Kevin Costner on the Field of Dreams at the first MLB game in Iowa, August 2021.
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If you build it, they will come. That’s the famous line from classic baseball movie Field of Dreams, and on Thursday night fans weren’t the only ones who came. Kevin Costner himself, star of that film, emerged from a cornfield and introduced the ballgame with a moving speech.
Here’s the spine-tingling intro to the Field of Dreams game in which Costner, the New York Yankees and the Chicago White Sox take to the diamond:
Inspired by the 1989 movie, Major League Baseball built a temporary 8,000-seat ballpark at the farm in Dyersville, Iowa, where the movie was filmed. The New York Yankees and Chicago White Sox played a real professional MLB game Thursday.
So who won? Under the beautiful Iowa night sky, Tim Anderson capped the ninth inning by smashing one of the game’s several home runs into the cornfield, winning the game 9-8 for the White Sox.
The game was postponed from 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic, so the event and its opening ceremony had an extra poignancy as an opportunity for 7,832 people to gather and enjoy the simple pleasure of a ballgame.
The New York Yankees and Chicago White Sox emerge from the corn onto the Field of Dreams.
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Written and directed by Phil Alden Robinson and based on the novel Shoeless Joe by W. P. Kinsella, the Oscar-nominated Field of Dreams starred Costner as a farmer who hears voices in his head telling him to plow his cornfield into a baseball diamond. The cornfield-ballfield attracts the spirits of baseball players involved in World Series match-fixing in the infamous 1919 Black Sox scandal.
The MLB has promised a return to Iowa in 2022, although the current disruption caused by the delta variant is a stark warning that the pandemic is far from over.
