Major League Baseball returns to an Iowa cornfield tonight, with the Philadelphia Phillies facing the Minnesota Twins in the first Field of Dreams game in four years.

First pitch is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. ET in Dyersville, Iowa, with coverage beginning at 6:30 p.m. exclusively on Netflix. The game opens a three-game series between two teams fighting for Wild Card berths.

Aaron Nola is scheduled to start for Philadelphia against Minnesota right-hander Taj Bradley. More than 25 Baseball Hall of Famers are expected to participate in a pregame ceremony, including former Phillies Mike Schmidt, Steve Carlton and Scott Rolen and Twins greats Joe Mauer, Rod Carew and Paul Molitor.

The setting traces its fame to the 1989 movie “Field of Dreams,” starring Kevin Costner as Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella, who inexplicably feels compelled to turn part of his cornfield into a baseball diamond. The field eventually attracts long-dead players, including “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, and becomes the setting for a story about baseball, family, second chances, and Kinsella’s relationship with his late father.

The movie was adapted from Canadian author W.P. Kinsella’s 1982 novel “Shoeless Joe.” Kinsella expanded the book from an earlier short story, creating a mixture of fictional and real baseball figures, including Jackson and Archibald “Moonlight” Graham.

The famous movie field itself was built in 1988 on farmland near Dyersville after an Iowa teacher working with a local film bureau photographed Don Lansing’s farm and submitted it to Universal Studios. Part of a neighboring farm was also needed to accommodate the diamond.

Tonight’s Phillies-Twins game won’t actually be played on the movie diamond. MLB constructed an 8,000-seat, regulation-size ballpark about a quarter-mile away, connected to the original site by a pathway through the corn.

The first MLB Field of Dreams game came in 2021, when the Chicago White Sox beat the New York Yankees 9-8 on Tim Anderson’s walk-off home run into the corn.

Source: MLB