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This Field, This Game: Goodbye to James Earl Jones, Baseball Icon

James Earl Jones. Iconic actor of stage and screen. Huge smile, huge voice. He was Darth Vader, of course, but he also carved out an unforgettable place in the world of baseball, appearing in two beloved baseball-themed movies—Field of Dreams and The Sandlot—and reciting a spoken-word version of the national anthem at the 1993 All Star Game, while being backed by the Morgan State University choir.

His Terrence Mann wasn’t the main character in Field of Dreams. That would be Kevin Costner, whose character, Ray Kinsella, explains in a voiceover at the beginning of the movie that he attended college at the University of California, Berkeley to get far, far away from where he grew up.