The Chicago White Sox and New York Yankees will play a game at the “Field of Dreams” farm in Iowa in 2020, The Associated Press reports.
In a famous line from the movie, a character asks, “Is this Heaven?” To which another responds, “No, it’s Iowa!”
Fittingly, the movie was filmed in Iowa: specifically, at the neighboring farms of the Lansing and Ameskamp families outside of Dyersville, Iowa. After a few years, the ownership of the fields was consolidated, as USA Today reported in 2011, and today the two sites are one and owned by a corporation that operates the site as a tourist attraction. It also hosts community events from time to time.
In 2020, it will host a real game between real Major League Baseball teams. Specifically, it will host a Thursday afternoon game between the White Sox and the Yankees, with the Sox taking on the role of the home team, on August 13. On Friday, the teams will have the day off as they travel to Chicago, about 200 miles away, and then will resume their series back in the Windy City.
It will be the first Major League Baseball game ever played in Iowa.
A temporary, 8,000-seat stadium will be erected to accommodate the fans, and a temporary right field wall will keep the players from running off into the corn as they chase down long fly balls. There will be windows, however, so the fans’ iconic view of the cornstalks in the background won’t be disturbed.
MLB sets 2020 game at #FieldofDreams location https://t.co/lXnmZpg0MP pic.twitter.com/HlGiQBkbeg
— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) August 8, 2019
It’s fitting that the White Sox should be the home team for that game. The 1989 movie involves the main character, Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner), navigating his troubled relationship with his father and his own activist past by interacting with the ghosts of Chicago White Sox players: namely, Shoeless Joe Jackson and his teammates who, in 1919, fixed the World Series.
Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred said in a statement that the Iowa site has a special resonance with fans of the game.
“As a sport that is proud of its history linking generations, Major League Baseball is excited to bring a regular-season game to the site of Field of Dreams . We look forward to celebrating the movie’s enduring message of how baseball brings people together at this special cornfield in Iowa.”
Bringing a game to an Iowa farm is part of a trend in recent years of MLB bringing one-off games to sites not normally associated with the league. For example, earlier this season the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox played two games in London, England.