Ray Kinsella lives with his wife, Annie, and daughter, Karin, on their Iowa corn farm. He is troubled by the relationship with his late father, John Kinsella, a devoted baseball fan.
Walking through his cornfield one evening, he hears a voice whispering, "If you build it, he will come", and sees a vision of a baseball diamond in his field and the great Shoeless Joe Jackson. Ray figures that if he builds a baseball field Shoeless Joe, whom his father idolized, can play baseball again. Annie is skeptical, but agrees to him plowing part of the corn to build a baseball field, despite the financial loss. As he builds, he tells Karin about the 1919 Black Sox Scandal. Months later a ball player appears, whom Ray recognizes as Shoeless Joe. Joe asks if others can play and returns with the seven additional Black Sox players.
Annie's brother, Mark, unable to see the players, warns that Ray is going bankrupt. Meanwhile the voice urges Ray to "ease his pain."
Ray and Annie attend a PTA meeting where some local citizens want to ban library books by radical author Terence Mann. Ray deduces the voice was referring to Mann, who had named one of his characters "John Kinsella" and who once professed a childhood dream of playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers. When Ray and Annie have identical dreams about Ray and Mann attending a game at Fenway Park, Ray seeks out Mann in Boston. While they attend a game, Ray hears the voice urging him to "go the distance", while the scoreboard shows statistics for a player named Archibald "Moonlight" Graham, who played one game for the New York Giants in 1905, but never had a turn at bat. After the game, Mann admits he heard the voice and saw the scoreboard.
They drive to Chisholm, Minnesota, and learn that Graham, who was a physician, died years earlier. During a late-night walk, Ray finds himself in 1972. He encounters the elderly Graham, who states he happily left baseball for a satisfying medical career. During the drive back to Iowa, Ray picks up a young hitchhiker who introduces himself as Archie Graham and says he wants to be a baseball player. Ray later tells Mann that his father had dreamed of being a baseball star. Ray says he stopped playing catch with his father at age 14 after reading Mann's books, and later caused a rift by claiming that Shoeless Joe was a criminal. Ray regrets never reconciling with his father before his death. Arriving at Ray's farm, they find that assorted classic all-stars have arrived to field a second team. A game is played, and Archie finally gets his turn at bat.
