Cardinals and Giants to play at the site of some of baseball’s darkest and proudest moments
Major League Baseball’s schedule makers send the St. Louis Cardinals to historic Fenway Park every other season and to historic Wrigley Field twice a summer, but there is no history quite like that which is contained in Birmingham, Alabama’s Rickwood Field, where the Cardinals and San Francisco Giants will match up Thursday in a salute to some of the game’s proudest and darkest moments.
Opened in 1910, Rickwood Field is the oldest operating professional baseball stadium in the United States. It was long the home park of the now-Double-A Birmingham Barons, but more notably, was the base for the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro Leagues.
It holds enormous significance in the baseball stories of many who were forbidden to play in the segregated game prior to Jackie Robinson’s debut in 1947 and for many long, hard years after.
“I’m super excited that I get to be a part of it and this team gets to be a part of it,” said Cardinals shortstop Masyn Winn, who is at present the only Black player on the Cardinals’ active roster. “Me and my stepdad have been talking about it since spring training. He’s super excited to be out there. To be able to share this moment with him and with this team is going to be pretty fun.”
When Winn was young, his stepfather, Earl Luckett, would recruit players from underprivileged areas of Houston for weekend games which resembled in some ways the barnstorming professional teams which dominated decades of action in the Negro Leagues. Each weekend, the players assembled would take the field wearing jerseys with the names of Negro League stars on the back rather than their own, and Luckett would ask the players to present facts about those stars to the group as a way of preserving the legacy and knowledge of Black baseball that MLB is now increasing efforts to support.
“I grew up in a suburb, [played for] a nice little select team, but he put together a team full of Black players,” Winn said. “We’d wear Satchel Paige, Cool Papa Bell, guys like that on our backs…Super important to me to be able to play on the same field a lot of those guys played on.”
It’s also notable, for all the wrong reasons, that Winn is likely to be the only Black player to appear in the game on Thursday. Giants starter – and former Cardinal – Jordan Hicks is lined up to pitch over the weekend at Busch Stadium, and Giants first baseman LaMonte Wade, Jr. is currently on the injured list.
The week, though, will feature myriad events designed to celebrate both Juneteenth and the history of the Negro Leagues. On Wednesday night, a celebrity softball game called Barnstorm Birmingham will take place, with legendary big leaguers Barry Bonds and Derek Jeter named the honorary captains of the two teams — The Hammers, named after Alabama native Henry Aaron, and the Say Heys, named in honor of Birmingham’s own Willie Mays.
There was hope that Mays would be able to attend the game played by his most notable team and at the ballpark where he grew up falling in love with baseball through the Barons, but it was announced over the weekend that he would not attend due to health concerns and he died Tuesday at age 93.
Mays’ son, Michael, has been involved in promotional activities around the game, and his godson, Bonds, will largely act in his stead.
More than three dozen retired players and celebrities are expected to be in attendance for the festivities, including former Cardinal Dexter Fowler and St. Louis natives Ryan Howard and Metro Boomin.
The game also holds significance for those who grew up in the area without easy access to Major League Baseball. Though there’s a significant limit on the number of tickets which were on sale to the public, Cardinals utility player Brendan Donovan largely grew up in the state while being raised in a military family, and has a special appreciation for the chance to play in front of his family on native soil.
“You have the Biscuits in Montgomery,” Donovan said, “but you don’t have a major team really anywhere in Alabama. So that’s kind of cool.”
Both his and his wife’s family will be in attendance, though he joked that it’s been easier to get them to come together for games since the two had their first baby in spring. Still, the game is a chance for him to represent a place that’s meaningful, even if that’s in a different form than its historical context.
MLB’s investment in Rickwood Field is designed to outlast the week’s activities, hopefully remaining a viable surface for under-served communities to use for years to come. Through the integration of Negro League statistics into the league’s historical record as well as the ongoing support of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, the league has taken significant, important steps on that front which now is left to be translated into action in communities.
“We want to make baseball look cool for the Black community,” Winn said of himself and outfielder Jordan Walker, currently with Triple-A Memphis. “I wish there were more Black players out there to represent, but to be able to be out there and be an inspiration for younger kids is pretty cool to me.”
