Baseball's most cinematic regular-season gimmick is back after a 3-year hiatus, and this time it's the Twins and Phillies getting the cornfield treatment. The event debuted in 2021 with the White Sox walking off the Yankees, the Cubs took the 2022 edition over the Reds, and then the whole thing went dark for site renovations. Thursday night in Dyersville, Iowa, it returned with two new teams making their Field of Dreams debut, streaming exclusively on Netflix.
Before first pitch even mattered, fans were already worried about the weather ruining the show. Iowa in August doesn't exactly promise perfect field conditions, and the anxiety showed up online well before the players emerged.
Is this Field of Dreams game happening or is the Corn Field a puddle
The concern didn't hold up. The corn parted right on schedule, and both teams walked the dirt path onto the diamond in uniforms built for the occasion — the Twins in white pinstripes modeled on their 1961 debut set, the Phillies in gray roads pulled from their 1939-41 look, patch and all. It's the whole point of this event: two clubs playing dress-up in a cornfield that used to be a movie set, with the ballpark itself sitting about 500 feet from the original Field of Dreams site.
The Twins and Phillies emerge single-file from the cornfield in their throwback uniforms and walk toward a wooden scoreboard reading zeros across the board before first pitch.
Then the game actually started, and Kyle Schwarber did what Kyle Schwarber does. The Phillies slugger connected early, and the scoreboard flipped to 1-0 Philadelphia in the top of the 1st before the corn had even finished settling behind the outfield wall.
Kyle Schwarber rounds the bases after a first-inning home run, putting the Phillies up 1-0 on the Twins.
It's a fitting way to kick off the night for a Phillies team that's currently jockeying for playoff position, same as the Twins on the other side of the diamond. The Field of Dreams Game has never been about playoff math, but this year it's got real stakes attached to it — two fringe contenders trading a regular-season game for a one-night trip back to 1939 and 1961, cornfield and all.