Legendary actor James Earl Jones died on Monday. He was 93 years old. CBS News has a full obituary on the esteemed Jones.
There was obviously much, much more to Jones’ life than his connection to baseball movies, but this is a sports shop and we write about baseball here. And he has an amazing connection to baseball movies. He played (spoiler alert, but c’mon, the movie is more than 30 years old) the owner of the dog — aka “the beast” — in The Sandlot. Much more famously, Jones was in “Field of Dreams” alongside Kevin Costner and delivered possibly the most famous baseball movie speech ever.
Here is the “People will come” speech:
That movie and speech have become so intertwined with Major League Baseball that there have been two Field of Dreams games and MLB has even had players recite parts of Jones’ speech:
While Jones may not have played the game himself, he had a great appreciation for it beyond his characters. In an interview with MLive in 2014, he said the following:
In all the baseball movies I’ve been in, I’ve realized one thing. It is impossible to hit a spherical baseball with a tubular stick unless you see the ball as you hit it. You can’t even hit it by accident unless you see the ball as you hit it. And I could never do that.
There’s more. Jones once read Casey at the Bat as only he could in that iconic voice (which will never not cause me to smile while thinking of him being the voice of Darth Vader):
Few actors, if any, ever had a connection to baseball without ever having actually played it. For that and so much more, we thank you and mourn your loss, Mr. Jones.
