The first major baseball game at the location where “Field of Dreams” crystallized.

More than three decades after “The Field of Dreams” took its place in the collective imagination, and one year later due to the pandemic, one of Hollywood’s most famous cornfields will finally be the stage for a major baseball game Thursday night.

The Yankees-White Sox match will be played next to the site that was used in the 1989 feature film. The original site remains a tourist attraction.

“Is this heaven?” asked John Kinsella’s ghost in the movie that inspired the match.

“No, it’s Iowa,” replied his farmer father, played by Kevin Costner, before throwing the ball under the reflectors, in the most moving scene in the film.

On Thursday, “Schoills” Joe Jackson and other players from another era will be replaced by Jose Abreu, Aaron Judge and Company.

Proud Iowa, which embodies the essence of the Midwest, usually makes headlines for four years, in the run-up to the election.

A major league match will be played there for the first time.

It will be in a temporary stadium with about 8,000 seats in Dyersville, home to just under 4,400 people.

“I’m walking around the state and when people hear you’re from Dyersville, they all know the game,” said Mayor Jim Heavens. It is a source of real pride to receive Major League Baseball. “

The film stars Costner, James Earl Jones, Ray Liotta, Amy Madigan, and more.

The original production site was soon announced to be too small for the game. At the new site, where 4,000 tons of sand and 2,000 tons of gravel were deposited, we also wanted the enclosures to resemble those in old Comiskey Park, the former home of the White Sox.

For fun, we added a maze in the corn, just outside the right field.

Summers are especially hot and dry in this part of the country. So we installed an irrigation system so the harvest looks good on TV (the match will be broadcast on RDS in particular). You want the corn to be 10 or 12 feet high.

“We wanted to make sure we didn’t end up with brown corn,” said Chris Marinac, who heads Major Baseball Operations and Strategies.

Both clubs will have uniforms reminiscent of 1919, when Jackson, who was playing for the White Sox, was among eight players banned for World Championship fraud.

The story of this team is one of many topics covered in “Field of Dreams,” a film that goes far beyond sports.