Willie Mays dies at 93: MLB legend will get fitting sendoff at Rickwood Field, where his career took shape

O recent death of Willie Mays, a great baseball player and one of the brightest stars the sports world has ever known, is a curiosity of timing. Mays died at the ripe old age of 93, with a full life behind him, but he also died two days before he was to be honored at Birmingham’s Rickwood Field, the same place where his big league baseball career began.

On Thursday night, in the bituminous coal mines of Alabama where Mays was born and raised, Mays’ San Francisco Giants and St. Louis Cardinals will play a game at Rickwood Field. It will be a parallel celebration of Mays, Rickwood and the Negro Leagues, as Major League Baseball emphasized when it announced the event nearly a year ago. The ad said in part:

Major League Baseball announced today that Rickwood Field, the oldest professional stadium in the United States and former home of the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro Leagues, will be the site of a special regular season contest between the St. .This experience, scheduled for June 16th of next year, will include a variety of activities honoring the Negro Leagues and their greatest living player – Hall of Famer, Giants Legend, Birmingham native and Birmingham Black Barons player, Willie Mays. .

Mays’ own words also appeared in the league’s statement:

“I can’t believe it. I never thought in my lifetime I would see a Major League Baseball game being played on the same field where I played baseball as a teenager,” Mays said in the press release. “It has been 75 years since I played for the Birmingham Black Barons at Rickwood Field, and knowing that my Giants and Cardinals will play there and honor the legacy of the Negro Leagues and all those who came before them is truly exciting. for me. We can’t forget what got us here and that was the Negro Leagues for many of us.

The hope, of course, was that Mays would be able to attend, and until very recently that was the expectation. On Monday, however, Mays informed the San Francisco Chronicle that he would not be able to reach Birmingham:

“I won’t be able to go to Birmingham this year, but I will watch the game here in the Bay Area. My heart goes out to all of you who are honoring the Negro League players who should always be remembered, including all my teammates on the Black Barons, I would like to thank Major League Baseball, the Giants, the Cardinals and all fans who will be at Rickwood or watching the game. It will be a special day and I hope the children enjoy it and are inspired.”

Emphasize our. On Tuesday, we lost Willie Mays, which adds a veneer of mourning and solemnity to what will happen at Rickwood Field on Thursday night. Still, the night will be rich with appreciation, memories and stories of Mays’ unparalleled brilliance on the diamond and enormous importance to baseball. Most heartfelt will be the truth that right there, on that strip of outdoor grass near 2nd Avenue West in Birmingham, is where Mays’ journey to the sports pantheon began in earnest.

Mays was born in 1931, at the height of the Great Depression, and raised in the working-class industrial towns outside Birmingham. A talented multi-sport athlete in high school, Mays truly shined when he played alongside his father on a local industrial team and then on a nearby semi-pro team. He also spent some time with the Chattanooga Choo-Choos, who functioned as a somewhat haphazard farm team for the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro-League. It was there that he caught the attention of Piper Davis, manager of the Black Barons. “No one has ever seen anyone throw a ball out of the field like him, or get rid of it so quickly,” Davis said about May. The Black Barons signed Mays at age 16.

Mays’ father, however, insisted that his son remain sufficiently dedicated to finishing high school, and this led to an unconventional arrangement with the Black Barons. Mays, for the 1948 season, would be allowed to play only in the Black Barons’ weekend home games at Rickwood Field until the end of the school year. That reduced Mays’ first taste of high-level baseball to just that — an experience — but it was enough.

Mays made his Black Barons debut in the second game of a doubleheader. He went to left, batted seventh and recorded two hits off starting pitcher Chet Brewer. A broken leg suffered by regular center fielder Bobby Robinson soon after allowed Mays to occupy the middle position that would be his province for decades to come. Rickwood Field’s sprawling outfield allowed Mays to demonstrate his precocious gifts as a flycatcher and undoubtedly caught the attention of scouts arriving in the Negro Leagues in those months following Jackie Robinson’s 1947 debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

In the end, Mays played just 10 games for the Black Barons, and in that time, he hit .233/.313/.326 with a triple and a stolen base. The 10 hits he collected at his hometown of Rickwood Field were added to his official MLB tally from the league’s r.recent decision to incorporate Negro League statistics. That year’s Black Barons were a colossus, as they went 63-28-2 in the regular season. In the Negro American League Series, they beat the Kansas City Monarchs in eight games, and in that extended series Mays collected seven hits and walked six hits. In the Negro League World Series, Mays and the Black Barons fell to the Homestead Grays in five games.

These weren’t old May issues he published in 1948, but he was only 17 at the time. Just surviving against such advanced competition while playing once a week was a sign of future greatness. As we know, this greatness would be realized at a level that would exceed anyone’s imagination. In a material sense, Mays’ journey toward that greatness began at Rickwood Field — it’s where he scored his first 10 major league hits. It’s fitting, then, that that baseball bids him farewell in exactly the same place.

“It will be a special day and I hope the children enjoy it and are inspired by it.”