Field of Dreams game still planned, but will baseball fans come?
DYERSVILLE, Iowa — Spurred by a voice telling him, “If you build it, he will come,” the Iowa farmer played by Kevin Costner dutifully carved a baseball field out of his cornfield and then watched as Shoeless Joe Jackson and his White Sox teammates strode out of the stalks and onto the Field of Dreams.
Major League Baseball is building another field a few hundred yards down a corn-lined path from the famous movie site in eastern Iowa but unlike the original, it’s unclear whether teams will show up for a game this time as the league and its players struggle to agree on plans for a coronavirus-shortened season.
The owners of the Field of Dreams and residents of the farming community of Dyersville desperately hope so, saying that after months of isolation and loss caused by the virus, not only their area but the entire country could use a boost like seeing the scheduled Aug. 13 game between the Yankees and White Sox go ahead as planned.
“For both baseball and the general public, what a match made in heaven that would be for this year,” said Keith Rahe, now a tourism official but who previously farmed a half mile from the Field of Dreams and vividly remembers the scorching summer of 1988 when the movie was filmed. “Just to have something to feel good about — how do you measure that?”
Major League Baseball announced plans for the game nearly a year ago, making it the latest regular-season game held at irregular locations, from Fort Bragg, N.C., for a July 4th celebration, to annual games at Bowman Stadium, a minor league ballpark in Williamsport, Pa., the town where the Little League World Series is played. As Commissioner Rob Manfred said in announcing the game, “We look forward to celebrating the movie’s enduring message of how baseball brings people together at this special cornfield in Iowa.”
But more than two months after the league’s scheduled opener in March, no games have been played and no one knows for sure if there will be a season, much less a contest in a cornfield.
That has people like Dyersville Mayor Jim Heavens a little down, not only because of the missed economic boost for his city of 4,000 but because of the chance the game offered to show the world his town. Heavens notes the bustling community, bracketed by a grain elevator and the twin brick towers of the Basilica of St. Francis Xavier, is overwhelmingly Catholic, proudly frugal and always ready for some baseball — though in describing Dyersville he quips that after 25 years there, “I’m fairly new in town.”
Heavens said a game at the Field of Dreams, officially within city limits but a few miles from downtown through farmland and past silverdomed silos, is just what baseball needs.
“Small town Iowa, baseball is still a big thing here,” he said. “It’s kind of like we’re right in the middle of Americana, in the middle of an Iowa cornfield and what better place to play baseball?”