Stadium for 'Field of Dreams' game between Yankees and White Sox near completion
The stadium and corn field maze at the Field of Dreams Movie Site on July 22 in Dyersville, Iowa. Credit: MLB Photos via Getty Images/Quinn Harris
We can finally remove the ‘If’ from "If you build it, they will come." The Dyersville ballpark has been built. And the Yankees and White Sox will be there.
The ballpark that will host the White Sox and Yankees on August 12 is in the "final innings of construction," Major League Baseball announced Thursday in a press release. The 8,000 person stadium in Dyersville, Iowa, home of the 1989 film "Field of Dreams", will be the first Major League game played in Iowa and airs on Fox at 7 p.m.
And we now know what the ballpark will look like.
The walls will be 335 feet down the lines, 380 feet to the gaps and 400 feet to straightaway centerfield. The smaller dimensions may make the Yankees feel a little bit more at home: Yankee Stadium is 318 and 314 feet down the lines, 399 feet and 385 feet to the alleys and 408 feet to dead centerfield.
There will be no shortage of homages to "Field of Dreams" for fans of the film starring Kevin Costner, Ray Liotta and James Earl Jones to reminisce on.
The grounds will feature a corn maze beyond the right field fence and LED lighting to spotlight the 159 acres of corn surrounding the ballpark. The rightfield fence will have corn stalks as high as 10-12 feet in conjunction with a mesh seven-foot high green chain link fence. There will be a manual scoreboard in the corn just beyond the fence and a removable panel in the rightfield fence for players to appear from the cornfield before the game.
And no special event could be complete without custom uniforms. Both teams’ outfits will be inspired by ones the Yankees and White Sox wore in the early 1900s.
The Yankees’ "New York" letterforms will be thinner and wider than their jerseys commonly used today. There will have no white outlines and the letters will be in navy blue on a gray uniform.
The two teams were originally scheduled to play in 2020, but COVID-19 changed the MLB schedule to 60 games with limited travel last year. The Cardinals had taken the Yankees' place for the 2020 matchup, but it ultimatelywas postponed.
