The boyhood fun of baseball will return at 'Field of Dreams' game for Joe Buck

Joe Buck does not take for granted calling World Series and Super Bowls. But as many of them as he has done for Fox, others have done those jobs, too, including his late father, Jack.

On Thursday night, he will do something that no announcer has done before: Call a regular-season Major League Baseball game in a makeshift stadium in Iowa near the site of a fictional movie, 1989’s "Field of Dreams."

If that is not enough to stir the soul of a jaded sports media veteran, nothing will.

"Those of us who maybe have lost the romantic feel of the game that we grew up with — because you get inside the ropes and behind the curtain and you start looking around and maybe you don’t like everything you see and the boyhood fun it of leaves — I think that’s going to return on Thursday night," Buck told Newsday.

"I know it will for me. To have the Yankees playing in a cornfield is kind of a crazy notion. But it’s going to happen."

That it will, with a game against the White Sox in tribute to "Field of Dreams," an event that first was scheduled for 2020 but was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

For Buck, the assignment resonates on multiple levels — as a sportscaster, as a Midwesterner and as someone whose father was 44 when he was born, denying him the chance to know Jack when he was a young man himself.

That is one reason the final scene — spoiler alert! — in which Kevin Costner’s character plays catch with his father’s character as a young man, resonates so strongly.

Buck first saw the film when he was a self-described "sarcastic, jerky 20-year-old" but still found himself crying at the closing scene.

"Now, it doesn’t matter where I hit the movie, if my thumb on the remote control finds it somewhere randomly, I can watch five minutes of the movie or the whole thing, and if I see the end of it, I’m a mess," he said.

Costner spoke to Buck on the phone to help prep him, and Fox is all-in to make the telecast look and feel different from a normal regular-season game.

"This game is not only going to draw baseball fans, but fans of the movie and people who are just intrigued to see how they put a baseball field in the middle of a cornfield," Fox director Matt Gangl told the Chicago Sun-Times.

But at the same time, this game matters, especially for the Yankees, who are battling for wild-card position.

"You have to respect that, and that’s the main thrust of the night — to cover a game that counts," Buck said. "But there are so many other pieces to it, and I feel like these players are going to be like kids again."

One of the beauties of the long season is that there is time for detours such as this. Buck recalled some of his best baseball broadcasting memories being the guests his father would bring on during Cardinals rain delays.

"Having done 162 games a year in my life [with the Cardinals], a lot of those games run together in May, June, July and August," he said.

"Now we have something to look forward to in these long summers, and I think this trumps it all. I can’t believe it’s actually happening, and I can sit here and call it."

Buck hopes the event will introduce the movie to a new generation, including his daughters, who are 25 and 22 and have not yet seen it.

The game in Iowa is not Buck’s only once-in-a-lifetime broadcasting experience this week. In May, he taped five episodes as a guest host on "Jeopardy!" and they are being shown this week.

"I wanted to be myself and have fun with it, because that’s the only way to do it, in my book," he said. "I’m not trying to be Alex Trebek Jr."

Buck said he was the last of the guest hosts to record shows after the death in November of Trebek, the program’s iconic host.

"By that point, I think everybody was worn out, and my day was standing between the crew and their vacation," Buck said. "To say they were rooting for me to be good at it is an understatement.

"I got a standing ovation when I left from the crew, which was the best pat on the back I could get. Like, ‘Thank God we’re done, and get these people out of here.' "

Now it is on to Iowa.

"I think this is really cool, and I applaud Major League Baseball for doing something like this," Buck said. "We’ve all been through a lot over the last calendar year, and I feel like it’s going to be a special kind of romantic night in a cornfield — if anybody’s ever had one of those."

By Neil Best

neil.best@newsday.com@sportswatch

Neil Best first worked at Newsday in 1982, returned in 1985 after a detour to Alaska and has been here since, specializing in high schools, college basketball, the NFL and most recently sports media and business.