Who Were The Ghost Players Invited To Field Of Dreams?

The Black Prince of Baseball, The Babe, and The Ninth Man Out

Brian Deines
13 min readJul 11, 2020
Liotta as Jackson

One of the immortal lines from Field Of Dreams comes from Shoeless Joe Jackson. It is delivered by a suddenly, very Goodfellas-sounding, Ray Liotta:

“Ty Cobb wanted to play… But none of us could stand the sunnuvabitch when we were alive — so we told him to stick it!!”

Honestly, that line planted the seed of a question that’s gnawed at me forever.

Who the hell are the other players that DID get invited to play?

Joe claimed in the movie that so many guys wanted to come play at the field he had to “beat ‘em off with a stick.”

But a lucky few DID get invited. So today, let’s name those lucky ballplayers.

In order to do so, we’ll need to know our baseball history. But there are also clues about who the other players are in the movie, and we can use those clues to piece things together.

Come with me, we’re going for a walk in the corn.

Here’s What We Know

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Brian Deines

Pattern recognition is the task of A.I. (Artistic Intelligence). *This is the pattern recognition you’ve been looking for