BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Mitch Earnest, an 18-year-old catcher from Decatur, Ga., was reaching for his bat to go out on deck at Rickwood Field when he was told Babe Ruth also reached for his bat in this same place during an exhibition game. Earnest paused for a moment to consider his next at-bat.
“I hit from the right side,” said Earnest, who was playing in a wood-bat tournament at the park. “Maybe I need to get in there lefty just so I can say I stood where Babe Ruth stood.”
Earnest does not have to explain his reverence. After all, lawyers from Chicago flew here one weekend and rented the field for a game. It is why Rickwood Field, which will be 100 years old on Wednesday, has been able to escape a wrecking ball and become a shrine as America’s oldest baseball park.
There is nothing that moves the thrill meter for a baseball fan the way walking the path trod by baseball gods does. Dizzy Dean pitched in Rickwood. Jackie Robinson andHank Aaron played there. Satchel Paige twirled from the mound.
It is still possible to roam where Willie Mays roamed as a teenage center fielder because some local baseball fans organized in 1992 to become the Friends of Rickwood. When the minor league Birmingham Barons moved out in 1987 for a newer park in the suburbs, Rickwood seemed doomed like so many other ballparks of its era.
The Friends of Rickwood hold an annual game, the Rickwood Classic, to raise money for the park’s maintenance and restoration as a museum. They host instructional camps and wood-bat tournaments for amateur leagues. They rent out the park, at $100 a game, $30 an hour extra if it requires lights, which, by the way, were first installed in 1936.
David Brewer, the executive director of the Friends of Rickwood, wants to export Rickwood Field as a model to other communities that have aging ballparks. It is more than baseball at stake, he said.
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