DYERSVILLE, Iowa (AP) — Major League Baseball came back to the Field of Dreams carrying a big piece of Cooperstown.
The pregame pomp before the Minnesota Twins played the Philadelphia Phillies — adjacent to the farmland where the 1989 fantasy was filmed — featured 26 members of the Hall of Fame emerging from the outfield corn just as the ghost players did in the movie.
With some of the loudest cheers saved for former Phillies third baseman Mike Schmidt
and former Twins catcher Joe Mauer, the capacity crowd of about 8,000 at the newly constructed ballpark in northeast Iowa soaked up the surreal atmosphere as the aged stars strolled into the infield for proper introductions.
Fireworks were launched from the cornfield during the national anthem, and Phillies slugger Kyle Schwarber followed with his own big bang — a stalk shot to right on Twins starter Taj Bradley's third pitch of the game.
After stealing the show at the inaugural 2021 event, which was played on the same footprint at a temporary setup that also hosted the 2022 game, Kevin Costner did not appear.
But the star of the film — as the restless farmer Ray Kinsella who reconnects with his late father by playing catch on his front-yard ballfield — narrated the pregame video that helped pump some old-guard nostalgia through the new-school broadcast on global streaming giant Netflix.
Both teams emerged from the corn together to take their places along the lines like on opening day, and Twins All-Star Byron Buxton — who came off the injured list in the afternoon to play — took the microphone to evoke a line from James Earl Jones, who played the author Terence Mann in the movie.
“The one constant through all the years has been baseball," Buxton said before Schwarber followed with a brief script on an idyllic late-summer night after heavy rain moved through the area earlier in the day.
Then came the legends, and living ones at that, unlike those wool-clad lads in the movie.
Schmidt and Steve Carlton wore Phillies uniforms along with Jim Kaat, who played for both teams. Mauer and Bert Blyleven donned Twins jerseys. The others — Andruw Jones, Harold Baines, Fred McGriff, Adrián Beltré, Andre Dawson, Larry Walker, Cal Ripken Jr., Iván Rodríguez, Jim Thome, Scott Rolen, Tony Pérez, Tony La Russa, Jeff Kent, Fergie Jenkins, Joe Torre, CC Sabathia, Billy Wagner, Rollie Fingers, Lee Smith and Trevor Hoffman — helped form a half-ring around the diamond to represent about one-third of the Cooperstown contingent that's still alive.
This was the largest such gathering at a ballpark, not including the annual ceremonies at the Hall of Fame in upstate New York, since the All-Star Game in 2008 that feted the final season at old Yankee Stadium.
Before the game, Buxton played catch with his 12-year-old son on the nearby movie site that remains open to the public for no cost on non-event days. Twins manager Derek Shelton did the same with his 78-year-old father, a former educator who coached him on his high school baseball team. Shelton later complained that his arm was in weaker shape.
“You don’t get old enough that an experience like that is not emotional to be able to do something with your father,” Shelton said.
Phillies manager Don Mattingly, whose son just happens to be the club's general manager, found himself harkening back to Indiana childhood ballgames with his brothers upon arrival on the team bus.
“This place reminds me of when I was a kid,” Mattingly said. "You’d go down a dirt road, and all of sudden you’d see a cornfield and then there’d be a field there."
Both teams wore throwback uniforms — the Twins in home threads from their first season in 1961 and the Phillies in road jerseys circa 1940 — in step with the hand-operated scoreboard in right field.
The permanent ballpark built for all kinds of events — including the opportunity to host MLB games on a recurring basis — also has plenty of amenities with the video board in left field, a state-of-the-art sound system and, of course, indoor plumbing.
The feel of the farm was just as strong as the buzz of the ballpark, with natural sponsor John Deere pledging $100,000 per home run hit to hunger-relief organization Feeding America.
The special environment didn't erase the circumstance of the stretch run of the regular season, though, with both the Twins and Phillies in the thick of their respective wild-card races.
“We’re not in Minnesota for three days," Phillies star Bryce Harper said, "but we’re still playing the Twins three times and we've still got to win some games."
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