Gary Lloyd
I was idling in my truck beside Block 4 at historic Oak Hill Cemetery, staring at downtown Birmingham.
I had finished some Trussville-related historical research early and was thinking of where to go next. Just one nearby place came to mind: Rickwood Field.
I drove nine minutes and arrived at a mostly empty baseball stadium — the oldest ballpark in America — and planned to take some photos of the forest-green exterior, the ticket windows and whatever else I could see from the intersection of Second Avenue West and Twelfth Street West. Instead, I found an open gate and cars parked behind the right-field bleachers. So, naturally, I drove in. I walked inside to find numerous Friends of Rickwood Field members and officials ready to work with rakes and pressure washer wands. I had a digital camera and tripod. Oops.
I thought I was going to be escorted out, an innocent trespasser begging for forgiveness when he had not asked permission. Instead, I was given a personal tour, through the press box and atop the roof, on the field and in the gift shop. I was given pointers on where to explore — beyond the current outfield wall to see the original concrete outfield wall, for example — and given free reign to wander every foot of the most historical diamond in America, which saw its first pitch on Aug. 18, 1910. I lapped the stadium twice — once on the field, once through the bleachers — sat in the dugouts, FaceTimed my dad from the outfield, read a newspaper in the visitors’ locker room and filled my camera with a hundred photos.
It was June 17. On June 20, Major League Baseball announced that a regular season game between the San Francisco Giants and St. Louis Cardinals will be played June 20, 2024, at Rickwood Field, a likely tribute to the Birmingham Black Barons and Negro Leagues.
Baseball plus history? If you know me, you know I was hooked. I posted about it that night on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram. Anything to promote local history. I’ve stayed in touch with the folks I met that day, and I’ve connected with some that I didn’t meet that day but plan to meet soon. One of the latter even tags me in his Facebook posts from Rickwood Field so I don’t miss out. What a community.
Since my June visit, I have used my Newspapers.com account to dig into the stadium’s history, and I’m still more hooked than I thought I ever would be. I mean, if you search “Rickwood Field” in Alabama newspapers since 1910, you get 13,088 results. That’s an average of 116 newspaper mentions per year for 113 years. The content-producing portion of my brain was working overtime. I had grandiose ideas of content I could produce — histories, features, even a book — from this one stadium. I suppose I still have those ideas.
But I’ll leave you with one passage. The Aug. 18, 1910, issue of The Birmingham News printed a page dedicated to the grand opening of the stadium, and under the headline “Rickwood Opens Today,” the second sentence read, “Lovers of the national sport in the city are celebrating the event in great style, and others, whether willing or not, are being drawn along with the tidal wave of enthusiasm and pride.”
It’s 2023, and that enthusiasm and pride are still drawing us along.
- Gary Lloyd is the author of six books and a contributing writer to the Cahaba Sun.
