If you build it, the White Sox and Yankees will come.
The Sox and Yanks will play a regular-season game next season at the “Field of Dreams” site on Aug. 13 in Dyersville, Iowa, where the award-winning baseball movie was filmed in 1988.
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, featuring a pathway through a cornfield taking fans to the park that will overlook the movie location, begins this month.
The Yanks-Sox matchup will be the first major-league game played at the popular tourist destination.
The ballpark’s design will pay homage to the original Comiskey Park, home of the Sox from 1910 to 1990, including the shape of the outfield and bullpens beyond the center-field fence. Windows on the right-field wall will show the cornfields beyond the ballpark.
The game will be played on a Thursday and televised nationally on Fox at 6 p.m. 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,” 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.”
Fans who attend the Sox’ game Friday against the Athletics 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.