Major League Baseball is back at the Field of Dreams, now in a permanent ballpark amid the corn

Major League Baseball is back at the Field of Dreams after a four-year hiatus while the community around tiny Dyersville, Iowa, worked on building a permanent ballpark. Major League Baseball ‘s growth goals have taken the game from a military base in North Carolina to a racetrack in Tennessee, with numerous stops for photo ops around the globe in between. But there’s nothing quite like turning the bright lights on an Iowa cornfield, where home runs disappear into a sea of green stalks and ghosts of old ballplayers just might still be whispering.

After playing in 2021 and 2022 at a temporary facility next to the “Field of Dreams” movie site, MLB has returned to stage another regular-season game in what is now a permanent ballpark. The Minnesota Twins host the Philadelphia Phillies on Thursday in the small town of Dyersville, where mystique and nostalgia will hop into the pennant races for a night and the pace of the big-city beat can quickly fade into the endless rolling hills. “It’s going to be really cool, having been able to see the movie when I was growing up,” Phillies All-Star Kyle Schwarber said.

“I’ve never been out there before, so I’m excited to see the corn.” Schwarber and his teammates sure won’t be disappointed. “It looks awesome this year,” said Keith Rahe, the executive director of Dyersville Events, which owns and operates the complex that now stretches beyond the farmhouse and ballfield that set the 1989 film and hosts a full calendar of youth tournaments as well as high school, college, minor league and senior-level competitions. Rahe’s nephews grew up there and have carefully cared for the corn for more than a decade.

Their five-person crew has worked particularly hard on those 67 acres this summer, fertilizing, transplanting and watering so their state’s signature crop looks as lush as can be for Netflix’s worldwide streaming audience. “It takes a lot of time and energy.” They built it, and MLB came back After the 2020 game originally scheduled between the St. Louis Cardinals and Chicago White Sox was pre-empted by the pandemic, the White Sox played the New York Yankees in 2021 with a Fox telecast that was the most-watched regular-season game in 23 years.

The Chicago Cubs then faced the Cincinnati Reds in 2022. Rave reviews of the broadcast presentation and on-site experience weren’t enough to guarantee the Field of Dreams an annual place on the MLB schedule, however, like the Little League World Series site in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Building a temporary ballpark from…