Major League Baseball is coming to America’s oldest ballpark — here’s why it matters
This week, in Birmingham, Ala., baseball fans will gather for a game like no other. The San Francisco Giants and St. Louis Cardinals will play at Rickwood Field, the oldest professional baseball park in the United States.
But that’s not all that makes Rickwood special. It is also the historic home of the Birmingham Black Barons, which played in the Negro Leagues between the 1920s and the 1960s — and that included baseball legend Willie Mays.
The game will be a significant moment in baseball history, as it will be the first regular-season Major League Baseball (MLB) game to be played there. The game will honour the Negro Leagues, which were made up of Black players who were excluded from the majors. In 1947, Jackie Robinson broke MLB’s colour barrier when he debuted for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
It will be held on June 20, a day after Juneteenth, a holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States.
“I think it’s going to be a monumental occasion on Thursday,” said Gerald Watkins, chair and executive director of Friends of Rickwood, a non-profit dedicated to preserving the park.
“This is a way to share a great story, bring attention to MLB that hasn’t been brought before, and educate a lot of people in America on the Negro Leagues and their importance.”
Here’s what you need to know.
Why is this happening?
It all goes back to the Field of Dreams. On Aug. 13, 2021, the Chicago White Sox and the New York Yankees played a regular-season game in Dyersville, Iowa, the site of the beloved 1989 movie, Field of Dreams.
“As a sport that is proud of its history linking generations, Major League Baseball is excited to bring a regular-season game to the site of Field of Dreams,” commissioner Rob Manfred said at the time.
“We look forward to celebrating the movie’s enduring message of how baseball brings people together at this special cornfield in Iowa.”
The White Sox won 9-8. The event gave Watkins an idea: What if MLB came to Rickwood?
“I envisioned Willie Mays, standing in the outfield, dreaming about being a big-league ballplayer,” Watkins told CBC News.
“I pitched that to MLB, and they got interested and came down, and we’ve been working with them nonstop to try to get ready. I’d say we’re in the eighth inning now. We’re almost there.”
The 10,800-seat ballpark, which has been renovated, will be filled with all sorts of nostalgia, like copies of old jerseys to help fans connect with its history.
The players will be wearing special uniforms that pay homage to the Negro Leagues in their respective cities.
The Giants and Cardinals will be wearing Negro League throwback uniforms for the MLB at Rickwood Field game<br><br>The threads will serve as a tribute to the San Francisco Sea Lions and St. Louis Stars Negro Leagues teams <a href=”https://t.co/Om8PL1evIK”>pic.twitter.com/Om8PL1evIK</a>
—@MLB
What makes Rickwood Field so special?
The park, which opened in 1910, has been home to 182 players who became Hall of Famers both in MLB and the Negro Leagues. But it’s never been home to a major league team.
Some of the biggest and most memorable names in baseball history have played there, including Babe Ruth, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson and Jay Dean, better known as Dizzy Dean, a pitcher who helped the Cardinals win a World Series title in 1934.
Both the Birmingham Barons and Black Barons played there, filling the stands every weekend. Willie Mays joined the Black Barons in 1948 as a teenager and soon signed with the San Francisco Giants; he played with the team from 1951 to 1972.
Mays, now 93, said that growing up nearby, Rickwood Field was “like a church.”
“The first big thing I ever put my mind to was to play at Rickwood Field. It wasn’t a dream. It was something I was going to do,” he said Monday on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“Rickwood Field is where I played my first home game, and playing there was IT; everything I ever wanted.”
A message from Willie Mays: <a href=”https://t.co/ar4dsAJDH1″>pic.twitter.com/ar4dsAJDH1</a>
—@SFGiants
Mays won’t be able to attend Thursday’s game, saying he doesn’t move as well as he used to. He will, however, be watching on television.
What else is MLB doing to honour Negro Leagues players?
Earlier this month, MLB announced it will update its database to include seven Negro Leagues to correct a “long-time oversight.” Its release will co-ordinate with the Rickwood Field game.
All of this is welcome news for Ferguson “Fergie” Jenkins, the first Canadian player inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.
Major League Baseball is incorporating statistics from the Negro Leagues into its official record books. Ferguson Jenkins, the Hall of Fame Canadian pitcher whose father played for an all-Black baseball team in Chatham, Ont., hopes these additions spur young athletes to learn more about players from that era in baseball.
“There’s just a lot of different past history, a lot of things that people don’t know about the game of baseball and how it evolved and didn’t have players of colour play,” he told CBC News.
“I don’t think the game would be as strong [without it].”
Major League Baseball has officially added statistics from seven ‘Negro Leagues’ to its official records. The change resulted in Josh Gibson becoming the all-time leader in multiple stats, passing the likes of Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb.
Now in his 80s, Jenkins has fond memories of pitching at Rickwood Field during the 1964 All-Star Game with the Chattanooga Lookouts. He was also a guest of honour at the park in 2013 for the 18th Annual Rickwood Classic, honouring the Birmingham Black Barons.
Will Thursday’s game have a lasting impact?
Rickwood Field is already a popular tourist destination, but Watkins of the Friends of Rickwood hopes the MLB game will launch it into another league.
