Mike Fleming

The beloved ballpark that Kevin Costner’s character built in Field Of Dreams has gotten a happy ending. According to reports, Go The Distance, an investment group that includes baseball Hall of Famer Wade Boggs, paid $3.4 million for the 193-acre Iowa site owned by Don and Becky Lansing. Boggs and cohorts plan to open All Star Ballpark Heaven, a complex that will feature 24 baseball and softball fields. Those fields will be fashioned for tournament play, and it looks like they’ll keep intact the original field from the film. Now, they’ve just got to hope that those tournament teams will come, but it’s a heckuva lot better than the alternative of roto-tilling it over and restoring the corn fields.

Fields from classic baseball films haven’t fared very well over the years. Major League was filmed in Milwaukee’s County Stadium and the outside facade was Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium, both of which were torn down. So was Buffalo’s War Memorial Stadium, where most of the action scenes were shot for The Natural. Eight Men Out was filmed in Bush Stadium in Indianapolis, which sat idle before it was transformed into a baseball-themed apartment complex. Costner’s other baseball film, Bull Durham, was shot at the Durham Athletic Park. That former minor-league baseball park, now too small to house a team, is hanging in there and being used as a baseball training center. As for the memorable scenes of Frank Drebin posing as an umpire in The Naked Gun, that venue doesn’t appear to be going anywhere soon. While the team in the movie was the Angels playing a home game against the Seattle Mariners, the pic was shot in Dodger Stadium.