By Gus "Walk-Off" Fields
There's a moment every year at Field of Dreams when baseball stops pretending to be a business. The corn parts, and grown men who've been retired for decades walk out of it like ghosts in a movie, and everybody in the ballpark — players included — just watches.
This year, 26 Hall of Famers emerged from that Iowa cornfield before the first pitch, ESPN reported, the kind of pageantry that only this one game, on this one field, gets away with. Then the actual baseball started, and Kyle Schwarber made sure the corn got more use before the night was through.
Schwarber hit two home runs into the outfield stalks, pushing his major-league-leading home run total to 37, as the Phillies beat the Twins 7-1 at the site of the 1989 film that gave the game its permanent home in Dyersville. Thirty-seven homers by mid-August is the pace of a player chasing something big, and Schwarber has made a habit this season of doing his chasing in the most theatrical settings available.
The Field of Dreams game has become one of baseball's odder traditions — a regular-season contest dressed up as a pilgrimage, played on a diamond carved out of a cornfield because a movie said a voice once told a farmer to build it. Schwarber didn't need a voice. He just needed a bat, and the corn didn't stand a chance.
No additional details on Schwarber's postgame comments or full box score were available in the source report.
— Compiled from reporting by ESPN.
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