How Hollywood saved Rickwood Field

The night was dark, the rain was falling hard. It was no time to be visiting the deteriorating west side of Birmingham, Ala. And with the water pouring into a vacant, ancient baseball stadium, pooling on its unkempt field and within its worn walls, it was no time to form a flattering opinion of Rickwood Field, either.

But the man from California stood, soaking in the rain and soaking in Rickwood. With his baseball cap slung low, he took a brief look around at the oldest professional ballpark in the country and, even in its dilapidated state, somehow knew it was perfect.

“Let’s do it,” Ron Shelton said back then.

On June 20, the Cardinals and Giants will play an MLB game at Rickwood Field, a special regular-season game at the former home of the Birmingham Black Barons. The event will pay tribute to the Negro Leagues and celebrate Birmingham native and living legend Willie Mays. With the park having been given an extensive $5 million makeover, the teams wearing Negro League throwback uniforms, dozens of living Negro Leaguers in attendance and FOX’s cameras capturing every moment for a live national broadcast, it’s going to be quite a production.

• Get tickets to MiLB at Rickwood Field

Let the record show, however, that it was another production -- way back in the early 1990s -- that made this 2024 game possible. Because when Shelton selected Birmingham’s ballpark as the shooting site for the baseball scenes in his Ty Cobb biopic “Cobb,” he set Rickwood’s resurrection into motion.

It’s the story of how Hollywood and Rickwood became intertwined.

* * * * *

Back in 1992, it would have been difficult to imagine any legitimate baseball team wanting to play a game at Rickwood, let alone two Major League ones.

With the roof caving in and the field shot, it was a sad state for the venerable venue. The teardown of Chicago’s Comiskey Park a year earlier had officially made Rickwood the United States’ oldest standing ballpark, yet there was decreasing reason to believe it would hold that title for long.

“The park,” says local resident Coke Matthews, “was in horrific shape.”

Rickwood had been the baby of a Birmingham industrialist named A.H. “Rick” Woodward, who, while still in his 20s, took a controlling interest in the city’s professional baseball team, the Coal Barons of the Southern Association, in the early 1900s. To that point, the Coal Barons had played every home game since their 1885 inception at Slag Pile Field, which was about as posh as the name implies. Rather than pay to occupy one of the park’s 600 wooden bleacher seats, freeloading fans could sit on the piles of furnace slag outside the outfield fences. The team leased the facility in 60-day increments.

• Rickwood Field game FAQ

Woodward knew Birmingham, known as “Magic City” because of its abundant natural resources and rapid growth, deserved better. So, after consulting with Philadelphia Athletics manager Connie Mack during an A’s exhibition game in Birmingham, Woodward put together plans for a new home for the Coal Barons (eventually shortened to Barons) that would resemble Philly’s Shibe Park and Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field and become the first Minor League park constructed of steel and concrete. The project cost $75,000, and a newspaper contest christened it as Rickwood Field.

It opened in August 1910 (the whole city shut down for the quasi-holiday). There were 5,000 seats, about 10,000 fans and not a single furnace slag pellet in sight.

From there, Rickwood enjoyed a long and rich history as the home of professional ball in Birmingham. The Phillies and the Pirates held their Spring Training camps at the park early in its life. In addition to Woodward’s Barons, the ballpark became home to the Black Barons, originally of the Negro Southern League, in 1920.

By the 1970s, though, Rickwood was struggling to retain the professional game. Charlie Finely had bought the Barons and moved them to Mobile in 1966. When he brought them back and rechristened them the Birmingham A’s in '67, attendance declined over the next several years, and the team left again in '76.

It would be another five years before a team (once again known as the Birmingham Barons) returned, this time under the stewardship of sports promoter Art Clarkson. In the 1980s, the Barons had a nice run at Rickwood, capturing titles in the Double-A Southern League in 1983 and '87. But with the ballpark and the surrounding area having seen better days, the Barons fled to the 'burbs.

