This story was published before Willie Mays passed away on Tuesday at the age of 93.

If you were a Black baseball fan living in Birmingham, Ala., in 1948, the place to be was Rickwood Field.

The Birmingham Black Barons were in the midst of a fantastic year – well on their way to playing in what would be the final Negro World Series.

Artie Wilson, who led the Negro Leagues with a .433 average, was the Barons’ star hitter. “Big” Bill Powell wound up striking out 40 batters in seven games and putting up a 2.79 ERA. A teenaged phenom by the name of Willie Mays soared through the outfield – embarking on a baseball career that would eventually be considered one of the best ever.

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You were lucky to be one of the 11,000 seated inside.

But one 14-year-old kid was lucky enough to be not only inside the stadium … but inside the clubhouse – rubbing elbows with the city’s, and the leagues’, biggest stars.

“We’d go out early, I’d leave church early,” Richard Arrington Jr., 89 and a former Birmingham mayor, told me in a phone call. “The players would arrive and I’d be there in the dressing room. Piper Davis was the manager. He’d let me be bat boy.”

• MLB at Rickwood Field

Arrington got the job – a part-time one for a few Sundays – mostly because he was a local kid hanging around the ballpark. Davis, the father of a friend of his, knew it would make him happy. Things were a bit simpler back then.

It was an honor for the high schooler to spend his weekends there, at this Black baseball cathedral. On the field, in the dugout, just roaming around in front of an adoring fanbase.

“Huge Black crowds,” Arrington recalled. “Especially on Sunday doubleheaders. They would play the Indianapolis Clowns, these other Black teams. The Black Barons had great supporters. [People] were very proud of the Black Barons.”

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“You had to leave church to get a seat in Rickwood when the Black Barons played,” Faye Davis, daughter of Piper, recently told MLB.com's Matthew Ritchie. “On a Sunday doubleheader, it was jam-packed. … The preacher at our church knew that the Davises were going to get up and leave. And he made the mistake of saying something one Sunday, and [my mother] said, ‘Don’t you ever do that again. As long as my husband is out there playing, my children and I will be there supporting him.’”

It was also an arena where the harsh, brutal realities of the Jim Crow South were put on hold for a couple of hours.

"Rickwood Field was a place where racism could take a break for nine innings,” comedian Roy Wood Jr., who grew up in Birmingham, noted in the new podcast series, Road to Rickwood. "Once the Black Barons came into being, white people came out to see them play, too. In small degrees, quality baseball superseded the Jim Crow South."

And to be that close to the players? A dream for a teenage boy.

“I could name just about the whole lineup,” Arrington laughed. “I knew all of those players. I looked up to them. I was just a kid, and they were all great baseball players to me.”

He recounted Wilson’s play at short, center fielder Bobby Robinson and left fielder Jim Zapp, but one of the most famous was, of course, Mays. And Arrington had a special connection with the future Hall of Famer: They both went to Fairfield Industrial High School, and Arrington was just a couple of years younger. He had an everyday view of The Say Hey Kid during those early years.

“Willie Mays was an exceptional, talented athlete,” Arrington told me. “I watched him play on our local team, the Fairfield Gray Sox. He was our quarterback in football in high school. He threw the football farther than anybody I’d ever seen. He was the leading scorer for one year on our basketball team. He was the most exciting athlete I’ve ever seen.”

Arrington and Mays would develop a kinship that lasted their whole lives.

When Arrington moved to St. Louis for grad school, he would go to Sportsman’s Park whenever Mays’ New York Giants were in town. And in 1979, when Arrington became the first Black mayor of Birmingham – serving for five terms over 20 years – Mays, a person with a lot of sway in the city, didn’t forget about his friend.

“Willie came here to Birmingham on two or three occasions for me,” Arrington said. “He appeared at a convention to raise money from people for my re-election.”

And it all – his relationship with Mays, his formidable childhood years, his baseball fandom – revolved around that 114-year-old ballpark in the heart of Birmingham’s Black community. Listening to Arrington talk, you get the feeling the Rickwood Game between the Cardinals and Giants is bringing back those warm reminders. He’s seen the field go through numerous teams and variations over the last two centuries as both a citizen and a mayor, and he’s excited for the rest of the country to see the charm he saw so many years ago as a kid.

“The few times I’ve gone out there recently, it brings back a lot of memories,” Arrington said. “I’ve been in the park, in the dressing room, in the dugout, all of that. It brings back great, great memories for me as an old sports fan.”