James Earl Jones, the greatest baseball film actor who ever lived and probably will ever live, has passed away. He leaves behind a beautiful and complicated legacy.
You might think Kevin Costner is the greatest baseball film actor, and I’ll admit it’s close. Both of them had key roles in three baseball films; Costner in Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, and For Love of the Game, and Jones in Bingo Long and the Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings, Field of Dreams, and The Sandlot. Costner may have an edge in pure screen time, but Jones’s resume goes on. He played a little baseball in John Sayles’s Matewan, a dramatization of a deadly clash between striking workers and union busters in 1920s West Virginia. In the film’s glorious montage of strikers setting up a joyful, ramshackle community near the picket line, there’s a brief sequence of Jones hitting a homer during an impromptu ballgame.
In 1987, he originated the role of Troy, made famous on film by Denzel Washington, in August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Fences. The film gets some ink in my book Baseball: The Movie because, while it contains no actual baseball, the game looms like a dark cloud over its protagonist. Troy is an ex-Negro Leaguer who claims to have homored off of Satchel Paige but was too old to make it to the major leagues by the time baseball was integrated. Baseball was his salvation—he learned how to play in prison—but it also became his damnation. He wears his anger over having never made it to the majors like a suit of armor. In one of the film’s most haunting scenes, Troy forbids his son from playing football out of bitterness for the opportunities he never got.
I wrote at length in Baseball: The Movie how baseball films about race mostly fail to reckon with the complicated legacy of integration. In The Jackie Robinson Story and 42, integration in baseball is used as an advertisement for democracy, while ignoring how it decimated Black-owned businesses and the communities they centered. Bingo Long and the Traveling All-Stars, which also featured Jones as a Josh Gibson-like slugger, hinted at these complexities, but only Fences really reckoned with them, basing an entire character around the dark side of integration’s shiny surfaces.
Jones was a pioneer among Black actors. He wasn’t the first to break through; that was Poitier. But as Jones once put it: “[Poitier] had established the height. The rest of us were there to establish the breadth of what Black actors could do.” He first did that by leveraging his physical stature and incredible voice as a boxer in the Tony-winning The Great White Hope in 1970. He used this achievement to jump to Hollywood (while always returning to the theater), starring in 1972’s The Man, about a Black U.S. Senator who becomes POTUS in a “designated survivor” scenario, and 1974’s Claudine, a warm and insightful romantic drama about a garbage man who falls in love with a single mother. As a non-genre film entirely about Black characters, Claudine was a rare thing in the era of “blaxploitation.”
Maybe I’m biased, but his work in baseball films remains the most fascinating—and in some ways, agonizing—part of his legacy. Jones was a supporter of the Civil Rights movement, although he didn’t see himself as an activist. Rather than become enmeshed in racial politics, he believed that his work on stage and on the silver screen was his contribution. And that’s what makes the politics of his work in baseball films so unsettling.
His stellar performances in the three baseball films each comes with some racial discomfort. Some of this is a prerequisite; good luck making a racial film in Hollywood, especially in Jones’s time, that doesn’t pull its punches in an effort to appeal to White audiences. But the compromises made in Jones’s baseball films are hard to square with his persona, not because he was such a dedicated activist (he wasn’t), but because his authoritative presence conveyed a principled approach, a righteous stubbornness, and an unwillingness to compromise.
Consider his first film, Bingo Long, in which he plays a power hitter whose knowledge of Karl Marx and W.E.B. Du Bois come in handy when he and his teammates quit on their miserly Negro League team owner and form their own barnstorming team, with each player getting an equal share of the profits. Even in 2024, it’s eye-opening to see a strong Black man in a film speaking about the “means of production,” but the trade-off comes in the film’s cringe-inducing parade sequences. In order to gin up an audience for their games, the team learns to dance down the main streets of these small southern towns, enticing Black and White audiences alike with their antics. As written by a White screenwriter and filmed by a White director, this shucking and jiving comes off as Black minstrelism, which is about as morally complicated a form of entertainment as America has ever produced.
Complications also arise in Field of Dreams and The Sandlot, which both feature standout performances by Jones but also somehow share the distinction of having him voice dialogue that erases the existence of the Negro Leagues. In the climactic scene of The Sandlot, his Mr. Mertle, a neighborhood shut-in, explains to the children that he used to play with Babe Ruth and, in fact, would have broken all his records had he not lost his sight after being plunked in the head. As evidence, he shows a photo of himself with his arm around the Babe.
