James Earl Jones was a virtual baseball historian

His booming voice was a national treasure. His presence was unmistakable.

James Earl Jones, who passed away at the age of 93 on Monday, lived a trailblazing life and became one of the greatest actors to hit the silver screen.

Beyond his legendary roles as Darth Vader in Star Wars, Jack Jefferson in The Great White Hope, or Mufasa in The Lion King, Jones is particularly known for helping to tell the story of America’s pastime on screen and stage.

In 1985, he played Troy Maxson in the August Wilson stage production Fences, a sanitation worker who used to play in the Negro Leagues but wasn’t young enough to play alongside the likes of Jackie Robinson.

His role as the reclusive author Terence Man in the 1989 classic Field of Dreams alongside Kevin Costner helped audiences appreciate the game of baseball. The story is based on W.P. Kinsella’s book Shoeless Joe, which told the story of Shoeless Joe Jackson and the 1919 Chicago White Sox who were banned from baseball for allegedly taking bribes from gamblers to throw the World Series.

Jones’s character helps Costner’s character Ray who constructed a baseball field behind his Iowa farm to realize that the ghosts of players' past got to fulfill their dreams through him. As Ray is faced with foreclosure, at the end of the film, Jones delivers one of the most iconic monologues in cinematic history.

“Ray, people will come, Ray/ They'll come to Iowa for reasons they can't even fathom. They'll turn up your driveway, not knowing for sure why they're doing it. They'll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past. The one constant throughout the years Ray is baseball. This field this game is a part of our past. It reminds us of all that once was good and it could be again.”

Little could anyone have foreseen that in real life the people would actually come to see their heroes as the Field of Dreams remains in Dyersville, Iowa playing host to the Field of Dreams game in 2021 and 2022.

Four years later, Jones took on the role of former Negro League player Mr. Mertle in the 1993 comedic masterpiece The Sandlot. He was a friend of Babe Ruth whose career was cut short due to being hit in the eye with a ball, leaving him blind. Mr. Mertle was the owner of the dog Hercules, referred to by the kids as “The Beast”.

His greatest line was “Baseball was life! And I was good at it, real good.”

That same year, he offered his voice to perform a spoken word version of the national anthem at the MLB All-Star Game in Baltimore.

Those roles helped make James Earl Jones a historian of the game, even though he was never trained to be such one. He was able to connect generations to the game in a way that almost nobody else could.

As a result, he will be remembered for far more than just a spectacular actor.