The relationship between the city of St. Louis and the city of Chicago is tenuous at best. St. Louis’ professional teams, the Blues and the Cardinals, are hated across the city and across multiple fandoms, some even rivals themselves.
This backdrop is put in place to set the stage for when the St. Louis Cardinals will meet the Chicago White Sox for the historic “Field of Dreams” game on August 13th.
At the onset of the league’s plan, the White Sox were slated to face the MLB juggernaut New York Yankees in the repurposed and renovated baseball diamond in Dyersville, Iowa. However, due to the restructuring of the MLB season with geographic consistency in mind, the Cardinals instead are slated to match up with Chicago’s South Side club.
The 2020 Field of Dreams game is on…for now. And it now includes an new opponent for the Chicago White Sox: The St. Louis Cardinals. https://t.co/f9coowQayX
— Tommy Birch (@TommyBirch) July 1, 2020
While the status of the game is still tentative due to COVID-19, the original plan for the league was to showcase the team featured in Kevin Costner‘s 1989 classic film; a film where the maligned 1919 Chicago Black Sox were heavily featured. Ray Liotta starred opposite Costner as Black Sox leader Shoeless Joe Jackson, with other members of the infamous team popping up out of the Iowa cornfield the movie and the upcoming game were set.
Major League Baseball had also thought to place either the crosstown rivals of the Sox, the Chicago Cubs, or regional club Milwaukee Brewers in the game’s slot opposite the South Siders. While the Yankees were picked originally, presumably on star power with Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton or based on the tie-in to the film, the hated Cardinals will instead draw the ire of Chicago baseball fans everywhere.
Fears of the virus have begun to plague the development of the site MLB was molding to look like the spitting image of the film with a larger grandstand. Construction is still ongoing, but the game itself is at risk while the country is plagued by the Coronavirus.
