Minnesota's Field of Dreams hosts 45th baseball tournament
Aug. 7—LYLE, Minn. — A small-scale Field of Dreams sits in the backyard of a house just north of the Minnesota-Iowa border. Any home run hit lands in a field of corn.
It's the kind of setup that baseball players and fans dream of having. Gary Meyer grew up with baseball games in the backyard, but, when he played, the field wasn't nearly as nice.
"When we first started out here, it was a cow pasture, and we played in between the cow pies," Meyer said. "Little by little, it got to be better and better."
The field is now a full-fledged baseball diamond with painted lines and a backstop. It's 210 feet to dead center field, and 198 feet to left and right. There's an old home plate behind the backstop on the third base side from when Meyer's grandfather played on a township team.
There's one difference between the field in Lyle and the Field of Dreams: Meyer's field is branded with Hamm's Brewing signage and statues of the Hamm's Beer Bear.
The beer company founded in St. Paul was the beer that Meyer's family drank at backyard baseball games, so it only made sense to name the field after Hamm's.
Saturday, Aug. 6, 2022, marked 45 years of backyard baseball games played between family, friends and neighbors. The "old guys" played the "punks," the younger players.
It was a gathering of people with a love for baseball.
The games were played with shorter bats and bigger baseballs, which challenged hitters. Pitchers tossed the baseball in a high arc. If the baseball landed on the black mat around home plate, it was a strike.
