What's Special about Foul Territory in Baseball?

In most sports, such as tennis and basketball, you can't keep playing once you cross the out-of-bound lines, but in baseball you can. When a baseball player catches a ball in foul territory and makes an out, we see that the foul line is not the final out-of-bounds line, after all. It's an illusion. The foul line says, "This looks like the out-of-bounds line, but actually the game can keep going beyond this line." And since boundary lines in sports symbolically represent social authority--limits, rules, what you can and can't do--the foul line embodies American ambivalence about authority. The foul line represents a desire to both respect and throw out the rules at the same time, a desire to keep play going, even after it's supposed to be over--like moonlight.

This contrarian side of foul territory comes into relief in the movie "Field of Dreams." I'm talking about the scene where "Moonlight" Graham* has been playing on Ray's field, but stops to save Ray's daughter, who has fallen out of the stands and is choking. "Moonlight" steps right up to the edge of the playing area, the point where the dirt meets gravel, a line that runs from the small bleacher seats to what would normally be the grandstands for thousands of spectators. Up until now, the movie has depicted this grandstand line as something the ghost players can't cross. Shoeless Joe stops at this line when talking with Ray and his family, and throughout the movie we never see any other players cross it--until Moonlight Graham does.

As Moonlight crosses that line, he returns to being his older self, Doc Graham. This is a magical, surreal moment--the first time in the movie that we see "time travel" happen right before our eyes. This moment redefines reality. Ray's brother-in-law now sees the players and accepts that what seemed like a fantasy is actually real. Fittingly, this sudden shift in reality all happens in foul territory, an ambiguous zone that is in and out of play at that same time. "Moonlight" switches to Doc Graham in full daylight, but, like baseball itself, he still carries a bit of moonlight inside him.

That's baseball. Like a moon that you can see in the daytime, it keeps going even when it seems like it's over.

Flckr, Neal Simpson, "Daytime Moon in Pecan Treetops," CC BY-ND 2.0

*The name "Moonlight" Graham comes from real baseball history. Novelist Bill Kinsella, the author of the book that "Field of Dreams" was based on, focused on "Moonlight" Graham because he was taken by that nickname and story when he found it in the Baseball Encyclopedia. Yes, Archibald "Moonlight" Graham was a real player in American baseball. He played a half inning in the outfield for the Giants in 1905, was next up to bat in the 9th inning but never got to because the Giants won the game, then he went back to the minors, and later became a doctor in Chisholm, Minnesota. Nobody is sure why Archibald was called "Moonlight," but it seems likely that it was due to his extraordinary speed. Some experts at the time considered "Moonlight" to be the fastest runner in the game, with one newspaper explaining that he is "known as 'Moonlight' because he is supposed to be as fast as a flash" (see SABR and this excellent biography).

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