Field of Dreams Movie Site, Near Dyersville, Iowa (If You Build It, They Will Come)

 

“If you build it, he will come.”

The Voice says that early and often in the 1989 baseball-oriented movie “Field of Dreams.” The protagonist, sports movie regular Kevin Costner, hears the Voice, and interprets it as a message to plow up his Iowa cornfield and build a baseball field.

Later, it becomes “If you build it, they will come,” and that really is the tagline of the tourist attraction that we visited yesterday.

A little about the movie:

In 1982, we heard a reference on the radio station that carried the Cardinals’ games to a new novel, called Shoeless Joe, that was described as “sort of about baseball, sort of about families, sort of a fantasy, and sort of the best book you’ll read this year.” The review was accurate. We bought the novel, read it, and fell in love with it.

When it was made into a movie a few years later, we had to see it, in part because the book had been so great and in part because Kerry had a crush on Kevin Costner. The movie was at least as good as the book. We have a poster from the movie on a wall at home. Besides Costner, the cast included Burt Lancaster, in his last movie role, playing “Moonlight” Graham, a character based on a real person whose major league career consisted of playing one inning in the field a century ago. Moonlight Graham is the kind of story I’m fascinated by, and Lancaster is memorable. Then there’s James Earl Jones, pontificating about baseball with that Darth Vader voice. Baseball nerds of the time (and only baseball nerds of the time) recognized that he was holding a copy of The Baseball Encyclopedia in his lap. No mention is made of the latter detail, but The Baseball Encyclopedia was the go-to place for baseball statistics until the web came along (incidentally, the best website is  here, and I usually have it up on my phone when watching a game).

The field after the movie:

It’s after the movie finished that the story of the field becomes interesting.

The producers rented out portions of two adjoining farms to lay out the field, making sure that they could set it up so that the angles were correct for sunset shots. They did not lay it out in the direction a major league park would be, but more about that later. After the movie came out, the family that owned the home plate portion left it as a part of a baseball field, and set up a souvenir stand, and people started coming. 

The family that owned the other part turned it back into a cornfield. But the souvenir stand did well enough that the second family turned their portion back into the rest of the field a year later, and set up their own souvenir stand.

And people kept coming.

Then another farmer put together a team of “Ghost Players” (if you’ve seen the movie, you’ll understand) who would play at the field once a month, and more people came.

Then there was a charity game involving a few Hall of Fame baseball players and some Hollywood celebrities, and 16,000 people showed up, and the game raised $100,000 for local charities.

One of the two original families bought out the other, and then, after a few years, sold the site to a private company called Go the Distance Baseball (a reference to another command from the disembodied Voice), and the facility was expanded. 

And people kept coming.

In one of my favorite twists to the story, a controlling interest in Go the Distance Baseball was then bought by Hall of Fame baseball player Frank Thomas.

In 1917, the Chicago White Sox won the World Series. They were favored to win it again in 1919, but lost. It turned out that several of their players, including “Shoeless Joe” Jackson, one of the best players in the game in the early 20^th Century, had accepted bribes from a gambler to throw the series. Jackson and seven others of the “Black Sox” were banned from the game for life, so he is not, and probably never will be, in the Hall of Fame, although players who weren’t nearly as good have received that honor. Shoeless Joe has become a somewhat mythical figure over the years. He inspired the title of the book, and he’s a central character in the movie, played by a young Ray Liotta. Meanwhile, the White Sox did not win another World Series for the rest of the century. They did finally win one in 2005, and one of their stars (though injured for much of the season and for the World Series) was Frank Thomas.

Who then bought the Field of Dreams site.

It has now become such a part of baseball culture that MLB held a regular-season game there in 2021. The White Sox, naturally, were the home team. They won, naturally, and it got the highest ratings of a regular season baseball game in 15 years. There hasn’t been a major league game there since, but the site is being expanded, and the game is expected to return.

If you build it, they will come.

Visiting the field

No one stumbles on the Field of Dreams by accident. We were traveling from St. Cloud, Minnesota (where we were staying with friends) to Macomb, Illinois (where my high school reunion is), and plugged the address into Google Maps, which said it only added about 45 minutes of driving to our trip. Most of the extra 45 minutes consisted of a series of turns from one country road onto another, until we crested a hill and saw a set of field lights rising out of the cornfields, very appropriate for the venue.

There were two or three dozen people there during the time we were, with a steady stream coming in and out of the parking lot. There were always people playing on the field. A few were wearing baseball uniforms, but most just had a cap from one major league team or another.

There’s the field (with cornfields behind it, but a fence to keep balls from rolling into the corn), a set of bleachers that matches those in the movie, and the house that the central character supposedly lived in. There’s also a dirt parking lot, a well-provisioned gift shop, a decently provisioned snack shop, and port-a-potties distributed around the site. Tours of the house are $20 per person. Although the online reviews are good, we didn’t do that, mostly because of the length of time that we were going to be driving, and the fact that it's the field that we came for. There’s no official charge to go to the field, although they suggest a donation of $20 (the number based on a line from the movie).

I’m happy to now be a part of those who have come.