Continuity mistake: During Terrance Mann's "people will come" speech, the sun moves around quite a bit. The scenes of the baseball players have long shadows. The scene with Ray has the sun overhead. When Karen falls it is late afternoon again. When Doc leaves it is early evening. From Shoeless Joe's angle it is late morning.
Continuity mistake: Near the beginning, as Ray has a vision of the baseball field, look at the difference of the angle of the sun. During the beginning of this sequence it's near noon. When Ray sees the field materialize the sun is obviously further west in the sky. Then, at the end of the sequence it is noon again.
Continuity mistake: The sun changes considerably when Doc is leaving to walk into the corn and the previous and following shots. When it cuts to Shoeless Joe, the sun is at his back. Back to Doc leaving, the sun is setting.
Continuity mistake: The clock at Fenway jumps two minutes in very little time from 10:30 to 10:32 in the space of two short scenes.
Continuity mistake: During the first practice, the sun changes from late afternoon initially to midday and back to late afternoon throughout the sequence.
Answer: Ray's mission was not confined to easing the pain of his deceased father. Ray himself had a lot of pain and regret over arguing with his father about baseball. Ray was also supernaturally guided to seek out the angry writer Terence Mann (who had always dreamed of playing professional baseball, but never did). When he travels to Boston looking for Terence Mann, Ray and Terence both hear the words "Go the distance," convincing them to travel to Chisholm, Minnesota, looking for an ex-ballplayer named "Moonlight" Graham (who never actually got to bat in the big league, either). As it turned out, Graham was long-since deceased, but Ray and Terence meet Graham's young ghost who returns with them to join the cornfield team. So, "Ease his pain," applied not only to Ray's father, but also to Ray himself and to writer Terence Mann and to Moonlight Graham. "Go the distance" was about traveling to bring both Terence Mann and Moonlight Graham into this magical place where all of their lost dreams could be fulfilled, as well.
Charles Austin Miller
I think "go the distance" has a metaphorical connotation of seeing your choices through in life, and finding the beauty in them. It also implies doing the work you need to do confront your past, resolve your past hurts, and find the strength to move forward.
Michael Albert
Well, in that sense, "Go the distance" is just a generic platitude. What we know is that each of the supernatural messages carried an urgent instructional connotation, calling for Ray to be proactive toward a specific goal: Bringing together these anguished souls (both dead and living) to live out their lost dreams and finally find peace.
Charles Austin Miller