Rickwood Field: A Century in America's Oldest Ballpark (review)

In this light and entertaining book, Birmingham native Allen Barra provides a nostalgic look at the city's historic Rickwood Field. Built in 1910 and modeled after Philadelphia's famous Shibe Park, Rickwood was the first steel and concrete ballpark in the minor leagues. It is still used for baseball today, including one minor-league game per year, making Rickwood America's oldest ballpark still in use. Barra describes Allen Harvey "Rick" Woodward's construction of the park, his subsequent renovations of it, and those of his successor, Eddie Glennon. He deftly tells the stories of the Birmingham Barons, the Birmingham Black Barons, and the many baseball immortals, including Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Dizzy Dean, Oscar Charleston, Willie Mays, and Satchel Paige, among many others, who played there. Barra successfully weaves these baseball tales into the fabric of Birmingham's social, economic, and political history.

In addition to the fast-paced narrative, the book is profusely illustrated with more than fifty black and white photos. It also includes four excellent and informative appendixes. The first appendix is a compelling essay by David Brewer, executive director of the Friends of Rickwood, on his organization's efforts to restore and preserve Rickwood Field. The second appendix is Lorenzo "Piper" Davis's first-person account of his long career with the Black Barons. The third appendix contains recollections of Rickwood by thirty-five people, some famous like Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson and the irrepressible Jim Piersall, and some not so famous like longtime Birmingham baseball fans Lamar Smith and Joe DeLeonard. The fourth appendix describes eight minor-league parks around the country that merit preservation and restoration.

Rickwood Field is not a serious piece of historical scholarship. It has an extremely limited bibliography of secondary works, and it omits such basic books as Zipp Newman and Frank McGowan's The House of Barons and 50 Years of Professional Baseball in Alabama Since 1900 and Bill O'Neal's The Southern League. The book has very few source notes. Numerous factual errors mar the text. Barra asserts that the Southern Association used the Shaughnessy Playoff system for the first time in 1948. In fact, the Southern Association implemented the Shaughnessy system in 1935. This mistake is especially surprising since the Barons won the playoffs in 1936. Hank Aaron did not play for the Indianapolis Clowns in 1953. Actually, Aaron left the Clowns and entered the Braves minor-league system midway through the 1952 season, and he spent the following year leading Jacksonville to a South Atlantic League pennant. More troubling still is Barra's discussion of the first integrated games at Rickwood in the spring of 1954. He argues that these games violated a Birmingham city ordinance prohibiting mixed-race sporting events. In fact, the city council repealed the noxious Jim Crow law in January 1954; the integrated games played at Rickwood in April were perfectly legal. Birmingham's white citizens voted by a three-to-one margin to restore the color line in sports in early June in direct response to the Supreme Court's seminal Brown v. Board of Education ruling of May 17, 1954, that declared school segregation unconstitutional. What is particularly frustrating about these and other errors is the correct factual information is readily available in numerous secondary works.

Barra also allows hometown pride to cloud his judgment. He makes conclusions that are questionable if not untenable. For example, he writes, "Simply put, the heart of the black baseball world was Birmingham, and it was forged in its mines and mills" (57). Really? There were more black teams and more successful black teams both on the field and in the counting house in Chicago, Pittsburgh, Kansas City, and Indianapolis. Another example of Barra's hyperbole is his assertion that Birmingham alone produced so many outstanding black players between 1920 and 1940 that they could have filled out at least one major league team and maybe more.

Barra's book could have been...