Alabama’s Rickwood Field, a monument to the love of baseball
The entrance to historic Rickwood Field (Jackson Roberts / Alabama News Center)
Coming in 2024: Rickwood to play host to Major League Baseball
The love for baseball is evident if you look past the non-padded outfield walls of Birmingham’s Rickwood Field and happen to see Ron Jackson mowing grass and picking up trash.
On this blistering afternoon, Jackson is riding his personal tractor right outside Rickwood – tending land for a practice field he dreams of making.
Jackson might introduce himself as a World Series Champion coach and longtime Major League Baseball player; the Los Angeles Angels drafted him out of Lawson State Community College in the second round of the 1971 draft.
Or, he might introduce himself as “Papa Jack,” the nickname many local folks know him by. Papa Jack started in the Birmingham Willie Mays youth baseball league and was a coach for the Reviving Baseball in the Inner-City, or RBI, program, leading his team to the championship in Minneapolis in 2014. Papa Jack gives back to his community, and he loves to talk about his dream to give kids the gift of baseball. He has a heart for baseball and an ongoing desire to make an impact in a sport that has been played at Rickwood for more than a century, a place where racial integration didn’t take place until the 1960s – 17 years after Jackie Robinson broke the “color line” in Major League baseball.
Indeed, the history behind Rickwood Field, the oldest professional ballpark in the nation, reflects the history of its hometown: a place once violently resistant to human and civil rights that is now a beacon for racial progress; a place with its own, unique culture that embraces its lengthy love affair with the game of baseball.
Coke Matthews, former board chair of the Friends of Rickwood, said, “Baseball was king in Birmingham for most of the 20th century; baseball was the source of entertainment. Rickwood was the epicenter of social and cultural life for Black and white fans.” Games were “must-see entertainment” with legends such as Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Jackie Robinson, Leroy “Satchel” Paige and most famously, Birmingham native Willie Mays, playing there during their careers.
Today, Rickwood still entertains visitors with as many as 200 games played here yearly, Matthews said. Baseball enthusiasts from across the nation and the world continue to make pilgrimages to Rickwood as a timeless monument of baseball history, and baseball’s evolution.
Matthews noted, “It is this constant stream of families, teams, people Black and white, old and young, male or female, and it is just kind of this phenomenal thing that continues to be a cultural pinpoint for the city.”
Major League Baseball recently affirmed the historic significance of Rickwood, announcing that the old ballfield, constructed in 1910, will host a game between the San Francisco Giants and the St. Louis Cardinals on June 20, 2024.
Scheduled one day after Juneteenth, the game will celebrate the history of the Negro Leagues and commemorate the 60-year anniversary of Rickwood Field’s integration, which took place on April 17, 1964. Less than three months after Black and white players first stood together on the field at Rickwood, and Blacks and whites were able to sit together in the bleachers, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, outlawing racial segregation nationwide.
The game will also honor Mays, the oldest living baseball Hall of Famer, who played for the Black Barons before a stellar career with the Giants. A statue of Mays now stands in front of Birmingham’s Regions Field, where the integrated Birmingham Barons now play.
It will be a day when baseball history is made, again, in Birmingham – when Major League Baseball holds its first game ever played in Alabama, at Rickwood Field.
No doubt, Papa Jack will be watching.
