After 37 Years, This Kevin Costner Movie Quote Is Still One of Hollywood’s Most Frequently Misquoted Lines

Kevin Costner has been in some incredible movies over his career, and his best releases are usually either sports movies or Westerns. This really started coming to life when Costner broke out in the late 1980s with the crime thriller The Untouchables in 1987 and the double-shot of baseball movies, with Bull Durham in 1988 and Field of Dreams in 1989. Those three releases helped make Costner a bankable star, and the latter of them remains one of the most beloved baseball movies for fans to this day. However, while so many fans love the movie and quote it to this day, most people get the biggest quote in Field of Dreams wrong.

The quote that people often get wrong is by an unidentified and unseen actor in Field of Dreams. The quote is, “If you build it, he will come.”

Why Fans Get the Field of Dreams Quote Wrong All the Time

When many people quote Field of Dreams, they completely mess up this famous quote. The misspoken quote has now become more popular than the correct one from the movie. In these cases, people say, “If you build it, they will come.” This misspoken quote makes sense, especially considering the theme of building a giant ballpark in the cornfields and people coming to see the legends who have arrived to play there. The problem is that bringing masses of people there wasn’t the purpose of the endeavor for Costner’s Ray Kinsella.

Ray is a man who lives on a cornfield with his wife Annie (Amy Madigan) and daughter Karin (Gaby Hoffmann). He had a broken relationship with his deceased father, John (Dwier Brown), and he worries he will grow old without fulfilling any of his dreams. One day, when Ray is walking through the cornfield, a voice whispers out to him, “If you build it, he will come.” That is when Ray has a vision of a baseball diamond in the cornfield with the ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta) standing in it.

“If you build it, he will come” refers to a couple of things, but the biggest is Ray coming to terms with his troubled relationship with his dad before he died. The entire theme of “If you build it, he will come” is that Ray believes that if he builds this monument, the ghost of his father, a lifelong devoted baseball fan, will return, and he can finally reconcile all his conflicting emotions. However, on top of his dad, this is also a love letter to baseball, and when the ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson walks out of the cornfield at the end, it proves to everyone that Ray wasn’t crazy. When Shoeless Joe nods to Ray’s dad walking out of the cornfield, the movie experiences its biggest payoff.

Why the Wrong Field of Dreams Quote Has Become So Prevalent

“If you build it, they will come” is what many people today say when they think they are quoting Field of Dreams. There is a good reason so many people think this is the right quote. The movie ends with a long line of cars showing up to see the baseball game that all the legendary players’ ghosts have arrived at. This will save Ray’s farm and prove that his dreams of building this iconic memorial to baseball were a good idea after all. “They” are all the fans from all over the country who showed up, and that is a big reason people misinterpret the quote’s meaning.

There is also the endless promotion of the movie to this day. Major League Baseball held a game at the 8,000-seat Field of Dreams Movie Site ballpark in Dyersville, Iowa, in 2021, 2022, and 2026. This game brings people from all over the country to see two MLB teams playing in the stadium with the cornfield in the distance. It is a beautiful homage to the Kevin Costner movie, and a way to ensure that this baseball movie will remain at the top of most baseball fans’ must-see lists. It is also a good reason to think the quote is “If you build it, they will come,” because MLB proved that with this game.

While Ray saving his farm is important, the movie is more about his broken relationship with his dad and the ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson. Ray has to build the stadium to give Shoeless Joe a chance to come out to play baseball again, a significant moment thanks to the player’s infamous past. He was banned from baseball after the Black Sox betting scandal of 1919, even though Shoeless Joe didn’t appear to be trying to throw the World Series like his teammates (leading both teams with a .375 batting average and setting a World Series record with 12 hits), despite accepting the bribe money. Ray built the stadium, and Shoeless Joe came. Then Ray’s dad showed up, proving the quote, “If you build it, he will come,” was the true meaning of the movie.

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