MLB Wants to Build a Baseball Field in a National Park
Major League Baseball approached the Trump administration about hosting a regular season game inside a national park — and National Park Service officials reportedly scouted three locations in Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming this week to make it happen.
The Washington Post broke the story Saturday. Both the White House and an MLB official confirmed the discussions had taken place. By Sunday, the backlash from Wyoming residents, environmentalists, and local officials was already significant.
"It's abhorrent," Wyoming state Democratic Senator Mike Gierau, who represents Jackson and the area surrounding Grand Teton, wrote in a text message. "Baseball is the American game. The national parks are America's greatest idea. They don't belong together this way."
The Field of Dreams Comparison
The idea, according to the White House statement, originated with MLB, which asked whether "hosting a game at a national park would be possible, similar to the Field of Dreams game." The Field of Dreams game is MLB's successful recurring made-for-television event held in Dyersville, Iowa, built around the 1989 film. A temporary ballpark gets constructed in a cornfield. Players emerge from the cornstalks. It's charming, it's photogenic, and it drives enormous TV ratings. The league wants to replicate the magic somewhere else.
A cornfield in Iowa and one of America's most protected wilderness areas are not the same kind of backdrop.
What It Would Actually Take
A baseball field alone covers roughly four acres. A proper stadium capable of hosting a major league game sits closer to 25 acres — and a full complex with parking and infrastructure can require hundreds more. Grand Teton's most recently disturbed land came from a trailhead parking expansion that bulldozed about 10 acres of sagebrush. The scale of what MLB is describing would dwarf that.
Grand Teton National Park covers 310,000 acres and includes a commercial airport — the busiest in Wyoming — along with vast Jackson Hole bottomlands and views of the Teton Range that are among the most photographed landscapes in the country. It also supports grizzly bears, wolves, moose, bison, and a fragile high-altitude ecosystem that took centuries to develop.
"Grand Teton National Park is about wild America, wildlife, opportunity for solitude — not for more amusement," said Luther Propst of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, calling the proposal "a radical departure from the tradition of national parks."
Betsy Buffington of the National Parks Conservation Association was more direct: "No Baseball Stadium in Grand Teton, Now or Ever."
The White House Is Walking It Back
The Trump administration issued follow-up statements that tried to put distance between the president and the idea. "This is not a White House or Administration priority," one statement read. A second statement said that the official who had been on a scouting trip — identified as National Park Service's deputy director Frank Lands — was on a previously scheduled visit to several national parks including Grand Teton, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon, and that MLB had simply coordinated their own trip to coincide with his.
"The MLB happened to schedule their trip to Grand Teton at the same time that Frank was there," the White House said.
MLB did not respond to follow-up requests for comment.
The Broader Context
The proposal lands at an unusual moment for the National Park Service. The Trump administration has already made significant cuts to the agency — reducing staffing, pulling back on grants to partner organizations, and pursuing what critics describe as an aggressive push toward private use of federal land. A land swap that would hand a portion of Yosemite to a private company was reportedly submitted to Congress earlier this year.
A baseball stadium in Grand Teton — even for a single game — would represent the most visible example yet of that broader shift. It would also raise immediate legal questions about whether the National Park Service's mandate to protect natural resources could be reconciled with bulldozing park land for a commercial sporting event.
For MLB's part, the idea of a game in a national park has obvious appeal from a television standpoint. A ballpark framed against the Teton Range would produce images unlike anything in baseball history. Whether the league wants to be seen as the organization that dug up a national park to get them is, as one Wyoming official noted, "a nightmare from a public relations standpoint."
Nothing has been approved. Nothing is being built. But the scouting trip happened, and Grand Teton now knows what MLB has in mind.
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