This is most of what we have to draw on as to the question of whether it’s profitable. That and the shot of cars lined up for miles.
So would it make money? Some thoughts:
[ul]
[li]He didn’t put in an awful lot of bleachers, so seating capacity can’t be more than about 200 at first, unless he expands?[/li][li]Doesn’t have to pay the players.[/li][li]Have to assume he can’t sell a TV contract. I guess you could argue a radio guy calling the games wouldn’t ruin the mystique.[/li][li]Likely also have to assume his options for merchandising is near nil. What would the players think if he set up a stand along the side charging $10 for Field of Dreams beer can koozies?[/li][li]Presumably he could run his own concession, but it’d have to be fairly limited.[/li][li]The operating costs of not planting that corn will always be a counterbalance. Esp. as corn shot up soon after the movie came out (ethanol and all that).[/li][/ul]
Some thoughts on things Ray probably wasn’t thinking about when he first cut down his corn:
For one, Ray would most definitely run afoul of county land use regulations. Presume his land was zoned for agriculture, not a business/attraction.
For generating all that traffic, the county/state would want to nail him somehow (some sort of special assessment on his property tax, probably) to pay for improvements to the roads leading to the farm.
There is no need to speculate. The family that owns the farm kept part of it as a baseball field since the movie came out. 65,000 visitors a year. It was up for sale in 2010 for 5.4 million. Not sure what happened after that.
I just thought it kinda creepy that some kind of mind-control wave was apparently going to go out and compel people to drive up, hand over a twenty and… what, exactly? Watch a guy play catch with his dead father?
If a baseball diamond can fit on a football field, he only cut down an acre of corn. That’s about 150 bushels of corn. In 1989, the average price of corn per bushel was $2.45. That doesn’t include production costs. So by mowing under an acre of corn he lost $300. All he’d need is 15 suckers at 20 to recoup his loss, the rest is gravy. Gaby Hoffman can sell lemonade at .50 cup and put herself through college.
BTW, the average price per bushel last year was about $6/bushel, still not a great deal of money.
Did you see the movie? There were quite a number of other famous baseball players. I’d pay $20 to see Smokey Joe Wood and Shoeless Joe Jackson come to life and play baseball - wouldn’t you?
The ghosts kept coming back? I always assumed they had a few games, he reconciled with his father, and then they all went back to the cornfield. Then people came wanting to see the crazy dude who’d built a baseball diamond in his cornfield.
But the players only became visible to people outside the main Kinsella family and Terrence Mann when Moonlight Graham stepped over the line to save the girl’s life. At that point, the Timothy Busfield character could see the players and told Ray not to sell the farm. At that point, I guess word spread fast about the diamond because it was that night that the crowds started to arrive after the sunset catch with Ray’s dad.
Originally, left field & 3rd base had belonged to a different farm than the rest of the field. The left field farmer had planned to replant, but changed his tune when he saw his neighbor making money off the rest of the field. He even went so far as to put up his own souvenir stand. This, understandably, caused some friction between the two farmers. Eventually, the issue was resolved when the left field farmer sold that bit of land to his neighbor, so that the entire field had a single owner.
At least that’s the story I’ve been told by my relatives in Dyersville. My parents are from the area, and most of my relatives have lived nearby.
This is what I never understood. It’s not like he plowed under his entire crop. Losing an acre somehow propelled him to bankruptcy and foreclosure? I enjoyed the movie, especially the scenes with Burt Lancaster, but it takes some suspension of disbelief to accept the basic premise. Yeah, I know… it’s fantasy.
He also installed fancy grass, bought balls, chalk, bats, etc, installed bleachers, and had those big halogen lights put in. Most likely, he put in several thousands of dollars of work into the field with absolutely no hope of a return.
Banks tend to get nervous when farmers start doing stuff like that, and the late '80s were not a great time to be a farmer in Iowa. There was a really, really bad drought in 1988 which severely damaged corn production, and then hog prices took a big dive sometime around there. Though that might have been the early '90s? I can’t quite remember – I was pretty little when we stopped raising pigs, but I remember the drought really well.
Not that the movie really touches on any of that, but if we’re talking real life, then your loan officer is going to be mightily displeased when you start destroying things which earn you money. You stop being worth the risk, especially if you start spending more money than you’re taking in on stuff like baseball diamonds.
