Continued from An American Legacy Story Part I: Willie
Rickwood (baseball) Field, Birmingham, Alabama. June 20, 2024.
Baseball has been played at Rickwood since 1910, making it America's oldest active baseball park. A baseball game will be played at Rickwood today. For over a century, thousands of baseball games have been played at Rickwood; Major League Baseball's (MLB) spring training games and exhibitions, semi-pro, and Negro League games. For a time, the University of Alabama's Crimson Tide used the field. Rickwood has even starred as a movie set
Today, Rickwood will star again, this time as the host of a regular season Major League game between the San Francisco Giants and the St. Louis Cardinals. This game will be more than just any other in the long 162 game grind that starts in the promising spring, grunts through the hot summer, sweats out the dog days of August, ending in the crisp birth of autumn.
Today's game is a celebration of the Negro Leagues, a celebration that's long, long overdue. It's also an unexpected celebration of one of the Negro Leagues' and MLB's favorite sons, Willie Mays, who, at 16, began his stellar professional career at Rickwood as the starting center fielder for the Birmingham Black Barons. Mays passed away two days ago in the San Francisco Bay Area, at the age of 93. It's almost as if the baseball gods had preordained the convergence of events.
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