"If you change the site physically," says Matt Mescher, the neighbor who once watered the outfield to keep the sod alive, "without that blue sky and cornfield backdrop, you're going to be cutting your foot off." At a lengthy and clamorous February 2012 city-council meeting, Rita and Al Ameskamp's son Wayne made an impassioned plea for the town to halt the project. "Don't let them build these baseball diamonds out in the country and take our farm ground out of production and ruin our piece of heaven," he said. Lawsuits and social-media campaigns ensued. Without irony, a columnist for The Des Moines Register expressed concern that the development would facilitate the area's "Disneyfication."Then came an election, this past November, in which proponents of the development were roundly defeated. All three of the city-council members up for reelection were thrown out of office-as was Mayor Heavens, a five-time incumbent who had served in the position since 2003. The Field of Dreams expansion, Heavens says, was "the issue of the election." His successor, Alvin Haas, the co-owner of a local construction and environmental-consulting firm, won't go quite that far, but he doesn't discount its significance. In a town uniquely defined by its ersatz baseball park, how could he? "We didn't campaign on it," he says, "but you know, in the back of their heads, people were thinking about it."Denise Stillman admits that the controversy has hampered fund-raising and planning efforts.
She's moving ahead anyway. The land belongs to her and her husband, after all: the city gave them license to build on it, and they're convinced the idea is still sound. Six fields will open for competition in 2015, she promises, with more to follow as soon as possible.Already, Stillman has made a number of incremental improvements to the field-rehabbing the big barn, upgrading the playing surface-and just about everyone in Dyersville would agree that these changes were necessary. She has screened movies and hosted Little League games, too, and has plans this June for a blowout weekend celebration to mark the 25th anniversary of the release of Field of Dreams. For select occasions, Denise has even convinced the Ghost Players to come back out of retirement-and the Iowa corn.This winter, not long after the controversial election, I drove out to see the Field of Dreams for myself. I started at the south end of Dyersville, near the old Ertl plant, a long, yellow factory where hundreds of residents manufactured farm toys for decades before the company moved its production facilities in the 1990s, first to Mexico and then to China. (The plant is now home to a Japanese toy distributor.) It seemed a fitting launch point: the decals that employees slapped on tiny tractors once gave Dyersville national recognition. I headed north on Highway 136 into the older part of town, passing two-story brick houses with expansive porches and tidy lawns.