ESPN: W. P. Kinsella: Where It Began: “Shoeless Joe”

Reflections on the 25th Anniversary of Field of Dreams:

I replied that to me, writing a novel was akin to a baker baking a loaf of bread: So long as the buyers pay for the bread, they were free to do with it as they chose. If they made dainty sandwiches, fine. If they fed it to their gerbils, fine. I realized that most books optioned for movies became gerbil food. I’ve never understood authors who are proprietary with their work, fighting any changes of plot or character. All I care about is being properly paid.

“Field of Dreams” was a stunning exception. I wept when I read the finished screenplay. “This is my own work doing this to me,” I said. “How can this happen?”
. . .
I loved the movie. Novels and movies are entirely different art forms. I don’t see how Phil Robinson could have done a better job of successfully transferring one to the other.

How have things changed in the past 25 years since the release of the movie? Fathers and sons still bond playing catch, still attend baseball games together, still share warm and luminous memories of games and players gone but not forgotten.

I have received letters from every part of the world, mainly from younger men, about how the ending of the movie affected them. Moved by those final scenes, men traveled, often thousands of miles, to take their fathers to baseball games, or just to have a catch in the backyard.

Much more in TFA.

How Pitch Location Affects Caught Stealing Percentage

Sometimes sabermetrics just confirms what we already know.

The Overrated Value of Catcher’s Throwing Arms | FanGraphs Baseball

Interesting stuff.

In short, when it comes to the timing variables within the running game and the reputation of the battery mates, our study refutes the conventional wisdom that the catcher’s arm is primarily responsible for caught stealing. While there are other lurking variables at play — like pitch location and handedness of the batter — surface value says that a pitcher’s quickness to the plate is a whole lot more influential than a catcher’s arm in the battery dynamic. Said lurking variables will be topics for future installments and will help us dive deeper into assigning credit to one of the two battery mates. When it comes down to the timing variable, the need for speed is on the pitcher’s side of the rubber.