"If you build it, they will come," whispered a mysterious voice to Kevin Costner's character Ray Kinsella in the 1989 baseball classic Field of Dreams, inspiring him to build a baseball diamond on the outskirts of his Iowa corn field.
In Phil Alden Robinson's perennial dad classic, "they" were the ghosts of deceased Chicago White Sox players, but next year the actual White Sox, along with the New York Yankees, will be playing a game on that very same field, The Associated Press reports.
Major League Baseball plans to build a temporary 8,000 seat stadium in Dyersville, Iowa, which will be ready in time for the game, scheduled for August 13, 2020. Dyersville is located near the border of Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin, nearly 400 miles from Guaranteed Rate Field in Chicago, and will be considered a White Sox home game. The temporary field will be modeled after Comiskey Park, the White Sox's home for nearly 80 years, including the era spanned in Field of Dreams.
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The game will mark the first MLB game ever played in Iowa. The MLB recently moved to hold regular-season games in states that currently lack baseball teams, like the Kansas City Royals' June face-off with the Detroit Tigers in Omaha, Nebraska, a first for the state.
Thursday morning, the MLB tweeted a video featuring Yankees outfielder Aaron Judge edited into one of the film's most iconic scenes. "Is this heaven?" he asks. "No," Costner responds. "It's Iowa!" Steven Orlofsky