Rickwood Area in Birmingham, Ala., believed to be the oldest skilled baseball stadium in the USA, has performed host to a few of baseball’s best 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.
Subsequent yr, the stadium will shine as soon as once more when it hosts a Main 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 Area, Rickwood Area opened in 1910 and has been residence 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 workforce.
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 Video games, and former variations have been held at Fort Bragg, N.C.; in Omaha, on the website of the Faculty World Sequence; and in Williamsport, Pa., the positioning of the Little League World Sequence.
M.L.B. has additionally staged two Area of Desires video games in Dyersville, Iowa, close to the filming location for the 1989 baseball-themed movement image “Area of Desires.” The White Sox performed the Yankees in Dyersville in 2021, and final season the Chicago Cubs and Cincinnati Reds bought a flip within the corn fields. There isn’t a Area of Desires sport scheduled in 2023 due to development on the website.
M.L.B. mentioned that the date of the Rickwood Area 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 best residing participant.
Mays, 92, went to highschool lower than 5 miles from Rickwood Area. In 1948, regardless of being solely 17 and nonetheless at school, 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 imagine it. I by no means thought I’d see in my lifetime a Main League Baseball sport being performed on the very area the place I performed baseball as a young person.”
His assertion concluded, “We will’t overlook what bought us right here, and that was the Negro Leagues for thus many people.”
With a seating capability of just about 11,000, Rickwood Area was constructed by the Birmingham industrialist Harvey Woodward, who was often called Rick, and it was modeled after Forbes Area in Pittsburgh and Shibe Park in Philadelphia. When it opened, on Aug. 18, 1910, companies in Birmingham have been shuttered to rejoice the grand event.
In its early years, the park would host exhibition video games with groups from the American and Nationwide Leagues, together with the Yankees, however Rickwood was residence 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.
Quite a lot of essentially the most vital historical past on the park, nevertheless, got here from the Black Barons, a Negro leagues workforce that featured stars like Mule Suttles and Satchel Paige, who gained extra video games for Birmingham than he did for every other skilled workforce.
In 1948, the Black Barons — with Mays in tow — confronted the Homestead Grays within the last Negro World Sequence. Whereas the Grays gained that Sequence, 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 Area.