Thursday, August 13, 2026 — MLB at Field of Dreams, Dyersville, Iowa.
There are only so many ways a baseball game can write its own ending. Kyle Schwarber found one on Thursday night, twice, by depositing baseballs into a cornfield in front of 7,163 people and a Netflix audience.
The Phillies beat the Twins 7-1 in the third MLB at Field of Dreams game, and the first in four years.
Schwarber Owns the Night
Schwarber’s two home runs cleared the fence in right and disappeared into the corn behind it, pushing his major league-leading total to 37. If you were designing the game in a lab, you would not have improved on that.
He’d been openly excited about the trip. Speaking before the game, Schwarber — like many of his teammates, in Iowa for the first time — said he wanted to see the corn and the field where they actually shot the movie.
Philadelphia finished with 12 hits and three home runs, piling up 23 total bases against Minnesota’s eight hits and one homer. Aaron Nola started for the Phillies, who came in needing exactly this kind of night.
The Standings Context Nobody Mentioned on the Broadcast
Lost in the nostalgia: this game mattered.
The Phillies arrived at 65-58, having just fallen out of a playoff position on Wednesday when San Diego swept Milwaukee and claimed the National League’s second Wild Card spot. Arizona holds the sixth seed. Philadelphia, which bought Luis Arraez and Brooks Raley at the deadline, is now on the outside looking in with roughly 40 games to play.
Minnesota fell to 60-63, effectively out of the AL race but technically the home team here — a quirk of the event that means the Twins hosted a game 250 miles from Target Field.
The Setting
This edition came with a significant change. The game was played in a new ballpark that seats up to 8,000 — the first big league game in that facility, replacing the temporary structure used in 2021 and 2022.
The rest of the pageantry stayed intact. Twenty-six Hall of Famers were honored before first pitch. Players from both clubs walked from the original movie diamond through the cornfield to the ballpark, replicating the entrance made by Shoeless Joe Jackson and the other ghosts in the 1989 film.
Intermittent rain and thunderstorms rolled through Dyersville during the day, but first pitch went off on time at 6:30 p.m. CT. In the hours beforehand, families and players wandered the site, quite a few of them playing catch.
A Bit of History
The event began in 2021 with the White Sox beating the Yankees 9-8 on a walk-off — still the standard by which every subsequent version is measured. The Cubs beat the Reds 4-2 in 2022. Then nothing for three years, until MLB announced this matchup in August 2025.
There’s a nice piece of symmetry in the pairing, too. Portions of the original film take place in Minnesota, where Kevin Costner’s character travels to Chisholm.
What It Says About Where Baseball Is
Two things stand out about this year’s edition.
First, the streaming arrangement. The game aired exclusively on Netflix, continuing the sport’s steady migration of marquee events onto platforms rather than traditional networks. A cornfield in Iowa is an odd place to observe a media-rights shift, but that’s where it happened.
Second, the timing. Baseball staged one of its most sentimental annual celebrations while the league and the players’ union spent the week trading public arguments over a salary cap, with a lockout widely expected after December 1.
The sport does this well — the corn, the Hall of Famers, the fathers and sons playing catch in a farm field. It’s a genuinely lovely product. Both sides of the labor fight keep saying the game is in a great place, and Thursday night was reasonable evidence for it.
The two clubs fly to Minneapolis and take Friday off before resuming the series at Target Field on Saturday. Philadelphia will spend that weekend trying to climb back into a playoff spot.
Schwarber, for his part, has already had his moment. Two into the corn is hard to top.
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