Major League Baseball is celebrating the Negro Leagues and legendary Hall of Famer Willie Mays with a game at historic Rickwood Field on Thursday evening.
The San Francisco Giants and St. Louis Cardinals will face off at the former home of the Birmingham Black Barons in Alabama for a regular season clash, with several tributes to Mays, who died earlier this week, and the Negro Leagues. Here is what to know about the game.
When and where can the game be viewed?
The game will be aired on Fox on Thursday night, with a first pitch scheduled for 7:15 p.m. Eastern time. It will be played in Birmingham, Alabama. It is one of several special games the MLB hosts throughout the regular season, including the London games and the Field of Dreams game in previous years.
What makes Rickwood Field historic?
Rickwood Field is the oldest standing professional baseball park and was the home of the Negro League’s Birmingham Black Barons from 1924 until 1960. The ballpark will have a capacity of 8,300 for the Giants-Cardinals game.
The historic ballpark recently received a roughly $5 million renovation to update the field while also keeping the charm of the ballpark intact. Updates to the ballpark include new padded outfield walls, new dugouts, a digital scoreboard, and accessibility improvement, according to the MLB.
Honors for Willie Mays
The game was already slated to have tributes to Negro League and MLB greats like Mays, but with his recent death at 93, there will be an emphasized focus on the all-time great ball player.
Mays played for the Black Barons in 1948, helping them reach the Negro League World Series at the age of 17, before joining the MLB’s New York Giants — which later moved to San Francisco in 1958 with Mays on the team. While with the Giants, the “Say Hey Kid” made “the catch” in Game 1 of the 1954 World Series, which Mays and the Giants would win in four games.
When the MLB announced the special game at Rickwood Field last year, Mays told MLB.com it was “emotional” to hear that the Giants and Cardinals would play at the ballpark where he got his professional start.
“I can’t believe it. I never thought I’d see in my lifetime a Major League Baseball game being played on the very field where I played baseball as a teenager,” Mays said in 2023.
“It has been 75 years since I played for the Birmingham Black Barons at Rickwood Field, and to learn that my Giants and the Cardinals will play a game there and honor the legacy of the Negro Leagues and all those who came before them is really emotional for me. We can’t forget what got us here, and that was the Negro Leagues for so many of us,” he added.
Giants manager Bob Melvin told MLB.com recently that he believes his Giants are the “perfect team” to play at Rickwood and honor Mays’s legacy.
“He probably inspired me to play baseball and like it as much as I did,” Melvin said. “I was a huge Willie Mays fan. For us to be able to go to Rickwood and celebrate that game where he played and all that’s involved now with the Negro Leagues and the stats being incorporated, I think we’re the perfect team to go there.”
A pregame ceremony on Thursday will honor Mays’s legacy on the baseball diamond and beyond.
MLB tributes to the Negro Leagues
In recent years, the MLB has increasingly celebrated the Negro Leagues, which saw iconic players such as Mays, Hank Aaron, and Satchel Paige, among others. The Negro Leagues grew in popularity and produced top-tier talent, as black players were barred from the MLB.
When the MLB began racial integration, beginning with Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in 1947 with his debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Negro Leagues began to wane in popularity.
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Last month, the MLB updated its record books to include the statistics of 2,300 Negro League players after it proclaimed in 2020 that the Negro Leagues were at major league level.
As part of the tributes to the Negro Leagues at the game on Thursday, the Giants and Cardinals will be wearing uniforms of Negro League teams from San Francisco and St. Louis. The Giants will wear the uniforms in honor of the San Francisco Sea Lions, while the Cardinals will wear uniforms honoring the St. Louis Stars.
