If You Build It, He Will Come

Ray, people will come Ray. They’ll come to Iowa for reasons they can’t even fathom. They’ll turn up your driveway not knowing for sure why they’re doing it. They’ll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past. Of course, we won’t mind if you look around, you’ll say. It’s only $20 per person. They’ll pass over the money without even thinking about it: for it is money they have and peace they lack. And they’ll walk out to the bleachers; sit in shirtsleeves on a perfect afternoon. They’ll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they’ll watch the game and it’ll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they’ll have to brush them away from their faces. People will come Ray. The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh… people will come Ray. People will most definitely come.

Field of Dreams - Dyersville, Iowa

More than a year after it was put on the market, the famous Field of Dreams set location from the 1989 movie was sold to an investment group call Go The Distance LLC.  They won’t be moving into the house–rather they plan to develop the 193-acre lot into a baseball/softball training and tournament complex, including a dome for indoor training.

The famous cornfields are visited by an estimated 65,000 visitors per year–including, in 2009, by the proprietors of this site. The field itself wasn’t actually all that impressive–but the ambiance was definitely impressive, and I could easily see charities and companies wanting to hold tournaments there.

Youth leagues, though, I’m not sold on yet–and having a training facility in a town of 4,000 in rural Iowa seems like a stretch.

I hope they can make something of it–but at the same time, even more importantly, I hope they don’t ruin the feel of the actual field that made the site famous in the first place.