A Perfect Night in My Home State

As a kid growing up in a small town in Iowa, there wasn’t a whole lot to do.

We were too small of a town to have a swimming pool and the closest one was nine miles away. That’s a bit too far for a ten-year-old to ride his bike, swim all day and then ride back. Believe me, I did try it once. I was completely worn out before I tried to ride back home. Luckily, one of my friends’ dad drove me home with my bike in the back of his truck.

The one thing we did have as kids was baseball, and I played it every year. Little League, Babe Ruth, and High School. Graduating the same year a certain baseball movie came out called Field of Dreams. The movie was filmed in Iowa and, in a nutshell, was about a farmer that hears a voice in the cornfield saying “If you build it, he will come.”

He ultimately tears up part of a cornfield to build a baseball diamond. The movie starred Kevin Costner and I recommend anyone who hasn’t seen it, watch it. It’s that good. And for a boy that grew up in Iowa, playing in fields surrounded by cornfields, it was so much more.

The farm and baseball field that was used for the movie is still there. People from all over go and visit it every year. They have a cornfield maze right next to the movie set. And now, there is another baseball field next to the maze. Only this field is actually built for a Major League Baseball game. Last Thursday night, the first MLB game was held there.

I wasn’t sure how it would go over. I mean, a big league game that really counts, played in the middle of a cornfield? Pardon the pun, but it could have been really corny!

All of my reservations were long gone as soon as the telecast started. When Kevin Costner emerged out of the corn in right-center field holding a baseball, I had immediate chills. He walked towards the infield, pausing a few times to look around. As soon as he got to the infield dirt, he stopped, looked at the crowd, then looked over his shoulder to the field he had come from. Out of that same cornfield, the Chicago White Sox and the New York Yankees players emerged. The crowd roared, and I had goosebumps the size of ostrich eggs. 

With one team lined up between first and second base, and the other between second and third, Costner gave a short speech. In that speech, he asked the Iowa crowd if this was heaven. A line in the movie in which Costner’s character is asked if this is heaven, his answer in the movie and the crowds answer back to him that night was, “No, it’s Iowa!”. Costner then said, “This field was built for the players.” He turned to the players and said, “Good luck”. 

After that, I didn’t care how the game went. It could have been the worst played game ever, and it still would have been a great night. But the game lived up to the opening. It was back and forth with lots of home runs. Including the last one that was a walk-off home run giving the White Sox a 9-8 win.

Every player that the Fox TV crew talked to said the night, the game played in a the middle of a cornfield, in front of a small crowd of 8,000, was something very special. Apparently, the entire country felt the same way. That was the most watched baseball game in the last 16 years.

The sights and sounds that were there on TV that night took me back to being a small boy playing baseball in Iowa. The sound of the crickets at night, how the lights faded off into the cornfield behind the fence, and seeing the ball fly off the bat and disappear into the corn. 

Is this heaven? No, it’s Iowa. And that night, it was perfect.