Ghost Player Legacy

The Ghost Players baseball team from the Field of Dreams became ambassadors for Iowa as they traveled the world. Local businessman and fellow Ghost Player, Joe Scherrman, and the video production company, DreamCatcher Productions (DCP) teamed up with the Community Foundation of Greater Dubuque (CFGD), have worked diligently to keep the lore of the Ghost Players and the attraction of the Field of Dreams movie site alive for scores of their fans--local, national and international.

Ghost Player LLC fulfills its mission and serves its targeted population by preserving the endangered video evidence of the Field of Dreams' Ghost Players; then organizing, logging, protecting (on external storage drives) and making accessible. This process provides long-term enduring access to digital files and meta data. The targeted populations include, scholars, historians, sports and movie enthusiasts of all ages. After preservation measures have been taken, further actions will be taken to interpret the materials and to make them accessible to the public via the Internet Archive.

Strategical priorities include protecting the endangered historical video footage by, (1) collecting the significant footage from different devices, (2) editing and digitizing all relevant material in order to preserve and organize the video, (3) locating secure locations for the collection, and (4) uploading to the Internet Archive for worldwide access.

Notable achievements of Ghost Player LLC include, (1) the preservation and access of earlier video evidence of the Ghosts, (2) production of the award-winning documentary "Ghost Player: Relive the Magic," (3) the companion book, "Travels With Ghosts and Other Tales," and (4) created an extensive researchable library hosted by the Internet Archive.

The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, is a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Ghost Player currently has over 6,000 video clips from 1988 until 2008. They are in a searchable format on the Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/ghostplayers

Testimonials

"Just like the ball players in the movie come back from the dead to play the game they love, each of us has a dream we have given up on. And when we do, whether we know it or not, we die a little bit. But this field has brought us all back to life".
John Schwendinger

"Here are a bunch of friends in a small town doing something they love, and they made a lot of other people's lives better. The emotion in it is so genuine. The commonality that exists with baseball at the same time represents something uniquely American,"
Kevin Quinn, Sport and Society in America Sports Conference

"One part Vaudeville, two parts baseball."
Beverly Beyette, LA Times