GREETINGS FROM…RICKWOOD FIELD by Russell Steur

GREETINGS FROM…RICKWOOD FIELD

By Russell Streur

 

 

Rickwood Field is one of the old ones.  Older than Wrigley.  Older than Fenway.  Old enough that Connie Mack, the grand old man of the game himself, paced off the infield in the Alabama spring of 1910 with a young Birmingham industrialist, Allen Harvey Woodward.

 

Woodward, born in 1876 in Wheeling, West Virginia, was the son of an iron company magnate.  Somewhere along the line, the younger Woodward acquired the nickname Rick and a passion for the game of baseball.  The father tolerated the nickname but disapproved of the game, especially when his son devoted more study behind the plate as the catcher on the University of the South’s baseball team than to his textbooks.  The elder Woodward yanked his son off the collegiate diamond and enrolled him at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  Rick survived the northern exile and the subsequent induction into the family business with his love for the game intact.  In 1909, at the age of 33, he purchased a controlling interest in Birmingham’s entry in the Southern Association, the Coal Barons.

 

The team had possibilities; their diamond, known with more accuracy than affection as the Slag Pile, did not.  Woodward’s first job was to build a home for his club.  He aimed for nothing less than to construct the finest park in the South.  Woodward didn’t waste any time, visiting Philadelphia’s Shibe Park in early 1910 and extracting a promise from Mack to help design the place.  Mack kept a promise to visit Birmingham shortly before the major league season began.

 

Blueprints for the stadium were completed a few days after Mack and Woodward walked the grounds.  The design placed the left field line 470 feet from home plate, center at 500 feet, and the right field line at 335 feet.  The outfield dimensions were not unusual for the dead ball era of the game.  Home runs were disdained at the time; doubles and triples were considered more exciting.  The 90 feet behind home plate to the grandstands was a different matter.  One catcher complained he needed a taxi to chase down a wild pitch.  Construction was completed within months and the steel and concrete stadium opened on August 10, 1910, with an estimated crowd of 10,000 fans in attendance.

 

 

Rickwood Field, Opening Day 1910.

 

 

Negro League baseball came to Rickwood before the decade was out.  A Labor Day doubleheader in 1919 between the Birmingham Black Barons and the Montgomery Grey Sox drew a crowd of 12,000.  The Black Barons club was a charter member when the Negro Southern League was founded the following year. 

 

Rotating between the Southern League and the Negro National and American Leagues, the Black Barons played at Rickwood for forty years. 

 

The team found its first success in 1927 behind the right arm of a youngster named Satchel Paige.  A year earlier, after a semi-pro stint with the Mobile Tigers, Paige had broken into the full-time game with the Chattanooga Black Lookouts, earning a salary of $50 a month.  The legendary hurler wasn’t a pitcher yet, just a thrower.  The Black Barons saw something the Lookouts didn’t and hired him away at a cost of $250 a month.  

 

It took time for Paige to find some control on the mound.  Jelly Gardner of the Chicago American Giants described facing Paige in those early days.  “One time [the ball came} at you, one time behind you, the next time at your feet. . . You had to be an acrobat to hit against him.”

 

Paige learned enough on the mound to lead the Barons into the 1927 Negro National League playoffs against the Chicago American Giants.  The Windy City team dispatched the Barons in a four-game sweep.

 

By the time he left the Barons in 1930, Paige was a star.

 

The Black Barons returned to prominence in the 1940s, winning wartime pennants in the Negro American League in 1943 and 1944, and again in 1948 with a teenage Willie Mays taking the first steps on his journey to Cooperstown.

 

Black Barons, The Negro League Baseball Players Association, Lackawanna County Stadium Give-Away, 1992.  Lester Lockett Card 3, Tommy Sampson Card 15, Artie Wilson Card 9.  

 

Third baseman Lester Lockett played in three East West All Star games and batted a league leading .408 in 1943.  Tommy Sampson was a four-time all-star from 1940 through 1943.  His career was cut short in 1945 when both of his legs were broken in an automobile accident.  Shortstop Artie Wilson played in four East West All Star games and won the Negro American League batting title in 1948 with a .402 average.  The next year, Wilson became the first Black player on the roster of the Oakland Oaks of the Pacific Coast League.  He batted .348 to win the league’s batting crown and also led the league with 51 stolen bases.

 

The white Barons played in the Southern Association from the organization’s beginning in 1901 for sixty seasons.   Along the way, they captured 10 pennants.

 

The Southern Association was no backwater.  Tobacco cards featured many players from the league.  Ted Breitenstein (left) tossed a no-hitter in his first major league start, with the St. Louis Browns in 1891, and repeated the feat seven seasons later with the Cincinnati Reds.  A three-time 20-game winner (and once a 30-game loser) in the majors, the pitcher had enough left in his arm to win 21 games with the New Orleans Pelicans in 1905 and 1906.

