How An Iconic Movie Set May Be Quietly Becoming A Real Baseball Economy

When I first saw the headline that the Northwoods League was bringing its 2026 All-Star Game to the Field of Dreams site in Dyersville, Iowa, I did what I usually do now: I started digging.

Everybody knows the movie, Field of Dreams, and most of us have heard MLB’s deal to play at a field right next to movie set. 

But, I wanted to know what was happening behind the scenes—the land deals, the nonprofit structure, the capital campaign, the youth tournaments, the projections. The kind of stuff most fans never see (or probably care about), but that actually decides whether a place like this becomes a true baseball destination or another project that someone raised money for.

Once I got into the details, it became obvious: this isn’t just a tourist destination for a historic movie set. It’s a full-blown infrastructure play for youth baseball and softball in the Midwest. 

And the Northwoods League All-Star announcement is really just one piece of a bigger economic story.

What’s Actually Being Built in Dyersville

Start with ownership. The Field of Dreams Movie Site is now run by Dyersville Events, Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that bought the site for around $27 million in 2024 with help from state grants.

They launched a $120 million “Bring It Home” capital campaign to do four things at once: preserve the original movie field and farmhouse, build a permanent ballpark on the old MLB game footprint, develop a full youth sports complex, and layer in leadership and education programming around it.

On the field side, the plan is pretty straightforward:

• Four new parks (diamonds) opening in summer 2026, scaling up to 10 total fields over time.
• A permanent professional-grade Field of Dreams Ballpark sitting next to the original movie field.
• Year-round usage supported by dorms, lodging, indoor space, and event programming.

If you’ve ever walked through Diamond Nation, Ripken, or Cooperstown All-Star Village, you know exactly what this is: a Midwestern version of that same model, dropped into a place people already feel connected to emotionally.

The Youth Tournament Math

The part that stood out to me was a paragraph buried in local coverage out of Iowa.

In 2025, the site hosted 637 youth baseball teams, a record year that generated an estimated $14.2 million in economic impact—before the new complex even opens. As of the November announcement, 204 teams had already registered for 2026, and site operators expect more than 700 baseball and softball teams to come through once the fields are online.

Youth sports tourism is one of the most reliable cash machines in American sports right now. Families drive or fly in, stay for 3–4 days, book hotel rooms, eat every meal out, fill up rental cars, buy merch, and, in Dyersville’s case, probably tack on some extra time just to walk the original field.

One local TV package put a number on the next phase: events at the site in 2026 are expected to generate at least $40 million in local economic activity, once you factor in MLB, Triple-A, the Velocity music festival, and the Northwoods League All-Star week.

That $40M isn’t all baseball, but youth baseball and softball are the anchor that keeps the calendar full and the hotel rooms booked.

Baseball and Softball Are Baked Into the Plan

One thing I like about what Dyersville is doing: they’re not treating softball like an afterthought.

The same coverage that broke down the 637 baseball teams and $14.2M impact also made it clear that youth softball is being built into the tournament inventory from the start. The complex is being designed for both sports, and organizers expect the 700-plus team figure in 2026 to include baseball and softball tournaments combined, with softball registration opening early in the year.

When you zoom out and look at the national numbers – baseball and softball participation north of 25 million, with softball up year-over-year – that’s just smart. The same fields, lights, concessions, and hotels work for both. The margins come from keeping them busy as many weekends as humanly possible.

What the Old Feasibility Work Told Us

Before the nonprofit took over, there was an earlier development concept called All-Star Ballpark Heaven. That project was driven by Go the Distance Baseball and backed by a formal economic impact study. The specific ownership structure has changed since, but the modeling is still useful for understanding the ceiling.

Here’s what those analysts projected for a nine-field complex with dorms, a hotel, and year-round events built on the Field of Dreams site:

• Roughly $80 million in buildout costs for fields, lodging, and an indoor facility.
• More than $32 million in direct spending annually once mature (families, teams, events).
• Over 250 jobs supported by the complex long-term, plus 1,200 full-time-equivalent jobs projected in the broader impact models by year four.

Those numbers were done before this current wave of national attention and MLB involvement. Now you’ve got multiple layers stacked on top: MLB games, Triple-A games, concerts, and now a major collegiate summer league event.

