Going Back in Time, M.L.B. Will Play a Game at Rickwood Field
Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Ala., believed to be the oldest skilled baseball stadium within the United States, has performed host to a few of baseball’s biggest luminaries throughout its 113-year run, together with Babe Ruth and Willie Mays, the latter of whom grew up a brief distance from the park.
Next yr, the stadium will shine as soon as once more when it hosts a Major League Baseball sport between the San Francisco Giants and the St. Louis Cardinals. The sport is scheduled for June 20, 2024.
Older than each Fenway Park and Wrigley Field, Rickwood Field opened in 1910 and has been house to a number of groups over its many a long time, together with Mays’s Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro American League, and the Birmingham Barons, a minor league staff.
M.L.B. introduced the sport on Tuesday in its newest effort to showcase regular-season video games in distinctive settings. M.L.B. calls them Specialty Games, and former variations had been held at Fort Bragg, N.C.; in Omaha, on the web site of the College World Series; and in Williamsport, Pa., the positioning of the Little League World Series.
M.L.B. has additionally staged two Field of Dreams video games in Dyersville, Iowa, close to the filming location for the 1989 baseball-themed movement image “Field of Dreams.” The White Sox performed the Yankees in Dyersville in 2021, and final season the Chicago Cubs and Cincinnati Reds acquired a flip within the corn fields. There is not any Field of Dreams sport scheduled in 2023 due to building on the web site.
M.L.B. mentioned that the date of the Rickwood Field sport was meant to coincide with Juneteenth and that the sport will characteristic a wide range of actions to rejoice the historical past of the Negro leagues and Mays, the sport’s biggest residing participant.
Mays, 92, went to highschool lower than 5 miles from Rickwood Field. In 1948, regardless of being solely 17 and nonetheless in class, he started his skilled profession with the Black Barons. A yr later he signed with the New York Giants.
In a press release issued by M.L.B., Mays mentioned: “I can’t believe it. I never thought I’d see in my lifetime a Major League Baseball game being played on the very field where I played baseball as a teenager.”
His assertion concluded, “We can’t forget what got us here, and that was the Negro Leagues for so many of us.”
With a seating capability of virtually 11,000, Rickwood Field was constructed by the Birmingham industrialist Harvey Woodward, who was often known as Rick, and it was modeled after Forbes Field in Pittsburgh and Shibe Park in Philadelphia. When it opened, on Aug. 18, 1910, companies in Birmingham had been shuttered to rejoice the grand event.
In its early years, the park would host exhibition video games with groups from the American and National Leagues, together with the Yankees, however Rickwood was house to the Barons, a Southern League establishment that featured stars like Pie Traynor and Burleigh Grimes. In later years, Bo Jackson performed for the Barons at Rickwood, as did Michael Jordan throughout his 1994 sojourn into baseball.
A substantial amount of probably the most important historical past on the park, nonetheless, got here from the Black Barons, a Negro leagues staff that featured stars like Mule Suttles and Satchel Paige, who received extra video games for Birmingham than he did for every other skilled staff.
In 1948, the Black Barons — with Mays in tow — confronted the Homestead Grays within the closing Negro World Series. While the Grays received that Series, William Greason, who went on to be the primary Black pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals, picked up Birmingham’s lone victory. Greason, 98, nonetheless lives in Birmingham and is the pastor at Bethel Baptist Church, lower than two miles from Rickwood Field.