Abandoned by the Barons, Rickwood became city property and the headquarters for the city schools’ athletic department. These were grounds that, be it in league games or exhibitions, had housed more than 100 Hall of Famers at one time or another, including Mays, Cobb, Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, Jackie Robinson, Satchel Paige, Yogi Berra, Ted Williams, Reggie Jackson and on and on. Now? It housed … school buses. By 1992, the conditions were so poor that the city had even stopped holding high school games there.

“It was at the point where the city was going to have to abandon it and tear it down,” Matthews says. “It was unsafe.”

Matthews was one of five local men who couldn’t bear to let that happen. He and Tom Crosby, Terry Slaughter, Alan Farr and Bill Cather had all been regulars at Rickwood in their youth. It was the place where they fell in love with baseball and the place that served as the center of Birmingham’s social activity for many decades.

So this group of guys who dubbed themselves the Friends of Rickwood took on the task of finding new ways to keep the park alive. Their organization became official in 1992, after a meeting with then-Mayor Richard Arrington Jr. went especially well. After laying out why they thought Rickwood’s preservation was important for Birmingham and for the sport, the mayor retreated to another room. An unsure unsteadiness hung in the air for several moments before Arrington returned bearing a large framed photo.

It was of the 1948 Negro American League champion Birmingham Black Barons -- a team that had featured Arrington’s childhood friend Willie Mays.

“Whatever you want to do with Rickwood,” Arrington told the group, “is OK with me.”

Matthews worked in the advertising design business, so he could envision Rickwood’s potential use in baseball-themed commercials or other ads. After a missed opportunity a couple of years earlier, when the city had regretfully turned down a request by a crew to film scenes at the ballpark for a little movie known as “A League of Their Own,” the Friends of Rickwood also sought to do some advertising of their own.

“We were convinced,” Matthews says, “if we just let people in the film industry know it was available, they’d come calling.”

* * * * *

Not long after, Ron Shelton came calling.

A native of Santa Barbara, Calif., Shelton had been an infielder in the Orioles’ farm system from 1967-71. That experience inspired him to write and direct the iconic baseball film “Bull Durham,” which was released in 1988 and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. After that massively successful directorial debut, Shelton went on to direct projects about a flamboyant governor in 1989’s “Blaze” and basketball hustlers in 1992’s “White Men Can’t Jump.”

But he didn’t stray far from baseball.

In 1993, Shelton was scouting sites for “Cobb,” a film based on sportswriter Al Stump’s sensational (and many say sensationalized) experience as ghostwriter of Cobb’s autobiography. Needing a realistic setting for the film’s retrospective baseball scenes, Shelton scoured the available inventory of old-timey ballparks and found it lacking. Cobb, of course, had logged his best years in the Deadball era, and the problem with parks that were still standing is they'd typically had a lot of updates that allowed them to continue standing.

“We had trouble finding an old ballpark that felt and looked like an old ballpark,” Shelton says. “There just aren’t many left.”

Turns out, it was the role Rickwood was born to play.

For situations like this, state film commissions will send a director photographs of what they have available. And in the digital and internet era, the process of picking out a place to film a few scenes can often be done remotely.

But in 1993, Shelton wanted to witness what was available first-hand. And though after all these years he can’t remember exactly where he was traveling from, he does remember being sent a private plane from the Alabama governor’s office to bring him to Birmingham on that dark and stormy night.

• Remembering the Birmingham Black Barons and Rickwood Field

“There were, like, four of us on the plane,” Shelton recalls. “And I thought, ‘This is how rock’n’roll singers die. On a small private plane to the Deep South in a storm.’”

Thankfully, the plane landed safely. But given the late-night weather conditions, Matthews and the other Friends of Rickwood who accompanied Shelton on his tour of the ballpark could feel their hopes and dreams crashing.

“You couldn’t even hear yourself think with the water gushing into the park, and you couldn’t even see the field,” Matthews says. “I was thinking, ‘Damn, we screwed this thing up.’”

