America's oldest ballpark: MLB game at Rickwood Field honors history of Black baseball

In the 1950s, Birmingham, Alabama, had a city ordinance called Negroes And Whites Not To Play Together. Section 597 made it against the law for “a negro and a white person to play together or in company of each other in any game of cards, dice, dominoes, checkers, baseball, softball, football, basket ball (yes, two words) or similar game.”

Historians often refer to this as “the checkers ordinance.”

A name synonymous with Southern segregation was Eugene “Bull” Connor. He was a powerful political figure in Birmingham at the time, and his zeal in enforcing Section 597 was legendary – and not in a positive way.

The issue came to a head in the fall of 1953 when an all-star baseball team organized by Jackie Robinson was scheduled to play a barnstorming game at Birmingham’s Rickwood Field. Because the roster was integrated, Connor did everything he could to block the game. In turn, Robinson agreed to play only the Black players to avoid having both races on the field.

The following April, Robinson’s Brooklyn Dodgers (including Black catcher Roy Campanella) scheduled two exhibition games in Birmingham against Hank Aaron’s Milwaukee Braves. With a referendum regarding the checkers ordinance about to be contested in a city election, the games were permitted to proceed.

In those days, Black fans were allowed to attend “white” baseball games, but they were restricted to “colored only” sections in the right-field corner. For the two exhibitions, those seats were packed, with thousands more Black fans standing all around the outfield. The sections reserved for whites were practically empty.

This game marked the first time both races were represented on the same playing surface at Rickwood Field.

This instance is just part of the rich history – some of it heartwarming and some infuriating – of the facility dubbed America’s Oldest Ballpark that will soon be on display for the country.

“Fans will see a Birmingham they have not seen before,” says Gerald Watkins, chairman of the board for the Friends of Rickwood. “It’s a place with a high quality of living and a community that came together to bring Major League Baseball here.”

And when fans attend Major League Baseball’s regular-season game between the St. Louis Cardinals and San Francisco Giants here June 20, there will be a new slogan about Rickwood on caps and T-shirts: "History Played Here."

It’s an apt phrase for a stadium that opened 114 years ago. It’s also the rare facility that has gone by only one name for its entire life, as it was named for Rick Woodward. He was the son of iron magnate Joseph H. Woodward, who disapproved of his son’s fascination with the fast-growing sport of baseball.

‘The Church of Rickwood’

In 1909, the young Woodward acquired controlling interest in Birmingham’s Minor League team, the Barons – a team nickname still used by the city’s Southern League franchise. His first order of business was replacing the team’s all-wooden ballpark with a structure based on concrete and steel – the first such stadium in the minors and only the fifth such baseball facility overall (Shibe Park, Forbes Field, Comiskey Park and League Park were the first four).

Enlisting the help of Connie Mack, who had overseen the design and construction of Shibe Park for his Philadelphia Athletics, Woodward pushed forward with the construction of Rickwood Field. Even then, cost over-runs were the order of the day, as the outlay to build the facility reached $75,000 when the budget had been $25,000.

Jubilation was the reaction of thecity of Birmingham to its new ballpark. After witnessing the joy of the overflow crowd of about 10,000 at opening day on Aug. 18, 1910, the elder Woodward decided to retire the debt created by his son’s expensive construction project.

With the Barons’ financial stability assured, Rick Woodward remained the team’s owner through 1938. He rented Rickwood to Negro league teams on weekends when the Barons were on the road and would even rent the park to the Ku Klux Klan for cross-burning rallies.

Until the franchise went dormant in 1961 when it refused to integrate its roster, the Barons competed in the minor league known as the Southern Association. The winner of that circuit’s playoffs would then face the champions of the Texas League each year in what was called the Dixie Series.

The Barons captured the Dixie Series six times, but the most talked-about tilt was in 1931. That’s when 20-year-old fireballer Dizzy Dean led his Houston Buffs into Birmingham. The brash right-hander taunted the Barons by threatening to pitch with his left hand against them. “That way they’d have a chance.”

At the time, the throng that showed up at Rickwood was the largest to attend any sporting event in Alabama. The Barons’ 43-year-old Ray Caldwell outpitched Dean in a 1-0 Birmingham victory. The game was “the touchstone of Birmingham’s baseball experience, forever etched into the city’s collective memory,” wrote Timothy Whitt in “Bases Loaded with History,” the book that serves as the definitive account of Rickwood Field.

