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Game on and on

Root for the Barons

By Courtney Haden

This space is not generally utilized for giving advice, since the person writing in it rarely takes any himself. Nevertheless, here’s a gently proffered suggestion: You need to go see the Barons play this summer.

As a kid, I would never have imagined it would be necessary for such a sentence to be written, so thoroughly did baseball captivate Birmingham imaginations during summers back then. Little League was just one of the organized outlets for kids to sharpen their skills around town, and on any given evening, as lightning bugs traced their paths through the twilight, you could hear the excited sounds of pickup games in almost every neighborhood.

Adults on both sides of Jim Crow’s partition fed their habit by playing in industrial leagues, where the competition was intense and the talents of some players equal to that of the pros.

Our link with the major leagues, the Birmingham Barons, actually began as an industrial league team merely 15 years after the city was founded. Called the Coal Barons, perhaps in sly homage to the capitalist cabal that ran Birmingham as a wholly- owned subsidiary of the steel industry, the team played its games in the shadow of the West End mills at a field called “The Slagpile,” alluding to a prominent mineral feature of an open-hearth furnace.

By 1901, the Barons were playing regional matchups in the Southern Association—this is two years before there’s even a World Series—and in 1910, they became the property of one Allen Harvey Woodward.

I talked recently with a famous national author who wants to write about the Barons’ rich history, and I hope he gives “Rick” Woodward star billing, for never was there a baseball team owner with more pizzazz. The rich industrialist underwrote his love of the game by building a palace to replace the Slagpile, the one that bears his name to this day and hosts the annual Rickwood Classic.

Back when every game was played at Rickwood Field, the lowliest pop fly seemed couched in unbearable drama for a kid in the first base-side stands. 1958 was an especially heady year, for that’s when the Barons, then a Detroit farm team, won a Southern Association title under manager Cal Ermer. I’ve still got the tattered felt pennant Daddy bought me to wave during one of the Barons’ 91 victories that year.

Ironically, the antics of the Barons’ most popular radio announcer may have led to shuttering the Barons franchise in the ‘60s. Though integration was a fact of life in the majors, Bull Connor, who was elected police commissioner in part because of his popularity as a sportscaster, would not brook integration of the Barons, even though the segregated Black Barons used the same field as the white Barons, albeit at different times.

The Barons returned to Rickwood as the A’s in 1967, a Kansas City affiliate giving future Hall of Famers Reggie Jackson and Rollie Fingers a place to sharpen their skills. With other sports competing for fans’ attention, attendance drooped during the ‘70s. Rickwood went dark again in 1975.

When the lights came back on in 1981, the team once again called the Barons, now owned and masterfully promoted by Art Clarkson , brought crowds back to Rickwood.

Thinking bigger, though, Clarkson got a modern stadium built in Hoover for his White Sox franchise, where almost half a million fans turned out during the ‘94 season to see if Michael Jordan could become a two-sport superstar. (He couldn’t, but you can still buy his souvenirs at the Barons gift shop.)

In 2006, wise old magazine publisher Don Logan invested some of the crazy money he’d made in New York in the Birmingham Barons and he put his kids to work upgrading the team’s legacy. What is now called Regions Park sports new lights, new seating and a popping new video scoreboard, but what I want you to come out and see is the good baseball manager Carlos Subero is coaxing out of his streaky, speedy upstarts. Already the Barons have claimed a shot at a Southern league pennant by winning the first half of the season in the Southern Division with only one .300 hitter on the roster but the lowest ERA in the league. I’ll not rhapsodize over the poetic nature of the Great American Game; eloquent artists such as Roger Kahn and Ken Burns have knocked that subject out of the park already.

However, I can tell you that even in the fancy stadium on Alabama Highway 150 there’s a tangible, historic connection to Birmingham’s very first ballyards and, as has been true for more than a century, there’s still no better way to spend a summer afternoon or evening than coming out to the park and watching our Barons play ball.
August Birmingham, Alabama

  

 
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