Greene County Democrat

Tag: Josh Gibson

  • Newswire : Nearly 200 Baseball Hall of Famers have played at Rickwood Field in Birmingham

    Willie Mays in Birmingham Barons uniform, 1948

    By Solomon Crenshaw Jr. | The Birmingham Times

    Generations of minor league baseball players have lived with the dream that they’ll get called up to the big leagues, playing in a Major League Baseball (MLB) game.
    Even announcers like Curt Bloom, the radio voice of the Birmingham Barons, had that dream, which was fulfilled two seasons ago when he was part of the broadcast crew for the Chicago White Sox, the parent club of the Barons.
    But Bloom admits that he couldn’t imagine that Birmingham’s Rickwood Field, the longtime home of the Birmingham Barons and the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro Leagues, would get the call to host an MLB game.
    “I never thought that Rickwood would get the call to the big leagues,” Bloom said. “It was our city jewel, our city gem. If you want to come see a game where Willie Mays played, you come to Birmingham. Now, come June 20, if you want to see where Willie Mays played, turn on your TV.”
    Mays is one of 182 Baseball Hall of Famers who have played at Rickwood. Those legends include Ty Cobb, Rogers Hornsby, Satchel Paige, Oscar Charleston, Mule Suttles, Josh Gibson, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Ted Williams, Stan Musial, Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Roberto Clemente, Rollie Fingers and Reggie Jackson.
    Willie Mays, died last week at 93, two days before the game to honor him and other Negro League players who got their start at Rickwood. Mays was revered for his hitting, fielding and base runni9ng abilities. He finished his career with 3286 hits, 660 home runs, 12 golden gloves, and a batting average of .302. Mays’ career spanned from 1951 to 1972 with the Giants, where he won a World Series in 1954, was a 24-time All-Star, and was a two-time National League MVP. 
    And while he’s not in the Baseball Hall of Fame, Bo Jackson played at Rickwood as a prep star for McAdory High School, a collegiate slugger for the Auburn Tigers and as a pro with the Memphis Chicks. Jackson was the 1989 MLB All Star Game MVP with a leadoff homerun.
    Another football player, Auburn University’s and the New Orleans Saints’ Frank Warren, played a football game at Rickwood. His Phillips High School Red Raiders fell 7-3 to the West End Lions on Sept. 17, 1976.
    While those legends all got a chance at the big league America’s oldest baseball park is indeed getting its chance as it hosts the St. Louis Cardinals and the San Francisco Giants on June 20 in the MLB Tribute to the Negro Leagues.
    This is no preseason and it’s no exhibition. This is a real MLB game that has come to Birmingham. The game is part of a three-day baseball extravaganza where the real stars of the show are the ballpark that sits a block south of Third Avenue West and north of Lomb Avenue in the Fairview Neighborhood and the Negro League teams and players who applied their craft there.
    Where Hall of Famers Played
    Gerald Watkins is chairman of the Friends of Rickwood, the organization that has worked to maintain the baseball gem that is Rickwood.
    Rickwood Field opened August 18, 1910, to a wildly enthusiastic crowd that saw their beloved Birmingham Barons beat the Montgomery Climbers, and unknowingly made history. Rickwood was the newest ballpark in the land that day, and 114 years later, stands as the oldest baseball park in America.
    Industrialist A.H. “Rick” Woodward, for whom the ballpark was named, was not only the owner of the Barons. He never lost his passion for playing the game of his youth, inserting himself into the starting lineup on Rickwood’s opening day.
    Woodward threw the first pitch ever in his new ballpark. It was not a ceremonial pitch, but it was a ball.
    Since opening, Rickwood Field has been home to the Minor League Birmingham Barons, the Negro League Birmingham Black Barons and the Birmingham A’s, which was in the farm system of the Oakland A’s. When UAB Baseball began under coach Harry “The Hat” Walker, the Blazers played at Rickwood.
    “Rickwood Field was a true Field of Dreams,” Watkins said, “where someone like Willie Mays dreamed of playing in the big leagues.”
    The Birmingham Barons, a Double-A affiliate of the Chicago White Sox, played their final season at Rickwood in 1987 before heading to the Hoover Met. The Barons moved to their current home – Birmingham’s Regions Field – in 2013, when the team won a league-best seventh Southern League championship.
    “It’s a special place for baseball fans and history fans,” Watkins said. “Even folks who are on a Civil Rights trail will come here after they go to the (16th Street Baptist) Church and they go to the Civil Rights (Institute and) the Negro Southern League Museum.
    “We’re a tourist spot. A lot of folks don’t see that but we really are,” he said. “Over the years, we’ve had as many as 38 states represented and eight foreign countries. If you look at our guest book today, you won’t see anybody from local places. You’re gonna see people from out of town or out of the country.”
    These days, the message on Watkins’ cellphone refers callers to Major League Baseball in their pursuit of tickets to the Giants-Cardinals game. Alabama residents entered a lottery to have a chance at buying tickets to that game. That allotment of tickets sold out in 45 minutes.
    “The teams (Cardinals and Giants) have an amount and Major League Baseball has an amount,” Watkins said. “Those numbers are not known but they come out of the total somewhere, some way. In the overall ticket numbers, those come out before the (public) tickets go on sale.”
    Television Experience
    Capacity at Rickwood Field will be approximately 8,100, down from about 9,500 before the renovations.
    “We have lost some seating capacity due to the improvements that we made, allowing better access for handicapped individuals,” the Friends of Rickwood chairman said. “We will have to have areas for more press and there’ll be some VIP areas that we’ve never had to deal with before. But, as MLB looks at it, they’re thinking about a television game.”
    That television experience will be enhanced by a Jumbotron that will be temporally installed in right centerfield.
    While access to the Major League game is limited, the MLB (Minor League Baseball) game between the Biscuits and Barons and the Barnstorm Birmingham softball contest will have greater access.
    Prices for Barnstorm Birmingham tickets are $24 in a nod to Birmingham’s own, the great Willie Mays, whose jersey number was 24. As with the other games, MLB will make a select number of tickets for Barnstorm Birmingham available for free to local youth and community groups.
    Watkins said he’s learned from his conversations with Major League Baseball that it is interested in coming back for a second game.
    “There’s no guarantees, but we have been told that the main thing we have to do is keep the field up at a Major League level,” he said. “That means we can’t overplay on it. That means we’ve got to make sure it’s cut properly, it’s watered properly, all the chemicals are applied properly.”
    Simply put, Birmingham must keep its gem polished.