Whitt told USA TODAY Sports that he feels there’s something about Rickwood Field “that has a religious quality to it, that it is a holy place. For years, they didn’t play baseball on Sundays so fans could go to church. The rest of the week was for the Church of Rickwood.”

The Friends of Rickwood, created in 1991 to oversee the preservation of the park, keeps track of the number of Baseball Hall of Famers who have played at Rickwood. It’s a staggering number: 182. When you consider the opposing teams in the minors, the barnstorming major leaguers (Honus Wagner, Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams and many more), and all the Negro League stars, you can see how it could be this many.

“It is an incredible group of players who walked onto this field,” says Whitt. “I think it’s more than in any other stadium in baseball.”

Preserving the landmarks

But it’s not the history of the Barons or the barnstorming big leaguers that prompted MLB to bring a game to Rickwood. It’s the fact that the Negro leagues fielded teams here from 1920 until the circuits disbanded in 1960. Some years the team was in the Negro American League, some years the Negro National League and others in the minor league Negro Southern League – but the team was always called the Black Barons.

And their home park was always Rickwood Field. Precious few ballparks that hosted Negro League teams are still around. “We should preserve these landmarks,” says Bob Kendrick, president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City. “Oftentimes they face the wrecking ball, and, yeah, you can rebuild them, but you can’t rebuild that history.”

Kendrick was part of the planning committee to bring the MLB game to Rickwood. “What impressed me the most is that when they had that game in Dyersville (Iowa), there was tremendous sentiment from fans to do something similar to honor the Negro Leagues,” he says. And baseball listened.

“This is going to be one of those seminal moments in Black baseball history. I don’t think I’m overstating how tremendously impactful this is going to be.”

Willie Mays, who died Tuesday, grew up in the Fairfield neighborhood less than two miles from Rickwood. In 1948 as a 16-year-old high school junior, the phenom joined the Black Barons. By the end of that season, he was the starting center fielder for a club that won the Negro American League pennant.

After another solid season with the Black Barons – while finishing high school no less – the New York Giants came calling, signing the “Say Hey Kid” to a contract in 1950. Mays went on to record one of the most remarkable careers in baseball history, culminating with a first-ballot trip to Cooperstown in 1979.

When Mays’ career ended, he was credited with 3,283 hits. Now, though, the official total is 3,293, as the Negro Leagues Statistical Review Committee has just completed three years of work incorporating results from the Negro Leagues into the big leagues’ record books. True, Mays had more than 10 hits with the Black Barons, but the box scores of many of his games couldn’t be found.

Mays was but one of many superlative players on the Black Barons. Some of Satchel Paige’s best years on the mound were in Birmingham, including 1929 when he set a Negro League record for strikeouts. Other Black Barons enshrined in Cooperstown are slugger Mule Suttles and hurler Bill Foster.

Because most years Birmingham played in one of the Negro “major leagues,” all manner of Black superstars played for opposing teams: Josh Gibson, who is thought to have the longest home run in Rickwood history; Oscar Charleston, who played or managed for 43 seasons; Cool Papa Bell, whose lightning speed was described in glowing terms in Birmingham’s newspaper; and a young Jackie Robinson who played for the legendary Kansas City Monarchs.

A field of real dreams

The Cards-Giants game on June 20 is meaningful on many levels, not the least of which is shining a spotlight on the undeniable importance of the Negro Leagues in baseball history.

Watkins, the Friends of Rickwood’s chairman, feels a big-league game in Birmingham is long overdue. “Major League Baseball was very innovative in playing a game up there (in Iowa), but the Field of Dreams was a movie site,” he says. “We have a real field of dreams here, because to use one example, Willie Mays was in the outfield here, looking up and thinking ‘Maybe one day I’ll be in the big leagues.’ So this is a field of real dreams.”

He feels the game will also help raise the funds necessary to preserve the treasure that is Rickwood Field.

“I think Rickwood is a far better venue for a (Major League) game than the Iowa Field of Dreams,” says Whitt, the Rickwood historian. “Shoeless Joe Jackson was a fictional character. The connection with Rickwood Field, though, is so incredibly real. You’re looking at a place where the real Jackson actually played in the minors and as a barnstorming major leaguer.”

Says Watkins: “I can’t think of anyone that’s ever come to Rickwood as a tourist or a ballplayer that’s left without a good feeling in their heart about baseball. That’s what we want.”

Joe Mock covers sports facilities for USA TODAY publications

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Rickwood Field game: MLB honors Negro Leagues at USA's oldest ballpark