Rickwood Field: America's Oldest Ballpark

Rickwood Field opened on August eighteenth, nineteen ten, in Birmingham, Alabama, and it is still standing. More than a century later it remains the oldest professional baseball park in the United States, a concrete and steel structure that has outlasted every major league stadium built in the same era and most of those built since.

Rick Woodward, the Birmingham industrialist who owned the Barons minor league club, built the park and named it after himself. He hired architects to design something that could hold its own against the major league parks going up in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, and the result was a stadium that drew more than ten thousand people on opening day and felt, by intention, like the real thing.

For decades, two teams shared the park. The Birmingham Barons played in the white Southern Association. The Birmingham Black Barons played in the Negro Leagues, scheduling their home games around the Barons' calendar. The two teams never shared the field. The Black Barons were, by any measure, one of the most successful franchises in Black baseball. Leroy Satchel Paige pitched here in the nineteen twenties before his legend was established. Willie Mays played for the Black Barons as a teenager, starting in nineteen forty-eight, for the team that had developed him, before the New York Giants signed him in nineteen fifty and called him up in nineteen fifty-one.

The Barons left Rickwood for a suburban stadium in nineteen eighty-eight. The old park was preserved rather than demolished, and it has been used since for special events, Negro Leagues tributes, and old-timers' games. In June of twenty twenty-four, Major League Baseball staged a regular-season game here between the San Francisco Giants and the St. Louis Cardinals, celebrating the legacy of Willie Mays and the ballpark where his career began.