(Radio Iowa) – Tonight’s (Thursday’s) Field of Dreams game between the New York Yankees and Chicago White Sox in Dyersville will be the first official Major League Baseball game played in Iowa. The League considered using the field created for the 1989 movie, but the dimensions were limited, so a new ballpark was built next to it. Murray Cook is one of the lead designers of the ballpark, where eight-thousand fans who won tickets through a lottery will gather tonight (Thursday).

“Once they get on the property, they’ll come through the original movie site field, enter the corn and walk a path that takes them towards the right field fence area,” he says. “You really don’t see the field until you walk up in the seating structure.”

Construction of the ballpark started in August of 2019, but plans for a game at the site in 2020 were cancelled due to the pandemic. Cook says 159 acres of corn was planted around the field this spring and it’s as high as it was in the movie. “We noticed this year that we had a bit of a drought. We added some irrigation in the corn,” he says. “The whole knee high by the 4th of July — we were mid-chest by the 4th of July.”

First pitch is scheduled for 6:15 p.m.

(Reporting by Iowa Public Radio’s Rick Brewer)