Major League Baseball officials gathered today at Rickwood Field, built in 1910 and America’s oldest surviving ballpark, today announced the promotional name for the game to be played there next year.

Major League Baseball will play a game at Rickwood Field as a tribute to the Negro Leagues on June 20, 2024. It will feature the St. Louis Cardinals playing the San Francisco Giants.

The game will officially be known as MLB at Rickwood Field: A Tribute to the Negro Leagues.

Former Major League players Ryan Howard, Randy Winn, C.C. Sabathia, Birmingham native Ron Jackson and MLB Network analyst Harold Reynolds were on hand for the announcement of the name and the unveiling of the log. Mike Hill, senior vice president of on-field operations for MLB, also attended.

“This is a special thing for me,” said Howard, the 2006 National League Most Valuable Player for the Philadelphia Phillies. “I grew up in St. Louis, but my parents were from Ensley.”

The Birmingham Black Barons won Negro American League championships in 1943, 1944 and 1948 playing with Rickwood as their home field, but lost the Negro World Series to the Washington Homestead Grays all three times. The Black Barons played at Rickwood from 1920 through 1960.

“I didn’t realize until I made it to the Major Leagues how important the Negroe Leagues were,” said Sabathia, a former star pitcher for the Cleveland Indians and New York Yankees.

The players who have played at Rickwood Field include Fairfield native Willie Mays, Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb. There have been 181 members of the National Baseball Hall of Fame documented to have played at Rickwood, more than half of all members of the Hall of Fame.

Minor league teams that called Rickwood Field home included the Birmingham A’s from 1967-75, with future Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson playing there in 1967 before quickly moving up to the Major Leagues and going on to star with the Oakland A’s. Previous minor league teams playing at Rickwood typically went by the name Birmingham Barons and played at the park when it opened in 1910, on into the 1960s.

The Birmingham Barons, a Double-A minor league affiliate of the Chicago White Sox, played home games at Rickwood Field from 1981-87, then at the Hoover Met from 1988-2012 before returning to Birmingham, moving to Region Field in 2013.

Rickwood Field hosted the Rickwood Classic as an annual event from 1988 through 2019, with the Barons returning to their former stadium.

Rickwood has been used as a set for several baseball historical movie productions include “Cobb,” a 1994 movie starring Tommy Lee Jones as Ty Cobb, “42,” a 2013 film starring Chadwick Boseman as Jackie Robinson, and “Soul of the Game,” a 1996 TV movie starring Blair Underwood as Robinson.