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Rickwood Field - A Century in America's Oldest Ballpark (Hardcover)
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Rickwood Field - A Century in America's Oldest Ballpark (Hardcover)
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Those fortunate fans who attended Opening Day on August 18, 1910
could not have had the slightest inkling that their brand new
stadium would one day be the oldest active professional ballpark in
America. Nor could they have possibly imagined how dramatically
baseball would transform itself over the course of a century. Back
then there were no high-powered agents, no steroids dominating the
sports headlines, no gleaming, billion-dollar stadiums with
corporate sky boxes that lit up the neon sky. There was only the
wood and the raw hide, the mitt and the cap, and the game as it was
played a few miles from downtown Birmingham, Alabama. Allen Barra
has journeyed to his native Alabama to capture the glories of a
century of baseball lore. In chronicling Rickwood Field's history,
he also tells of segregated baseball and the legendary Negro
Leagues while summoning the ghosts of the players themselves -Ty
Cobb, Honus Wagner, Babe Ruth, Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Ted
Willians, and Willie Mays - who still haunt baseball's oldest
Cathedral. But Rickwood Field, a place where the Ku Klux Klan once
held rallies, has now become a symbol of hope and triumph, a
stadium that reflects the evolution of a city where baseball was,
for decades, virtually the sole connecting point between blacks and
whites. While other fabled stadiums have yielded to the wrecker's
ball, baseball's Garden of Eden seems increasingly invulnerable to
the ravages of time. Indeed, the manually operated scoreboard still
uses numbers painted on metal sheets, and on the right field wall,
the Burma Shave sign hangs just as it did when the legendary Black
Barons called the stadium their own. Not surprisingly, there is no
slick or artificial turf here, only grass - and it's been trodden
by the cleats of greats from Shoeless Joe Jackson to Reggie
Jackson. Drawing on extensive interviews, best-selling author Barra
evokes a southern city once rife with racial tension where a
tattered ballpark was, and resplendently still is, a rare beacon of
hope. Both a relic of America's past and a guidepost for baseball's
future, Rickwood Field follows the evolution of a nation and its
pastime through our country's oldest active ballpark.
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