Two of the greatest baseball movies ever made feature the same player: Joseph “Shoeless Joe” Jackson. Jackson was a Golden Era Barry Bonds. He could do everything — run, field, throw, hit, hit for power. When he left the game, in 1920, his lifetime average was .356, the second highest in history after Ty Cobb. His outfielder’s glove was called the place “where triples go to die.”
Jackson was an eloquent, soulful shaman in 1989′s “Field of Dreams,” the Kevin Costner-builds-a-baseball-field movie that had men weeping in the dark all over the nation. That movie, in which Jackson was played by Ray Liotta, depicted baseball as a spiritual experience, a kind of heaven.
