From My Collection: Kevin Costner

A few months ago, I posted about my Pacific Eight Men Out set.  Today we have this Field of Dreams card featuring Kevin Costner, which is my only other baseball movie card.

Kevin Costner.

Field of Dreams was released in April, 1989, when I was finishing up 8th grade.  I liked the movie when it came out, and soon after that I found the novel at my school's book fair, when I was in 9th grade.  It wasn't completely obvious at first that the novel and the film were the same story, since the book was called Shoeless Joe and it wasn't labeled as "the inspiration for the movie Field of Dreams" or anything.  I had my suspicions, though, both because Shoeless Joe Jackson was so integral to the Field of Dreams story, and because I remembered that the last name of the book's author, Kinsella, is the same last name as Kevin Costner's character in the movie.  Sure enough, it was the novel the film was based on.  Kinsella wrote another novel, the Iowa Baseball Confederacy, and which was mentioned on the book cover.  I thought at the time I'd like to check out this other book, but it was harder to get some books in the pre-internet era; you'd have to try to special order from a bookstore if they didn't already have it, and I wasn't that motivated to read it.

Kevin Costner card back.

As the back makes clear, this card promoted the idea of ordering Field of Dreams on Pay-Per-View on cable.  I guess ordering movies that way is something we could still do (we do have cable, since it's the only way I can get the Pirates games), but we stream via Amazon and Netflix instead.

As far as I can tell, this card isn't available on COMC.  There is one on eBay, with a Buy-it-Now price of $50 (but it's graded and slabbed, in near-perfect condition).  Perhaps the card is a bit rare?  I picked it up at a show a long, long time ago, and I don't think I paid much of anything for it.  I suspect it was thrown in on another purchase.