Major League Baseball comes to Birmingham’s Rickwood Field next week for the first MLB regular-season game in the 114-year-old ballpark’s history, when the St. Louis Cardinals play the San Francisco Giants on June 20.

But 30 years ago, on a Tuesday afternoon in late March and with much less fanfare, the late, legendary Jimmy Buffett also played in America’s Oldest Baseball Park, when the “Margaritaville” singer-songwriter made a cameo appearance in the 1994 movie “Cobb,” based on the life of Baseball Hall of Famer Ty Cobb.

Tommy Lee Jones, fresh from winning an Academy Award for his performance in “The Fugitive,” starred as the tempestuous Cobb, and former ballplayer-turned-filmmaker Ron Shelton of “Bull Durham” and “White Men Can’t Jump” directed.

Buffett, who died this past September at 76, appeared ever-so-briefly in “Cobb” as “The Armless Guy,” a character based on an ugly, real-life incident in which Cobb went into the stands and punched and kicked a heckler who had lost eight of his fingers in an accident.

(A brief clip of that scene can be seen around the 45-second mark in the movie’s trailer.)

After filming his scene that day, Buffett entertained a few hundred movie extras with a 45-minute-or-so set that he performed from the back of a flatbed trailer parked along Rickwood’s third-base line.

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Buffett’s appearance in “Cobb” — and his informal, wrap-party concert — came about because of a huge assist from one of the associate producers on the movie, Tom Todoroff, who had worked with Buffett as a voice coach.

In an interview with The Birmingham News during the filming of the “Cobb” movie in 1994, Todoroff said he took Shelton to a Buffett concert in Los Angeles, and the idea of casting Buffett as the heckler grew from there.

“(Shelton) loved Jimmy’s show, and Jimmy loves his movies,” Todoroff said in that 1994 interview. “We all decided Jimmy should be in this movie, and Ron said, ‘Figure out what Jimmy should play.’

“I said he would be a great heckler because in the early days, when he was playing clubs, he was really heckled,” Todoroff added.

‘Where’s the “Cobb” Mob?’

But once Buffett agreed to be in the movie, they had another big favor to ask of him.

In addition to about 450 paid background extras in the movie, the “Cobb” filmmakers also needed thousands more people – about 9,200 to be exact — to fill the stands at Rickwood Field for some of the larger crowd shots.

So, with the help of some resourceful Birmingham advertising folks, they hatched a plan to get Buffett to perform a free concert to thank all those willing to show up and sit in the stands for two days of filming.

They billed it as the “Cobb” Mob.

Their first mistake was waiting until just three days before that Saturday to announce Buffett’s appearance.

“Parrotheads,” as Buffett fans call themselves, were also instructed to leave their usual concert attire at home and come dressed in clothes appropriate to the movie’s 1910s-1920s period.

And they had to catch a school bus at the Alabama State Fairgrounds and ride it to Rickwood, where they were expected to stay all day. For two days. For free.

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In retrospect, it was too much to ask of even the most hard-core Parrothead — even with the lure of a free Jimmy Buffett concert dangling at the end of the weekend.

So that anticipated crowd of 9,200 was just a few hundred.

Trevor Hale — who worked for Birmingham’s Slaughter Hanson Advertising agency at the time and was on loan to the movie crew to help with the publicity – now jokingly calls it “the ‘Cobb’ Mob that was never really a mob.”

“The expectation of thousands and thousands of people didn’t happen,” Hale says. “I remember walking into the (production) trailer with Ron Shelton asking me, ‘Where’s the Cobb Mob’?

“When I look back, (there were) so many things we could and should have done better to get the crowd there – especially not waiting until the last day or two to announce Jimmy Buffett and asking people to jump through so many hoops,” Hale adds.

‘The icing on the cake’

Rain washed out filming most of Sunday and all of Monday, and despite a last-ditch effort by the movie’s casting office to recruit additional extras to help fill the stands, way less than a thousand people turned out for the last full day of shooting.

Buffett, though, held up his end of the bargain.

Come Tuesday, the Mayor of Margaritaville was dressed in costume and seated along the third-base line, hurling verbal fastballs at Jones’ tyrannical Ty Cobb to the point that Jones came up into the stands and punched him out – or pretended to, anyway.

It was the last scene of a long and stressful day, and when it was over, Jones led the crowd in a round of applause for Buffett and then threw his cap into the stands.