He also hopes it will encourage more Black youth to take an interest in baseball and, perhaps someday, play on professional teams themselves.
But even if they only watch part of the game or Google a Negro Leagues player, that will help them understand history, he said.
“I think when all of this is said and done, America is going to have a different view of baseball, and the African American kids and fans are going to have a more inclusive feel,” he said. “And hopefully, it’ll be better for our entire game.”
The proportion of Black players currently in MLB is at one of its lowest points, he noted. Indeed, a spokesperson for the league recently told the Los Angeles Daily News that about six per cent of its players are Black.
Other efforts are also afoot to further representation in baseball. The non-profit Players’ Alliance emerged in 2020 to address equity and inclusion in baseball; the following year, MLB pledged at least $100 million US to the organization over 10 years to increase Black representation.
Published at Tue, 18 Jun 2024 08:00:17 +0000
Nisreen Ramadan Abu Kashif, 48, gathered her nine children to venture down the road in Khan Younis to look for food on Monday.
Most of the children walked barefoot, but their mother was focused on their empty stomachs.
After nearly nine months of the Israel-Hamas war and very little aid making it into Gaza, she worries about feeding her family. Every day, each child carries their own pot — small ones for the younger siblings and larger ones for the eldest — while navigating dusty rubble, in hopes of cobbling together their next meal.
“We were living off the aid that came through the border, and now, there’s no border,” Abu Kashif told Mohamed El Saife, a freelance videographer with CBC. “The situation is more than terrible.”
The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said Sunday it would halt its military operations from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. local time along the stretch of the road that includes the Kerem Shalom border crossing and the Salah al-Din highway, a major north-south road. The pause, which it said began Monday, is meant to get aid into the strip.
The border crossing has become a major pipeline for aid since Israel expanded its operations in Rafah last month.
However, despite the brief reprieve, aid organizations said they’re still running into significant barriers trying to get enough water, food and supplies to those in need.
The military later clarified the pause would not stop the fighting in Rafah, once a place of refuge for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
“We created this creative solution in order to make sure that the international organizations are feeling safe to provide the distribution of humanitarian aid from the Kerem Shalom crossing,” IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari said in an interview with CBC News on Monday.
“We are fighting Hamas, not the people of Gaza…. We will continue to facilitate humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza.”
The flow of UN aid in the devastated Palestinian territory has been heavily squeezed since Israel’s operation began in Rafah, the key gateway into Gaza from Egypt. Israel is coming under mounting global pressure to ease the crisis as humanitarian agencies warn of looming famine.
Jens Laerke, a UN spokesperson, told The Associated Press on Sunday that Israel’s announcement was welcome, but that “no aid has been dispatched from Kerem Shalom today,” with no other details. Laerke said that the UN hopes for further concrete measures from Israel, including smoother checkpoint operations and regular entry of fuel.
Nisreen Ramadan Abu Kashif says she’s worried about feeding her family and fears that aid organizations can’t keep up with demand. ‘I wonder from where do I secure food and water for them,’ she told freelance journalist Mohamed El Saife.
Abu Kashif said water is hard to come by in Khan Younis — even seawater.
“All of the Palestinian people are suffering from a lack of entry of the aid because they closed the [Rafah] border.”
Israel has said it hasn’t limited humanitarian supplies for civilians in Gaza. It has blamed aid organizations for failing to deliver, or Hamas for intercepting shipments to fuel its own operation against Israel.
UNRWA, the main organization delivering aid to Gaza, said it received a notification from the Israeli military about the daytime pause, but that it was in English only, and was soon followed by the government contradicting that instruction.
“There has been information that such a decision has been taken, but the political level says none of this decision has been taken,” UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini said in a news conference in Oslo on Monday.
“So for the time being, I can tell you that hostilities continue in Rafah and in the south of Gaza. And that operationally, nothing has changed yet.”
Aid trucks are not getting into Gaza, strangling food, water and medical supplies. Some truck drivers avoid areas where Israeli settlers attack aid trucks while Egypt and Israel blame each other for keeping the main Rafah crossing into Gaza closed after Israel captured it a week ago.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday criticized the plans for a pause.
An Israel-Hamas agreement to end the war still appears distant, eight months in, despite international pressure on both sides to accept a ceasefire deal. Israel’s military campaign has killed more than 37,000 people in Gaza, according to the local health ministry, and laid waste to much of the enclave.
Israel launched its assault after Hamas-led fighters killed some 1,200 people, by Israeli tallies, in a surprise attack on Oct. 7.
Back in Khan Younis, Abu Kashif lined up at a local soup kitchen, her only option in the strip for food. Two men stirred the contents of the pots over an open fire. They were serving a vegetable soup.
“The organizations can’t keep up with the needs of the kids and the needs of the residents,” she said.
“I’m very worried.”
Israel has promised daily ‘tactical pauses’ along a stretch of the Gaza border to help with the flow of humanitarian aid. But not everyone is convinced the measure will actually help Palestinians who are struggling to survive the humanitarian crisis.
Published at Mon, 17 Jun 2024 23:41:52 +0000
