The Rickwood Field dirt that Willie Mays and 180 other National Baseball Hall of Famers roamed has been dug up and is being removed from America’s oldest ballpark.

Renovation work at Birmingham’s historic baseball stadium began on Oct. 25 with bulldozers excavating the infield and outfield, said Gerald Watkins, chairman of Friends of Rickwood.

On Monday, work continued with the dugouts being disassembled and dirt hauled away.

“The infield has been dug up, they’re working on the outfield,” Watkins said. “There’s four different machines working out here now digging up. They’re hauling dump trucks full of dirt away as quick as they can, taking advantage of the good dry weather.”

There was no grass left on the field, and much of the dirt trod by Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb was gone.

“That’s right,” Watkins said. “It was absolutely necessary to do it.”

Major League Baseball has announced it 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.

By then, the new baseball playing field will be at a lower elevation.

“They’re taking it down about two feet or more,” Watkins said. “They’ll be replacing that with a new subsurface, irrigation system and then the baseball playing surface after that.”

Rickwood Field in Birmingham was built in 1910 and is the nation’s oldest surviving baseball park.

The small, ancient dugouts, already being dismantled, will be replaced by more spacious dugouts more suitable to modern professional teams.

The surface dirt that legends walked on is going away.

“What they’ll bring in here will be, I hate to use the term, ‘state of the art’ dirt,” Watkins said. “What they bring in here will be the same quality as used on Major League fields everywhere. It will serve us very well for the long run.”

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