© Photo Gordini
Almost certainly the director Phil Alden Robinson, back in 1989, knew neither of the existence of the little Godo, across the Atlantic, nor of that of the diamond “Antonio Casadio”, in via Rivalona. It goes without saying, however, that in his masterpiece ‘Field of dreams’, the driving element is precisely a baseball field born from nothing, in the middle of the corn. In Dyersville, in the heart of more rural Iowa than you really can’t, where over the years it has become a sort of national monument and a location loved by all baseball fans and regularly brings together many families who, with bats and gloves, start playing where in 1989 Kevin Costner and Ray Liotta did.
Well, those who have seen that film and who have also seen the “Casadio”, can only notice the many similarities between the two diamonds, also and above all for what is immediately outside the borders and on the country roads which serve to reach both. The little, big Godo has now become a stronghold of Italian baseball, because here still reigns the passion, tradition and custom, among the local kids, to start approaching the sport by first trying the path of ‘beat and run’. Not for nothing, in the team that in this 2022 will once again play the top league, almost the entire roster is made up of players born in Godo and raised very young under the protective wing of the unforgettable Bill Holmberg. None of them were born in the early ’70s, when Antonio Casadio and Giorgio Brunelli decided to build a diamond adjacent to the football field where Godo played in the amateur leagues. Baseball, in the small town 10 kilometers from Ravenna, had thrown its seed for years now, but until then the local team had to emigrate to the provincial capital to play its games.
Everything changed, in fact, in those years, then the growth of the passion for baseball went hand in hand with that of the team that, led by Bill Holmberg and dragged by Russ Myers, won the historic promotion in Serie A2. Shortly thereafter, incredibly for a football-loving country like Italy, it was the soccer field that had to move out to allow the adjustment of the diamond. It was the signal that something was changing also in Godo, and the rest is almost recent history: the inauguration of the lighting system in 2005, the seat of the World Cup in 2009, with three games of the greatest planetary competition that were played right at the ‘Casadio’. Over time, the small grandstand, which at the time of the promotion to A2 was always sold out, has been enlarged and other improvements have been made to the dug-out and the scoreboard.
But for all fans, Godo’s diamond will forever remain the Italian ‘Field of dreams’. This is where dreams come true, because the prestigious and deserved, uninterrupted presence in Serie A of the rossoblù team for 30 years could hardly be defined in any other way.
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