Willie Mays, Birmingham and Rickwood Field: Baseball Honors a Legend in His Hometown

In the late innings of a minor league game on Tuesday night at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Ala., fans throughout the grandstand, suddenly and almost in unison, began staring at the news on their phones: The great Willie Mays had died, at 93, in California.

An inning later, a tribute video played on the scoreboard overlooking the outfield where Mays played his first professional game as a teenage phenom for the Birmingham Black Barons, and the loudspeaker blared “Say Hey (the Willie Mays Song),” recorded in 1954 by the R&B group the Treniers.

“I was shocked,” said Randy Ferguson, 70, a member of the Friends of Rickwood, the nonprofit organization that oversees the ancient ballpark. He was standing outside a small museum underneath the stands, where the next day fans would line up to see Mays’s flower-draped Hall of Fame plaque, the first time it has left the wall in Cooperstown since it was installed at his induction in 1979. “I have chill bumps. I can’t think of any place to be than here.”

At 114 years old, Rickwood Field is the nation’s oldest professional ballpark, the first place Mays played pro ball and the last ballpark still standing that he called home. To honor the legacy of the Negro Leagues, Major League Baseball scheduled a game in Mays’s hometown between the San Francisco Giants, Mays’s old team, and the St. Louis Cardinals, that will be played on Thursday.

The Rev. William H. Greason, 99, who was the first Black pitcher for the Cardinals in the 1950s, has been a pastor in Birmingham for more than a half-century since retiring from baseball. He had been hoping to see his old friend this week, at the ballpark where they played together.