Buffett later hopped on the back of that flatbed and, along with his longtime sidekick, Fingers Taylor, but sans the full Coral Reefer Band, serenaded the extras with an abbreviated acoustic set.

“You might not recognize me,” Buffett, by then out of his movie wardrobe, told the crowd. “I’m the guy Tommy Lee beat the (stuffing) out of.”

His set included a handful of his greatest hits, including “Margaritaville,” of course. Instead of singing, “all those tourists covered with oil,” he changed the line to, “all those extras dressed in period clothes.”

Shelton emerged from his trailer to join in the fun.

“We pulled the flatbed in, and Buffett put on an amazing set,” Hale remembers. “It felt very intimate. It felt like it was just for us. At the end of the day, it was the icing on the cake, wasn’t it?”

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Coke Matthews III – who, at the time, was the chairman of the Friends of Rickwood, the dedicated group of baseball enthusiasts and historic preservationists who banded together to save the ballpark and restore it to its former glory – remembers hearing Buffett that day but didn’t get to see him.

He was stuck under the Rickwood Field grandstand guarding a table full of cellphones that Cellular One had donated for the cast and crew to use during filming.

“This will make you remember the old days – 30 years ago,” Matthews recalls. “Cellular One had agreed to provide free cell phones, so we had like 15 cell phones sitting on a table, and when Buffett started to play, everybody abandoned the table to go hear Buffett.”

Everybody, that is, except for Matthews, who had been instrumental in getting the “Cobb” movie to come to Rickwood in the first place.

“I could hear Buffett, but I never saw him because I was trying to guard the cell phones,” Matthews continues his story. “I enjoyed listening to it, but I remember being pretty chapped about missing it.”

‘What do you think you’re doing?’

Birmingham native Tommy Edwards, who became a Buffett fan when he first heard “Come Monday” in 1974 and went on to see him perform “around 200″ times in concert, he has a much happier memory from that day — a close encounter with his favorite musician that he never tires of sharing.

After he found out that Buffett had a bit part in the movie, Edwards, who worked for American Airlines at the time, signed up to be an extra, along with three of his buddies.

Once they got to Rickwood that Tuesday, Edwards started scoping out the ballpark in search of Buffett.

“I saw him walking toward one of the tunnels on the third base side, so I kind of excused myself . . . and walked across the field,” Edwards recalls. “And as he was coming back out of the tunnel and back onto the field, I spoke to him, shook his hand, and was telling him what a big fan I was.

“Then this director came over, and she said, ‘What in the hell do you think you’re doing? You need to get your (behind) back where it’s supposed to be.’ Just cussing me out.”

Edwards and his friends, who were supposed to be with a group of extras sitting along the first-base line, instead moseyed over to the third-base line.

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Not long after Edwards sat down, who should arrive but Jimmy Buffett.

“As luck or fate would have it, I was in the third seat from the aisle,” he recalls, “and there was one guy between me and Jimmy.”

Edwards, who brought along a 35mm camera, snapped a few photographs of Buffett, including a close-up of him going over his lines before his big scene with Jones.

Buffett, Edwards adds, immediately recognized him as the same guy who got dressed down by the “Cobb” assistant director a few minutes earlier.

“Jimmy recognized me and said something like, ‘I’m glad you still have a piece of that (behind) because she sure chewed you out there,’” Edwards says. “So we had a little chuckle over that.”

‘It was kind of fate’

Given how close he was sitting to Buffett that day, Edwards figured he was sure to be in the final cut of the movie.

“I’m thinking, ‘OK, I’m two seats down from Jimmy,’” he recalls. ‘‘’I know what’s going to go on. Tommy Lee Jones is going to get sick and tired of the heckling, and he’s going to come up there and punch him out. I’m a lock. I’m in this movie.’ . . .

“And the only thing it really showed was him grabbing Jimmy and a really quick close-up of Jimmy with this astonished look on his face. And that was it. I’m like, ‘Wait, whoa, whoa, whoa. Where was the scene?’ I was completely out.”

But Edwards will always remember when Jimmy Buffett came to Rickwood Field and sat just a couple seats down from him.

And the photos to prove it.

“It was kind of fate, you know,” he says. “Because if there’s a bigger Jimmy Buffett fan out there, I’ve never met ‘em.”

Bob Carlton spent five days as an extra on the set of “Cobb” when the movie was filmed at Rickwood Field in 1994. Parts of this story were taken from articles he wrote for The Birmingham News during the filming.