BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – The refurbishment of historic Rickwood Field for Thursday night’s regular season game between the San Francisco Giants and St. Louis Cardinals was a labor of love germinating from a partnership between Major League Baseball, the MLB Players Association and the City of Birmingham at a cost of more than $4.5 million.
Birmingham footed the $4.5 million for improvements of the city-owned facility, which is designated on the National Register of Historic Places. MLB paid undefined costly overages to make the one-time event happen, said the PA’s executive director Tony Clark and Dan Halem, the deputy commissioner under Rob Manfred.
There are no future events for Rickwood on the current schedule.
The game was long planned as an homage to the Negro Leagues and Willie Mays, who started his pro career here at 17 playing for the Birmingham Black Barons in 1948. That changed to a requiem when Mays suddenly passed away at 93 on Tuesday.
“It was a shock when we heard Willie died,” former MLB great Albert Pujols said Wednesday, prior to a celebrity softball game on the 120,000-square-foot playing field of replanted sparkling green Bermuda grass. “But thinking about it since then, this is now the perfect way to honor him as the man he was and what he meant to this game.”
Mays, a Birmingham native, signed his first two-month pro contract for $250 to play for the Barons on July 4, 1948. Less than three years later—May 25, 1951—he joined the New York Giants for good and began a 23-year, Hall of Fame career that began in New York, traversed the country to San Francisco before returning to New York to finish his career with the Mets.
Mays signed his first contract to play at the Polo Grounds for one season at $7,500. The most he ever made was $165,000, in both 1972 and 1973, the final two years of his career. (That amount would be worth nearly $1.17 million today.) Mays earned $1.8 million total over the course of his career.
Speed ahead to 2024. Shohei Ohtani signed a 10-year, $700 million contract this past offseason with the Dodgers—$70 million a season—with $680 million of it deferred.
That raises the question: Had Mays played in this era, what would he have been worth?
“That’s mind-boggling to me,” CC Sabathia, the former pitcher also in town for the Celebrity Softball Game, said.
Highlighting the pay gap and preserving the memory of the trials endured by Negro Leaguers were important to current players who pushed for the creation of events like Thursday’s game, Clark said.
When both sides hammered out the current Basic Agreement during the lockout of 2022, the right to stage a game like this was memorialized under a category entitled, “Special Events.”
“It’s important to us to make sure the history wasn’t lost,” Clark said in an interview. “That people understand the players who played here weren’t allowed to play in the Major Leagues, although they still performed at the levels they did.”
The Basic Agreement stipulates that “up to four series per championship season may be scheduled in the continental United States or Canada at a site other than a Major League or Minor League ballpark” with the agreement of the union.
There’s one major stipulation: “The site of the Special Event shall have a field, dugouts, and clubhouses that conform to Major League standards, and the Players Association shall have the right to inspect the facilities before the game, consistent with past practice.”
The idea for this game was great in theory—and a long road to get here in reality.
Rickwood Field, opened in 1910, is the oldest pro ballpark in North America, but hasn’t been regularly used since 1988. It seriously deteriorated with a leaky roof, no lighting, a faulty electrical system, no drainage for the ballfield, few serviceable restrooms, and about 8,000 usable seats. The field had so many levels of turf on it, bulldozers had to be brought in to remove tons of dirt.
It was hardly a place for a special event, let alone a minor league game.
The city stepped up with its grant, and MLB assigned field guru Murray Cook and ballpark designer Janet Marie Smith to take on the various issues.
Cook described the playing field as a rec field, and the dugouts were cramped, hardly up to Major League standards. The original clubhouses have been turned into museums with blowup tents being used by the clubs this week to dress and relax away from the heat.
The light standards that were installed in 1936 hang over the field, but had no electricity. Cook had his workers take out the bulbs to ensure foul balls wouldn’t shatter glass on the players and fans below them.
MLB brought in its own lighting system on flatbed trucks and hoisted them into the sky by cranes to use for the three days of activities. They will go away when the event ends, leaving Rickwood lightless. So will the video board hovering over the right field fence. But the drainage system and the new field will remain.
No matter. The Double-A Barons—a Chicago White Sox affiliate—have made their home downtown in modern Regions Field since 2013. They played a game here Tuesday night against the Montgomery Biscuits on the night Mays died and lost, 6-5, as part of the event. But they’re not coming back anytime soon.
There’s no parking, and streets in the area have been closed for security reasons, limiting access. Media, fans and ballpark workers have been asked to park at Legion Field, an old football stadium about a half mile away, and take shuttle buses back and forth to Rickwood.
Those were only some of issues. The big challenge, Cook said, was to maintain the “magic and history of the venue.”
Thus, a lot of money was spent for a one-off event, to honor the Negro Leagues and those players who didn’t have a chance to play in MLB because of its segregationist polices prior to 1947, when Jackie Robinson finally broke the color barrier.
It’s part of a whole. Negro Leaguers have been inducted into the National Hall of Fame, and many of their statistics prior to 1948 have now been included in MLB’s official records.
“Yes, being in an old ballpark and the nostalgia connected with it is fantastic,” Clark said. “All of it is important, but ensuring that that history and those stories continue to be told and that everybody hears it as a result of these games being played, that’s what I’m most encouraged by.”
