DYERSVILLE, Ia. – As Tom Mietzel crosses the gravel from the marble site of the movie “Field of Dreams” and looks to the left field, he can’t help but think of his wife, Denise Stillman.
Less than a mile from where you will find an 8,000-seat, specially built baseball stadium. It is forbidden for fans, and even for Mietzel, who runs the corporate rate of the property.
If the CEO of Go The Distance needs to venture, he will need to get a special permit from Major League Baseball, which limits pedestrian traffic until next year’s game. So in this position the marble is as close as it usually is.
But even from that distance, and with rows of corn and other states of enthusiasts in front of him, betting on the standout field, Mietzel can see much of the new park.
“She would have enjoyed it, ” said Stillman’s Mietzel.
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And she would have. The former owner of the field of Dreams spent years pushing for a major league game to reach Iowa. Your dream will come true … at some point. The Chicago White Sox and the St. Louis Cardinals were scheduled to play in the new park on Thursday. But the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed back MLB’s plans for a game in Dyersville until 2021.
Whenever that day comes, it will be because of Stillman’s dream, which he pursued through his friends, a circle of family and colleagues after his death from liver cancer in 2018.
“I’m proud of the fact that we’re the ones to do it,” said Roman Weinberg, chief operating officer of Go The Distance. “I know she’d be happy.”
A poster that Mietzel helps you store in a closet in your workplace is a reminder of Stillman and his dream. This illustrates Stillman’s fondness for what she called All-Star Ballpark Heaven, a softball and baseball complex on the Field of Dreams site that can host youth tournaments. The plans, launched last year after his death, come with youth parks.
Another of Stillman’s hopes comes beyond the site of the film’s left diamond frame: the ball box where the MLB game will be played.
“She knew that if she could get into MLB and play a game, she would do a number of things,” Mietzel said.
Stillman, who presented Go The Distance, hoped that a major league game could simply increase the credibility of his task and upload much-needed information to the site. Mietzel said Stillman even called MLB to provide a plan. Stillman wasn’t the only one interested in a game played in Iowa City.
In fact, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, who organized games to play in a variety of exclusive locations such as Fort Bragg, North Carolina, asked Marla Miller, MLB’s senior vice president of special events, to play Stillman to play. Manfred, who visited the site in 2016 for the 25th anniversary celebration, insisted on bringing baseball to Dyersville.
“He thinks we could just back off,” Miller said.
But getting there isn’t easy. The plan was suspended when Stillman became involved in a lawsuit with an organization of neighboring owners, who argued that the film’s site had been incorrectly rezoned through Dyersville from farmland to advertising land in an agreement to make way for his plans. And during the time the Iowa Supreme Court upheld the proceedings in 2016, the damage was done. Meitzel said some of the investors in the assignment were no longer all-inclusive.
Then, in April 2017, Stillman diagnosed hedothelioma hedothelioma hedothelioma hedothelioma with hepatic hedothelioma, a rare vascular liver tumor. He was less than a year old. When Stillman left, he was still focusing on the project.
In 2018, she called Miller to tell MLB about her legal victory and let them know she was still interested. Stillman didn’t tell Miller he was close to death.
Instead, he moved away from the assignment until his death on November 7, 2018.
“It’s one of the last things it’s running on,” Mietzel said. “Some of the last emails you sent were for MLB. So it was in his brain until the end.”
Mietzel made sure that Stillman’s desire for a major league game would come true. When he took over Go The Distance, he made it his main target.
“I promised him when he died that he would take care of me,” Mietzel said.
He followed.
In 2018, talks with MLB heated up. That winter, Mietzel showed a group of representatives from MLB around the site. They tested the soil to make sure they could dig deep enough into the ground to create a field that would meet MLB’s regulations.
Mietzel helped negotiate a deal, a component from which he took a position at the farm’s internal table, which required the game to be played on a field separate from the film’s iconic diamond. Miller said MLB had discussed the option of betting on the film’s website. But there would be too many changes and Stillman had made it clear before his death that he agreed with this approach.
“She was very, very worried that we were wasting the magic of the original field, and she was right, so we started hunting on the land adjacent to the countryside,” Miller said.
In February 2019, Mietzel signed the deal with MLB. In August, MLB announced that the White Sox and New York Yankees would play in the transitional stage. MLB would pay for the entire structure and even create a path through a cornfield that would take enthusiasts to the ballpark and overlook the famous movie theater. Miller said that without Stillman’s dream and his company’s commitment to making it a reality, the game would materialize.
“It’s his circle of relatives who has been looking to keep that dream alive since his death,” Miller said.
But the dream is back in suspense. When the pandemic arrived, MLB got rid of the Game Yankees and replaced them with the Cardinals.
Then, before this month, MLB announced that it would boost the game until 2021.
The plan is to keep the White Sox in the game, with an opponent and a date to announce. He’s not worried about Mietzel, who knows the game will happen occasionally. He even hopes it will be an annual occasion on the major league calendar.
“I’ve waited so long, ” said Mietzel. “I’m going to lose sleep over that. They said they’d come back. Then why worry?
Plus, the way Mietzel looks at it, Stillman’s dream is even though it all comes true. The MLB game is not only coming to Iowa, but also its dream of the multi-purpose complex, in which Mietzel hopes to begin structuring next year. It’s a bittersweet achievement because Stillman can’t be there to see it built.
“Part of the appeal of Field of Dreams is that it’s spiritual, in the fact that you can almost feel the souls of those who enjoy and others who were here and who had such a big effect on our lives. And I feel like every single day when I get here, ” said Weinberg. “I can feel it here. And it’s reassuring and makes us move forward.”
Tommy Birch, a corporate sports and Register journalist, has been in the paper since 2008. He is the 2018 Iowa Sports Writer of the Year. Contact him at [email protected] or 515-284-8468. Follow him on Twitter @TommyBirch.
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