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Major League Baseball’s long-awaited “Field of Dreams” game between the Chicago White Sox and New York Yankees (later changed to White Sox vs the St. Louis Cardinals under the league’s modified 2020 schedule) was scheduled for this past Thursday night, but the league called it off.
The game was going to take place on Dyersville farm in Iowa, a couple hundred feet away from where the movie was filmed in the 1980s, and it was going to be the first ever MLB game played in Iowa.
BrightView, a landscaping company headquartered in Blue Bell, Montgomery County, had a major role in setting up the ballpark.
“We had to clear the corn, do a lot of grating and subground work, put in a well and put in irrigation, and of course, we built the field,” explained president of BrightView’s sports turf division Murray Cook. “Subsequently, we had it all ready to go this year. It turned out to be a really nice ballpark.”
BrightView was responsible for the bullpens, fences and foul poles in addition to the field. Cook spent the better part of the last year in Iowa along with his crew working on all this.
“Walking onto the field,” he told KYW Newsradio, “in the middle of this cornfield with corn that’s 9 feet high above the fence and you’re circled by 170 acres of this corn, it just gave you goosebumps, every time you walked out there. It’s sad we’re not playing this year.”
The league hasn’t announced a new date yet for the “Field of Dreams” game, or even if there will be one.
In the meantime, Cook said his group still has a job to do.
“Our BrightView crew will continue to manage the field in the fall and maintain it to a level it needs to stay until a date is determined,” he said. “Do all the things that most folks do with sports fields and then just create the magic again by bringing it back up to the level and replanting all our corn around the field.”
Much of this version of the “Field of Dreams” is temporary and will be taken down, but Cook said everything BrightView has been responsible for will remain.
Around 8,000 baseball fans were expected to attend this game.
There’s no word if “Shoeless” Joe Jackson and some of the other ballplayers who famously emerged from the cornfields in the movie were planning to show up.