Birmingham Barons to Return to Rickwood Field for Negro Leagues Tribute in 2025

By Josh Jackson | MLB.com Minor League Baseball is coming back to America’s oldest professional ballpark in 2025. The Birmingham Barons, Double-A affiliate of the Chicago White Sox, will host the Rocket City Trash Pandas (Angels) at Rickwood Field in a tribute to the Negro Leagues on June 4, 2025, the team announced on Thursday. Between 1996-2016 and 2018-19, the Barons played one game — the Rickwood Classic — at Rickwood Field each Minor League season. As a ballpark that was the homefield of a Negro Leagues franchise that competed for several seasons on circuits now recognized as Major League level, Rickwood Field is a living monument to the thousands of Birmingham fans who filled its stands and the hundreds of Black baseball pioneers who competed between its lines — including Baseball Hall of Famers Satchel Paige, Willie Wells and Mule Suttles. Willie Mays, who grew up about five miles away from Rickwood Field in Fairfield, Ala., also played his first games as a professional there. Mays joined the Birmingham Black Barons at age 17 in 1948. Opened in 1910, Rickwood Field was the home of both the historical Birmingham Barons and, beginning in 1923, the Birmingham Black Barons of...