 

Hub Perdue (center) notched a 12-2 record for New Orleans in the war-shortened 1918 season and won the ERA title the following season with 1.56 mark in a 17-2 campaign. Courtesy of Grantland Rice, Perdue owns one of the most delightful monikers in the history of the game, The Gallatin Squash—Gallatin for his home in Tennessee, and Squash for reporting out-of-shape to training camp one spring.   Perdue reveled in the attention. 

 

The Barons were represented by Carlton Molesworth (right), an All-Star centerfielder for the pennant winning Barons in 1906 who later managed the club to pennants in 1912 and 1914.

 

While Black and white teams shared the field at Rickwood, fans were strictly segregated.  Separated by chicken wire from the rest of the seats, the right field bleachers were reserved for Black fans during white contests.  Arrangements were reversed when the Black Barons played.

 

Suffering from the fatal effects of major league integration, the Negro American League dissolved after the 1960 season. 

 

The Southern Association expired of racial animosity the following year, when segregation laws in Birmingham and New Orleans prohibited teams with Black players from taking the field.

 

The vision of Blacks and whites playing together on city sports fields had long terrified Birmingham’s bigoted leaders. 

 

Originally enacted in 1944, Section 597 of Birmingham’s City Code explicitly banned Blacks and whites from playing together in games of cards, dice, dominoes or checkers.  The act was amended in 1950 to extend the ban to “baseball, softball, football, basketball or similar games” as well.  Owners and operators who allowed Blacks and whites to play together were subject to fines, imprisonment or injunction.

 

In the fall of 1961, a federal court declared that Birmingham’s segregation of parks, playgrounds and golf courses was unconstitutional.  In response, City Mayor Art Hanes and Police Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor ordered all of Birmingham’s parks, swimming pools and other places of public recreation to close.   The order applied to Rickwood Field.  Ironically, Connor had been a radio announcer for the white Barons in the 1930s before embarking on a political career increasingly based on racial hatred and police brutality.  Under the reasoning that it was better for nobody to have a picnic lunch at a city park than for Blacks and whites to mingle on a baseball diamond, the closure remained in effect for two years. 

 

The ban would have lasted longer, except the voters of Birmingham chose otherwise.  Despite the endorsement of Governor George C. Wallace, Connor lost a run for mayor in April of 1963 to a less defiant opponent of integration.  A month later, city and civil rights leaders agreed on a plan to desegregate lunch counters, fitting rooms and other facilities at downtown department stores, to improve hiring and promotion of black employees, and to release still-jailed civil rights protestors.  But Ku Klux Klan bombings on Black churches and homes tolerated under Connor’s watch continued, including the horrific attack on the 16th Street Baptist Church which killed four young girls preparing for Sunday services on September 15, 1963.  Other murders and bombings received less national publicity. 

 

Racial tensions still ran high when Charlie Finley brought the Barons back to Rickwood Field in 1964 as a member of the integrated South Atlantic League.  Section 597 remained on the books but was ignored by city, team and league.  

 

Blue Moon Odom (Topps 1967, Card 282), Bert Campaneris (Topps 1969, Card 423) and Tommie Reynolds (Topps 1965, Card 333) were all members of the groundbreaking 1964 Birmingham A’s.

 

Poor attendance forced the Barons off the field after the 1965 season.  Rebranded as the A’s, the team returned in 1967 before moving up the road to Chattanooga after the 1975 season.  The Barons name returned to Rickwood in 1980 when Birmingham poached the Rebels from Montgomery.  Age finally caught up to the stadium and the Barons moved to a suburban park in 1988.  There, the Rickwood story might have ended.  Instead, no one saw how to make a dollar by tearing the place down, and plenty of fans wanted to keep the place standing. 

 

In 1992, civic leaders and businessmen including Rick Woodward’s grandson began managing the filed as a living baseball museum under the name Friends of Rickwood.  Millions of dollars spent for maintenance and restoration through the years have allowed the park to be used for high school and college games, baseball camps, special exhibitions and the Rickwood Classic, when the Barons return to the field for a festive turn-back-the-clock game.

 

 

All of which is why, now, in the early Southern spring, a fan of the game can walk past the ticket windows beneath the park’s Spanish Mission facade, up 2^nd Avenue West, through a third base gate, and watch the Miles College Golden Bears take on the Albany State University Golden Rams in a Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference tilt between HBCU schools. 

 

And there, beneath the enormous cantilevered light standards first erected when Franklin Roosevelt was President and with the freshly-painted Budweiser and elegantly-scripted Tutwiler Hotel signs on the outfield walls, the visitor can hear the long strides of every runner on the basepaths, a century of echoes,  and a Saturday afternoon at the country’s oldest ballpark brings something new to the game.

 

 

Tuff Stuff Magazine, Classic Baseball Stadiums, Card 30 (August 1992)

 

 

Photographs by the author.  All other images from the author’s collections.