As someone who invested in Diamond Nation early and later saw it rolled into Unrivaled Sports alongside Ripken and Cooperstown, I recognize the pattern. Once you get the build right and hit a certain scale of teams per year, the asset becomes very attractive to big institutional money.

Dyersville is still earlier on that curve, but the inputs are there.

The 2026 Calendar: How Everything Stacks Up

Look at just one summer—2026—and you can see how this turns from an idea into real cash flow for a small town and the surrounding region:

• Northwoods League Home Run Challenge – July 7, 2026
• Northwoods League All-Star Game – July 8, 2026
• Triple-A game – Iowa Cubs vs. St. Paul Saints – August 11, 2026
• MLB Field of Dreams game – Twins vs. Phillies – August 13, 2026
• Velocity Music Festival – September 4–6, 2026, with Shinedown, Carrie Underwood, and Creed headlining, projected at $15 million in economic activity by itself.
• A full slate of youth baseball and softball tournaments built around those anchor dates, with >700 teams expected once all four fields open in 2026.

And you want to hear something crazy? Dyersville population is right around 4,000 people. That will be some serious economic impact.

Where the Northwoods League Fits Into All This

Now let’s talk about the Northwoods piece, because that’s the connection point that pulled me into this in the first place.

Ever seen the movie Summer Catch with Jessica Biel? 

If so, the Northwoods is a league just like “The Cape” and it’s considered by most, to be the second best league behind Cape Cod. And – maybe surprising to some – the league has some crazy stats and economics.

A real league, not a novelty tour

On the baseball side, the Northwoods League is:

• A 26-team summer collegiate league spread across the upper Midwest and Canada.
• The attendance leader in collegiate summer ball, drawing 1,339,157 fans during the 2024 regular season and finishing at 1,357,679 including the All-Star Game and playoffs. That broke their previous record of 1,297,864 in 2023.
• Home to more than 400 MLB alumni over its history, with markets like Madison, Traverse City, Kalamazoo, St. Cloud, and others consistently pulling big summer crowds.

For host cities, a Northwoods team is a 36-game summer engine: ticket sales, concessions, local sponsorship, and hundreds of thousands in recurring seasonal spend. The league has quietly built itself into a powerful middle layer between college baseball and pro ball.

Big Moves

The All-Star Game announcement was pretty simple on the surface: The league and the Field of Dreams Movie Site put out a joint release stating that a new ballpark, currently under construction on the site of the previous MLB games, will host the 2026 Northwoods League All-Star Game on July 8, with a Home Run Challenge on July 7 featuring players from the Great Lakes and Great Plains divisions.

Commissioner Ryan Voz summed it up this way:

“We are thrilled to bring the 2026 Northwoods League All-Star Game to the Field of Dreams Movie Site, where baseball’s past and future will collide in the most spectacular fashion… hosting the brightest collegiate summer stars on this hallowed ground will create memories that last a lifetime—for the players, the fans, and everyone who believes that if you build it, they will come.”

By taking their All-Star Game to Dyersville, they’re doing three things at once:

1. Attaching the brand to a site people already care about.
2. Putting their players on a national stage at a time when attendance and interest are already at record levels.
3. Sliding themselves into the same Midwest ecosystem that youth tournaments, MLB, and MiLB are about to make even more valuable.

Why I Care About This

The Field of Dreams complex plus the Northwoods League All-Star Game is less about one cool week in July 2026, and more about this: The Midwest is starting to build the same kind of year-round, data-driven, tournament-anchored baseball and softball infrastructure that changed places like New Jersey twenty years ago.

If we care about growing the game – not just talking about it – this is the kind of project we need to pay attention to. Not because it makes for a romantic photo, but because the economics behind it say something very real about where baseball and softball are going next.

Sources

– Axios reporting on the 2024 nonprofit acquisition of the Field of Dreams Movie Site
– WOWT 6 News coverage of the $120M “Bring It Home” capital campaign and 2026 field expansion plans
– WOWT 6 News reporting on 2025 tournament participation, 2026 registration, and projected economic impact
– Strategic Economics Group feasibility modeling for All-Star Ballpark Heaven
– MCC Meetings economic analysis and facility cost projections
– KCCI reporting on the 2026 Iowa Cubs vs. St. Paul Saints Triple-A game and MLB Field of Dreams matchup
– Northwoods League press releases and 2024–2025 attendance data
– OurSports Central reporting on Northwoods League attendance records