of Dreams game on Netflix. It’s the third edition of the Hollywood-MLB mashup played on a field near the Iowa farmhouse where the 1989 classic was filmed. And while it wasn’t quite the same as watching Costner walk out of the corn at the 2021 edition, tonight’s video still delivered chills.

The original film was more about the connections baseball builds in families, particularly between fathers and sons, and Costner was a key to the emotional and evocative feeling connecting all in attendance and watching on TV. 

The two-minute video that presaged the game covered the history of baseball, what it’s meant to fans and what it’s meant to America with, as Costner said, “story after story”; from Babe Ruth to Jackie Robinson to Kirk Gibson to Barry Bonds to last year’s Dodgers. Those stories are important, he said, “to remind us what baseball can make us feel, how deeply it can bring us bring us together and why it’s still worth believing in.”

You can watch below.

And if you haven’t teared up yet, before the The Minnesota Twins and Philadelphia Phillies took the field, MLB hall-famers from decades past strode from the corn onto the grass, including Goose Gossage, Cal Ripkin Jr, Andre Dawson, Mike Schmidt, Bert Blyleven and Joe Torre.

You can watch that bit below.

As Brad Pitt’s Billy Bean said in another great, more recent, film about the game, “How can you not be romantic about baseball?”