How strange that the filmmakers abdicated the chance to insert a little actual history into the film and have Mertle explain that he played with Ruth only on barnstorming teams in the offseason (which would have been possible) but never got to play in the majors because of his race. This would actually explain why Mertle stayed inside all day. Not because he was blind but because he was bitter. More like Troy from Fences. Instead, they pretend the Negro Leagues never existed and that baseball was always integrated. They even photoshopped Jones’s head onto Jimmie Foxx’s body in that picture. It’s shameless and inelegant, but not exactly surprising in a film committed to blind nostalgia.
The complications of Field of Dreams are a little more subtle. Jones plays an ex-Civil Rights activist and author named Terence Mann who is kidnapped by an ex-hippie/now-farmer who believes his dead father will come back if he can get Mann to attend a baseball game with him at Fenway Park. Don’t ask questions about the plot. The character is like a mix of J.D. Salinger and James Baldwin, but in the book the film is based on, it actually was J.D. Salinger. Writer-director Phil Alden Robinson transformed Mann into a Civil Rights author, claiming he wanted to give Salinger his privacy, but he didn’t think through the implications of making him a Civil Rights activist. His arc is unfulfilling at best. When we meet Mann, he has left the fight. Tired and disillusioned, he has dropped out of society and stopped writing. By the film’s end, he has started writing again, but his sense of racial justice remains absent. He’s going to write about his love for baseball. Everyone is supposed to be happy about that.
That’d be okay, except for the famous monologue he delivers at the end. It’s a great speech. If you haven’t watched it, do it now. It will stick to your guts. I can’t hear the word “baseball” without thinking of how Jones delivers it here, and I’ll never get over this bit: “They'll watch the game, and it'll be as if they'd dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick, they'll have to brush them away from their faces.” It’s incredible writing and perfect delivery, accentuated by James Horner’s swooning score.
But then we get to this line—“This field, this game, it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again.”—and all of a sudden, something doesn’t feel right, especially when you notice that no deceased Black players have been revived to play on Ray’s special field. Just like The Sandlot, the film doesn’t want to reckon with baseball’s original sin, despite giving itself a perfect opportunity to do so. It’s jarring to hear James Earl Jones gloss over baseball’s shameful history, especially since he made so many strides for Black actors in his career, and even more so because he once played a Negro Leaguer himself.
This is not an observation made with modern eyes. No less than Charles Krauthammer, a conservative commentator and lifelong baseball fan, noted in his Washington Post column that “baseball does not remind us of all that was good—it was, to take only one example, most cruelly segregated for over half a century—but it does remind us of all that is youth. At the heart of all baseball sentimentalism is this confusion of the young and the good.”
So how do we reconcile Jones’s invaluable contribution to baseball cinema with these failures to reckon honestly with the sport and its past? For starters, it is too much to hold Jones responsible for words written by others. Every performer of color—check that, every person of color—lives in a state of constant compromise. They are inundated with indignities and trade-offs and decisions about what to endure and what to speak out against that people like myself can barely understand. Why would the baseball movie be any different? For Jones, perhaps the value of having him speak these words, as opposed to a lesser actor, made it a contribution still worth making. After all, who could have given those words more dignity?
Or perhaps he simply didn’t feel it was his place to make waves. There are no records of him complaining about a screenplay’s portrayal of race, or butting heads with a director who wouldn’t allow him any creative agency. Jones felt that his contribution to the fight was his success as an actor and the depth of character he brought to his roles. There’s no doubt he accomplished that in Field of Dreams, The Sandlot, and Bingo Long. It’s impossible to imagine anyone else in those roles, not only because no other Black actors of his generation had his fame and stature, but because none had his talent. Even now, with so much progress having been built on the back of his success, very few actors do.
What a remarkable coda to your book. It also makes me very sad.
Beautiful writing, Mr. Gittell. Ties together a lot of loose ends for this baseball nerd and poseur cinephile!
I watched The Great White Hope on Monday night since I had only seen it once, not in entirety, on PBS once over 20 years ago. It was something one felt compelled to sit with the day after Miami Dolphins footballers Tyreek Hill and Calais Campbell took the brunt of racist police brutality.
Deep cut, but there is a reference to baseball's, um, fraught, history in The Great White Hope. Jones's Jack Jefferson sneaks out of the United States by taking another man's identity and crossing the border with a Black baseball team called, wait for it, "the Detroit Blue Jays."
Amused me ... the Tigers do have a big fanbase up in southwest Ontario, and at the time the Toronto Blue Jays were but a gleam in a few well-connected men's eyes. But the Tigers once had their Double-A Eastern League affiliate in London, Ont. ... also hometown of the former Blue Jays all-star Paul Quantrill (father of Cal Quantrill), and longtime Blue Jays executive Paul Beeston attended university there.