The Rickwood Field game on Thursday between the Giants and St. Louis Cardinals is so big that a trio of dignitaries knocked on the doors of former Negro Leagues players in Birmingham, Alabama, and presented them with golden tickets to be honored on the special day.
Dr. Layton Revel, former Philadelphia Phillies All-Star slugger Ryan Howard and Birmingham mayor Randall Woodfin made the door-to-door pilgrimage to recognize about a dozen African-American players from an era when doors to the big leagues were closed for them.
The special knocks were in large part credited to a man who has dedicated much of his life to preserving the history of Birmingham’s legendary Rickwood Field – America’s oldest active baseball park – and the men who played there.
“Mayor Woodfin called me and said, ‘I’ve been talking with MLB, and they’re going to invite all the ballplayers, because I know you gave them a list,’” Revel told the Bay Area News Group. “For the ones who live in Birmingham, we’re going to hand deliver the tickets.”
Revel, who runs the Negro Southern League museum in Birmingham, gladly did his part to set up what will be a unique tribute at the hallowed venue.
Fans line up to enter Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama, for a Double-A game between the Birmingham Barons and the Montgomery Biscuits in a 2019 file photo. Major League Baseball will stage a Negro Leagues tribute game at Rickwood Field on June 20, 2024, between the San Francisco Giants and the St. Louis Cardinals. (AP Photo/Jay Reeves)
Giants Hall of Famer Willie Mays, a onetime Birmingham Black Baron, is not expected to attend the game in his hometown, but the Negro Leagues will have plenty of representation.
The Giants and Cardinals will wear throwback uniforms to honor the living legends and the league that once boasted luminaries such as Josh Gibson and Cool Papa Bell, players who thrived despite laboring in a Jim Crow South.
Fifty-plus living Negro Leagues veterans, including 12 from Birmingham, are expected to be in attendance for the special occasion, recognized by a league that just recently opted to include their statistics in official tallies.
“America’s oldest professional ballpark still echoes with the sounds of the legends who graced this field,” Woodfin wrote on Facebook. “I want to thank Major League Baseball for sharing this vision to commemorate Juneteenth and celebrate the Negro Leagues in the Magic City.”
Built in 1910, Rickwood Field has undergone renovations to make it usable for MLB.
“It’s obviously important for us to have an opportunity to pay tribute to the Negro Leagues, and I think the ballpark itself is going to really surprise people,” MLB commissioner Rob Mandred told the Associated Press.
If there is anyone who is qualified to talk about Birmingham’s hallowed baseball grounds, it is Revel.
His expertise has been honed by decades of Negro Leagues research, the last decade spent curating and running a museum with hundreds of unique items.
It was a passion that started almost 40 years ago.
“I had a friend who had played in the Negro Leagues, and I had got to meet a lot of the ballplayers, and was disappointed that not much had been done to preserve the history of Black baseball in America,” Revel said.
Revel said that Mays, even as a teenager from Birmingham suburb Fairfield in a segregated South, was considered a phenomenon by every part of American society when he was playing for Chattanooga and later his hometown Barons.
“White America knew what was going on with the Negro Leagues, and with Willie Mays, what caught people’s attention was how young he was,” Revel said. “He wasn’t tearing it up as a hitter, but he just had natural ability, and he got to play quite a bit.”
Charles “Coop” Willis grew up with Mays and later played for the Barons. He told MLB.com that Mays was “one of the greatest things” to come out of the town where they went to high school, but also that his friend’s stardom was a pleasant surprise.
“I didn’t know that, at that time, that [Mays] had a future like he had,” Willis told MLB.com. “I couldn’t see that far down the road. But I did know that he was a great athlete. No one thought that he would be a Major League baseball player, but it happened.”
After playing for the Barons from 1948-50, which included a Negro Leagues World Series appearance in 1948, Mays went on a 22-year MLB career that took him from New York to San Francisco and back to New York.
“Those guys were really good guys,” Mays recently told the San Francisco Chronicle. “All of them. They’re the ones who taught me about the game and life. Taught me everything. So when I came to the Giants, I already knew how to do all kinds of stuff.”
One of his biggest fans is Seton Hall’s professor of mathematics John Saccoman, who wrote Mays’ biography for the Society of American Baseball Research.
Even though Mays is not expected to be in attendance, Saccoman sees the Rickwood Field game as a well-deserved celebration of the game’s greatest living player.
“I personally feel like Willie Mays really didn’t get his due in his retirement,” Saccoman said. “I think people are coming around now, and it’s fortunate that he’s still alive to see that. With the new metrics, like Wins Above Replacement and all of this, he could have won 10 MVP awards. He was the best player in the league offensively and defensively for that many years.”
Though Mays will be rightfully praised, Revel and others hope that fans also find time to appreciate the entire league, which was where the vast majority of the premier Black talent in the country played until MLB integrated in 1946.
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If fans want to learn about the history of those players, there’s not many better places to go than the Negro Southern League museum.
Revel and the curators take pride in putting rare artifacts front and center.
“If someone steals my BMW tonight, I’m going to be sad, but I can buy a new BMW,” Revel said. “But if someone steals the 1919 McCallister Cup for the Colored Championship of the South, it’s going to be gone forever.”
Because of continuous work by enthusiasts such as Revel, Bob Kendrick in Kansas City and other researchers, more information of the league is continuously being found.
But with the years passing and the number of Negro Leagues players growing smaller, the Rickwood Field game may be the last chance for the public to celebrate those legends in person.
“I think at one time we had close to 50 players who were living in Birmingham,” Revel said. “We’ve got 12 now, and there’s only 144 left all over the country.”
Thanks to efforts by the city, Revel and MLB, those men will be honored this Thursday on national TV.
