Major League Baseball’s Field of Dreams game finally happened on Thursday night, with the Chicago White Sox and New York Yankees squaring off in the middle of a corn field reminiscent of the movie the event was named after. The game was at thriller, with a two-run walk-off home run from Chicago’s Tim Anderson sealing the win against the visiting Yankees.
Much like the NHL’s outdoor game in Lake Tahoe earlier this year, this game was all about visuals. A literal cornfield was the outfield fence, and players (and Kevin Costner) emerged from the fields to take the, well, field, on Thursday.
A lot of people noticed how tall the corn was in the outfield, especially when the players emerged from the field. It’s much taller than they are! Even Aaron Judge, who is a large home run-hitting human being. He’s dwarfed by those stalks.
And there’s a good reason for that: the corn out there is a bit different than many non-agrarian baseball fans may expect. That’s usually called field corn, which grows much taller than the sweet corn you might eat fresh off the considerably shorter stalk. Which is why when some White Sox players tried to eat it on Thursday night, it did not go well at all.
Joe Buck even asks “that’s feed corn, right?” as a player abruptly spits it out. Because it’s not good corn! As you can read here, there’s a pretty big difference between the corn in that outfield and the sweet corn you’d expect to find at a grocery store. It’s generally used for very different things, and needs to age on the stalk to actually be something people enjoy putting inside their bodies after a bit of additional processing. Basically, that corn is often turned into corn meal or corn flour and used for other corn-like purposes like tortilla chips and corn flakes. So it’s technically edible just, you know, not yet.
And now we all know.