If you build it, Kevin Costner will come.
According to Sports Media Watch, Netflix’s VP of sports, Gabe Spitzer, confirmed on a conference call Thursday that Costner will be part of the company’s broadcast of next week’s MLB game at the Field of Dreams site in Dyersville, Iowa. Spitzer wouldn’t specify what role Costner will play in the telecast or whether he’ll appear on-site.
Costner appeared as part of Fox Sports’ coverage of the inaugural Field of Dreams Game in 2021, emerging from the cornfield in the same spot where his character walked out in the film, and narrating the pregame ahead of that year’s matchup between the White Sox and Yankees.
Kevin Costner emerges from the corn. #FieldOfDreamsGame ⚾️🌽 pic.twitter.com/0kXhsc5Tux
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) August 12, 2021
After a lot of wandering around from Kevin Costner, players from the Yankees and White Sox walk out of the corn to join him on the field. #FieldOfDreamsGame ⚾️🌽 pic.twitter.com/sRxy6MajoI
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) August 12, 2021
Getting him involved was already the goal internally before Thursday’s confirmation, as Netflix host Elle Duncan told Front Office Sports back in June that she was pushing hard for Costner’s involvement.
It’ll be Netflix’s third crack at live MLB this year, and the first two have told two very different stories about how the streamer handles moments like this. Opening Night in March turned into an infomercial for Netflix’s own content library, with John Cena, a shirtless Bert Kreischer, and a WWE plug from Jey and Jimmy Uso crowding out the game itself. July’s Home Run Derby broadcast mostly corrected course, fixing the countdown-clock format and mostly cutting the self-promotional bloat, though a comedy bit from Will Ferrell, Luke Wilson, and Jimmy Tatro still landed with a thud during the intros.
Netflix has already demonstrated, in fits and starts, that it can resist the urge to overproduce a moment that speaks for itself. Whether the streamer extends that same touch to Costner, who won’t be a celebrity parachuted in for star power or slotted in to plug its own content library, will be answered next week, when the Phillies and Twins take the field at the same Iowa cornfield that made him a fixture of this event in the first place.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.