If you build it, the White Sox and Yankees will come.
The Sox and Yankees will play a regular season game at the “Field of Dreams” diamond next season in Dyersville, Iowa, where the award-winning baseball movie was filmed in 1988. The game is slated for Aug. 13.
Is this Heaven? pic.twitter.com/wUOVoAjFKn
— Chicago White Sox (@whitesox) August 8, 2019
Construction on a temporary 8,000 seat ballpark at the site will begin later this month.
The Sox-Yankees game will be the first major-league contest played at the popular tourist destination. The ballpark’s design will pay homage to the original Comiskey Park, home of the White Sox from 1910-1990, including the shape of the outfield and bullpens beyond the center-field fence. The game will be played on a Thursday and televised nationally on Fox at 6 p.m. (CT).
The game will be considered a Sox home date. The teams will be off Friday before resuming the series at Guaranteed Rate Field on Saturday.
“We look forward to celebrating the movie’s enduring message of how baseball brings people together at this special cornfield in Iowa,” baseball commissioner Rob Manfred said in an MLB statement.
Said Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf: “Field of Dreams is an iconic, generational baseball story built upon a deep love of the game that transcends even the most impossible of circumstances. The filmmakers tell a beautiful story that resonates to this day. It is an incredible honor for the White Sox franchise to be the home team against the Yankees in a special setting that will capture everyone’s imagination just like the movie does. It seems very fitting that 30 years after the film’s debut, MLB will build a ballfield in an Iowa cornfield where we will come to play a game so that baseball fans can create their own memories to be cherished for decades.”
Fans who attend the Sox game against the Athletics Friday at Guaranteed Field — with an odd 2:10 p.m. start — can get in the spirit of the event if they stay after the game for a showing of “Field of Dreams,” the film based on a novel about Shoeless Joe Jackson, one of eight Sox players banned from baseball in the 1919 Black Sox scandal.