  • Newswire: Major League Baseball elevates the Negro Leagues

    By: Northstar News

    Baseball player Jackie Robinson (1950s)

    This is a dynamic time for Major League Baseball.

    The Cleveland Indians will drop their racially offensive name and mascot sometime in the near future after 105 years of offending Native Americans, and Major League Baseball has finally elevated the Negro Leagues.

    Major League Baseball officials said it was “correcting a longtime oversight in the game’s history” by elevating the Negro Leagues on the centennial of their founding. The league consisted of seven teams.

    After Jackie Robinson (pictured above) became the first Black player to be signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers, tthe league began to dissolve.

    What does all this mean? Major League Baseball and Elias Sports will pour over historical records and determinate how to incorporate them into Major League Baseball.

    Some of the players who are expected to wind up in Major League Baseball, include Josh Gibson, who was the greatest of the home run hitters and Satchel Paige, an all-time great pitcher, who struck out 150 players.

    Robinson wore a baseball cap with a metal lining to protect him in case pitches aimed as his head or fans through garbage at him.

  • Newswire: Barack Obama, other celebs tip caps to Negro Leagues’ 100th Anniversary

    By: Jim LItke, AP

    Former President Barack Obama tips his cap

    Barack Obama tipped his cap. So did three other former U.S. presidents and a host of prominent civil rights leaders, entertainers and sports greats in a virtual salute to the 100-year anniversary of the founding of baseball’s Negro Leagues.

    The campaign launched Monday with photos and videos from, among others, Hank Aaron, Rachel Robinson, Derek Jeter, Colin Powell, Michael Jordan, Obama and fellow former Presidents George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter at tippingyourcap.com.

    On the receiving end of those tributes are many of the Negro Leagues’ greatest alumni: Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, “Cool Papa” Bell and Jackie Robinson, who began with the Kansas City Monarchs and went on to break the color barrier in the major leagues with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Not long after, with many of its best players gradually following Robinson’s path, the Negro Leagues ceased operations.

    Singer Tony Bennett, showing his heart, tips a San Francisco Giants cap. Californian Billie Jean King opts for the Los Angeles Dodgers. Clinton said he chose a Chicago Cubs cap in honor of Ernie Banks, the late Hall of Famer who got his start in the Negro Leagues.

    But, Clinton added: “This cap is for Hillary, too, when finally, the Cubs won the championship. Long before that, the Negro Leagues made baseball better and America better.”

    The celebration was moved online after a major league-wide tribute to baseball’s Black pioneers scheduled for June 27 was shelved — along with the games — because of the coronavirus pandemic. At first, Negro Leagues Baseball Museum president Bob Kendrick worried that his longstanding plan to honor the men and women who battled long odds for a game of their own would have to be postponed, at best.

    “In our game, there’s nothing more honorable than tipping your cap,” Kendrick said. “And once I realized that national day of recognition was going to fall by the wayside, I thought, ‘OK, maybe we can do it next year.’ But that didn’t really do it.

    “So then I thought, ’How about a virtual tip of the cap?‴ Kendrick paused, then chuckled. “And let me say here and now, there is no way I could have done this myself. I could not be more proud of the response.”

    Kendrick got the lift he was looking for from communications specialist Dan McGinn and longtime NLBM supporter Joe Posnanski, a sports writer for The Athletic and author of “The Soul of Baseball,” chronicling his yearlong road trip promoting the Kansas City-based museum and the stories behind it with legendary Negro League star, the late Buck O’Neil.

    O’Neil was the driving force behind the museum for decades. The NLBM has expanded several times since Rube Foster, as skilled an executive as he was a baseball pitcher, founded the first Negro National League at a YMCA on the same site in 1920.

    Kendrick said his personal favorite tribute came from Jackie Robinson’s family.

    “It’s Rachel tipping her cap, but there’s four generations of Robinson women in that video talking about our common cause and it evokes the kind of emotion at a time when our country really needs it,” he said.

    “And you know,” he added a moment later, “it’s funny how this whole thing worked out. I always felt if there was going to be conversations about race in sports, the Negro Leagues should be at the center, because that’s the story: They triumphed over adversity.

    “I got to know so many of them, and not a single guy that I met ever harbored ill will, at least to the point where they let it block their path. Everybody else thought the major leagues were better, but you couldn’t convince them,” he concluded. “They just wanted the chance to prove they could play this game as well as anybody else.”

    They did, forging a rich legacy that will echo with a new generation thanks to something as simple as the virtual tip of a cap.