NEWSLETTER
We’re just over 24 hours from the second installment of the Field of Dreams Game in Dyersville, Iowa, where the Cubs and Reds will meet in the MLB-scaled replica stadium across the cornfields from the original movie set used in the 1989 Hollywood adaption of W.P. Kinsella’s 1982 novel, Shoeless Joe.
There will also be action on the diamond in Dyersville today when the RBI (Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities) teams from Chicago and Cincinnati meet up in an exhibition game titled “A Dream Fulfilled,” which will be televised on FS1 at 4:00 PM (CT).
However, we learned today that MLB will not return to Dyersville in 2023.
White Sox legend and Hall of Famer Frank Thomas, who is part of the ownership group that owns and operates the Field of Dreams movie site, said that construction plans for the site would prevent MLB from hosting the third consecutive game in Dyersville next season.
“It’s a lot going on,” Thomas said. “They [MLB] don’t want to come back if the stadium’s not prepared.”
Thomas and the ownership group that bought the movie site, which sits 250 yards from the MLB venue built for last season’s White Sox-Yankees contest, are planning to build a youth baseball and softball complex. That project would start later this summer or during the fall.
According to Tommy Birch of the Des Moines Register, a return to Dyersville for MLB at a later date remains a possibility.
Personally, I think that the game should have either a) ended after last season’s game (which had as good of an ending as a Hollywood writer could dream up) or b) continuously feature the White Sox as one of the opponents, given that the field, movie, and novel are about the infamous 1919 White Sox who threw the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds that season, leading to eight members of the team being banned from baseball for life.