But Shelton looked past the rain and the rust and all the things that had rendered Rickwood unusable for professional (or even high school) baseball and saw something else.

“It had the overhanging roof of the grandstand, which I love,” he says. “I always liked playing in ballparks like that, because they just felt enclosed. That felt period. It felt like 1906 or whatever year it was supposed to be. There are none of those parks anymore, because everyone’s afraid of having an obstructed view.”

So Shelton was sold. And though the film was not some modern-day action movie with an essentially unlimited budget, the studio (Warner Bros.) signed off on modest upgrades to Rickwood.

“We would walk around with the art director and production designer and say, ‘We can live with that’ or, ‘We need to paint that,’” Shelton recalls. “And signage was really important. We needed ‘No gambling’ signs and other period signs done in the style of the first decade of the 20th century. That sells a lot of it.”

That’s how Rickwood wound up with signs touting Coca-Cola’s ability to relieve fatigue (incidentally, the real Ty Cobb made a fortune off his early Coca-Cola investment) and Birmingham’s appeal to tourists, among other vintage ads. Many of the old-fashioned wood boards made for the “Cobb” movie stayed up for around 20 years, until a tornado took them for a ride.

Once the ballpark was up to shooting standard, the baseball scenes -- which were shot in full color and then desaturated to create a vibrant black and white -- could be filmed. Shelton and Co. brought in some big names for this one.

The first, of course, was the film’s star, Tommy Lee Jones, who played Cobb and therefore had to resemble a fleet-footed baseballer despite the inconvenience of having broken his ankle less than a week before shooting began. Because of Jones’ injury, which required him to wear a boot, the Birmingham baseball shoot was moved to the end of the production schedule to give him more time to recover. (Regardless, the actor was still not fleet of foot.)

Other stars in those scenes are more subtle.

The non-descript “Right-Handed Pitcher” (per the official credits) for the Philadelphia A’s against Cobb’s Tigers was none other than Roger Clemens, who at that point in his career had the credentials to leave the Red Sox’s Spring Training camp for the four days between his starts. Clemens had been brought aboard by his friend Robert Wuhl, who played Stump.

Then, there’s “The Armless Guy,” the disabled heckler Cobb climbs into the stands to assault. He was played by tropical rock legend Jimmy Buffett, who made the trip from his native Mobile just to get punched in the mouth.

But Buffett’s more important role happened behind the scenes: He was integral in attracting local extras to play the fans in the stands.

“We had to have a white crowd, because it was segregated baseball, right?” Shelton explains. “We were willing to pay 400 people $100 a day or whatever the rate was. But we needed more than that. And Jimmy was a friend of mine and another one of the producers, and he was from Alabama. And he said, ‘I’ll come over there and give you a free concert!’”

Buffett shot his scenes as the armless man and, after filming wrapped, hopped on the dugout (or a flatbed truck … the memories differ here) and played a handful of songs as a reward to the unpaid extras in the audience.

“He introduced another generation of people to Rickwood Field,” Matthews says.

So did the movie. Though it was not a box office success, “Cobb” was the proving ground for what Rickwood had to offer the film industry. Soon after, HBO used the ballpark for the filming of “Soul of the Game,” a movie about Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson and Jackie Robinson. A few national commercials were also shot there, including a 1995 campaign for Baby Ruth that featured an actor portraying Babe Ruth. More recently, some of the interior ballpark shots for the Robinson biopic “42” were filmed at Rickwood.

These projects brought a dying ballpark back to life. High school and college games returned and, from 1996-2019, the Barons hosted an annual Rickwood Classic there.

“It started with Ron Shelton not being intimidated by the park being in such bad shape,” Matthews says. “He was the angel sent to save Rickwood.”

Shelton is proud to have played his part in revitalizing Rickwood and thrilled that MLB will now host a game there.

“I had an accidental role in this,” Shelton says. “But I'm thrilled. I have a weakness for these old ballparks. It upsets me when they don’t survive. But Rickwood did, and now it’s in beautiful shape.”