I wanted to write about a father this month — Father’s Day month — for my movie column, and with all the baseball going on in our house lately, I thought a baseball movie would be appropriate, too. Besides, everything I know about baseball I learned from my dad.

But baseball + fatherhood + Hollywood = sappy, sentimental, movies. I could not get past the first twenty minutes of the first several baseball movies I tried. Then I watched Bull Durham (for the fifth or sixth time) to get the bad taste out of my mouth. Then I tried to write about Susan Sarandon’s Annie, who — when she’s not tutoring young ball players is tutoring writers — but the motherhood angle there is an impossible stretch and Kevin Costner’s Crash as a father figure really doesn’t work either.

But Annie the writing teacher and Kevin Costner triggered a memory for me, and I checked out Field of Dreams. Yes, this is another sentimental baseball movie but it does have a writer in it, played by James Earl Jones, and he proves instrumental in helping Kevin Costner’s baseball-loving character reconcile with the idea of being a dad. So this, ultimately, is what I came up with; check it out and let me know what you think!