Baseball and an Iowa cornfield merged to make a big-screen hit in the “Field of Dreams.” He’s best-known for his role of Samwise Gamgee, one of the hobbits in the hugely popular “Lord of the Rings” movie series. Now actor Sean Astin will play Kent Stock, the coach of Norway, Iowa’s championship high school baseball team in 1991. That was the last year tiny Norway was independent as it merged in ’92 with Benton Community Schools. The film is called “The Final Season” and it’ll be shot starting in May in Norway, Cedar Rapids and Marshalltown. The budget’s reportedly between five and ten-million dollars.
