The San Francisco Giants and St. Louis Cardinals will come to Birmingham in 2024 to celebrate a field where the greatest No.24 the game has ever seen first became a star.

That’d be the great Willie Mays, of course.

Gotta hand it to Major League Baseball for this one. When I heard Mays’ San Francisco Giants were coming to Rickwood Field next year, it gave me goosebumps. The news was first reported on Tuesday by the San Francisco Chronicle.

Baseball fans in Birmingham have always fantasized about Major League Baseball at Rickwood. It’s the oldest professional ballpark in America, and games there are magical. Rickwood is a living, breathing history museum and an aura surrounds the place that makes it feel like a mythical oasis of American sports. Can I offer one suggestion? The old wooden grandstands only hold 10,800 fans, so hopefully Major League Baseball adds additional seating in the outfield for the big event.

Major League Baseball at Rickwood? It sounds pretty perfect, doesn’t it? This is going to be a home run for Birmingham and for Major League Baseball.

And something tells me that’s going to be a tough ticket.

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The Giants will play the St. Louis Cardinals at Rickwood in one of MLB’s “Field of Dreams”-style games. The Field of Dreams is the baseball field cut into a cornfield in Iowa. It’s where those famous scenes for the movie “Field of Dreams” were filmed. MLB played games there in 2021 and 2022 and they were hugely popular.

There are no cornfields at Rickwood, but there is a history there of culture-defining baseball that deserves to be celebrated on the largest of stages. This game is going to be a treat for fans, but it will also be something like a spiritual experience for many of the players. Rickwood is that special.

The famous park off 3rd Avenue West opened in 1910 for the all-white Birmingham Barons, but it was the institution of Black baseball in Birmingham that makes Rickwood Field a national treasure. The Black Barons played at Rickwood, of course, but the field also served an important role for Birmingham’s famed Industrial Leagues.

The Industrial Leagues were like an unofficial farm system for the Black Barons. Every steel mill in the Birmingham area had an Industrial League team. Willie Mays’ father, William Howard Mays, Sr., played in the Industrial Leagues. Everyone called him “Cat” Mays because he was so quick. Cat raised his son in the culture of the Industrial Leagues. Even when he was young, it was clear Willie Mays would have the physical gifts to play pro baseball. According to one of his biographies, Mays began walking at six months old. It was in dugouts for Industrial League games were Willie Mays fell in love with baseball.

The Industrial Leagues developed Mays, but it was at Rickwood where the 17-year-old became a Birmingham star destined for greatness.

There was never any debate over the greatest season of professional sports in the history of Alabama. It was 75 years ago in the summer of 1948. That’s the season when Willie Mays played for the mighty Birmingham Black Barons and helped the Black Barons reach the final Negro League World Series.

Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947. In 1948, at the height of the Negro Leagues, teams like the Birmingham Black Barons, Kansas City Monarchs and Homestead Grays fielded rosters every bit as talented as their counterparts in Major League Baseball. A lot of people don’t understand or appreciate that history. Thankfully, there are stewards of the game like the curators of the Negro Southern League Museum in Birmingham who still do.

Alonzo “Piper” Davis was the manager and best player of the 1948 Black Barons, but that team was loaded. Artie Wilson was considered one of the best shortstops of his generation. He had a batting average of .433 in 1948.

A friend of Willie’s father, Piper Davis knew all about the potential of Cat Mays’ son. Davis added Willie to the 1948 roster, and the young high schooler developed quickly throughout the season. He helped the the Black Barons win the Negro American League pennant over the Kansas City Monarchs in a legendary eight-game series and then hit the walk-off, game-winner at Rickwood in Game 3 of the Negro League World Series.

The Homestead Grays won the 1948 Negro League World Series in five games, and three of the games were played at Rickwood. It was a bittersweet series. Game 5 at Rickwood would be the final game in the history of the Negro League World Series. The integration of Major League Baseball signaled the beginning of the end of the Negro Leagues.

And now at 92 years old, Mays is the oldest living member of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and the last living member of the Hall of Fame who played in the Negro Leagues. He’s the greatest all-around baseball player in the history of baseball, and the incubator for that talent was the rich culture of Black baseball in the Birmingham area.

Rickwood Field was the center of it all, a field of dreams long before any movie, and a site of national heritage where new dreams can still grow.

Joseph Goodman is the lead sports columnist for the Alabama Media Group, and author of “We Want Bama”, a book about togetherness, hope and rum. You can find him on Twitter @JoeGoodmanJr.