The group consisted of Emmanuel Durojaiye of Morgan State University and Marcus Plummer of Grambling State University from Getty Images’ HBCU Photographer Mentorship Program, and MLB intern Jamea “Nadia” Beavers of Spelman College.

Equipped with cameras and training, the creatives documented every moment as 50 athletes from Division I HBCU baseball programs performed on a national stage, aiming to enhance their prospects for the MLB draft.

Emmanuel Durojaiye, Morgan State University

Emmanuel Durojaiye, an engineering major and graduating senior at Morgan State University, became interested in sports photography as an incoming freshman seeking to be active on campus. Since then, he has balanced his engineering studies and sports photography with contributing to the growth of his university’s media department. He helped establish MSU Creatives, an initiative where students intern with Morgan State’s athletics program.

“My creativity thrives in this setting. Upon realizing the minimal sports coverage my university received with only one professional handling all sports photography at the time, Randolph Brent, now the current digital media director at MEAC [Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference], quickly became my mentor,” Durojaiye said. “As he handed me my first camera, a Canon T7, from that moment, I felt compelled to create a larger platform to showcase my peers.”

“This picture shows the athletes running alongside their teammates, coming out of the dugout amidst smoke, lights and music. In this moment, you can hear the players yelling, ‘Yah!’ Being able to capture the camaraderie they had for each other, as well as their love and pride in representing their athletic abilities, felt amazing,” Durojaiye said.

“The band truly embodied the spirit of HBCU culture and history, bringing it to life on such a grand platform. It meant a lot to hear our songs resonating through the crowd, who were ecstatic. Both Texas Southern’s Ocean of Soul and Prairie View A&M’s Marching Storm showcased their schools with pride and passion battling off on the field,” Durojaiye said.

“Captured at the end of the game, this was a moment where players were flipping and dancing in celebration,” Durojaiye said. “I had to crouch low to get these shots, and catching him midair truly shows the level of excitement I feel. You could tell it meant a lot for the players to be there, as this wasn’t just another game for them but a chance to showcase that there is talented athletes at HBCUs.”

Marcus Plummer, Grambling State University

Marcus Plummer, who is pursuing his master’s degree in sports management at Grambling State University, graduated in 2023 with his bachelor’s degree in mass communication. He got involved in sports photography in high school to stay connected to sports after his time as a player.

While at Grambling, he gained experience photographing campus life and homecoming events before moving into university athletics.

“I felt this year’s classic was a great representation for Grambling, with five athletes participating. After having a phenomenal year and becoming the SWAC [Southwestern Athletic Conference] champs in baseball, seeing Tiger Borom walk away with the Swingman Classic MVP trophy at the end was truly amazing,” Plummer said. “Just being alongside these athletes from my school felt great, and I’m proud to represent our athletic department in this creative space as a photographer.”

“In the front is Tiger Borom, with what I believe is his family in the background, posing with a thumbs-up after winning MVP,” Plummer said. “I also love this picture because it shows his support and just the crowd and the youth in the stands who came to watch the players.”

“Ty Jackson has such a great personality that you can see when photographing him. He hit a double and started celebrating as soon as he made it to second base,” Plummer said. “Moments like this in baseball are cherished because they showcase the personality of the game, and the fans loved it. His energy throughout the game was truly something special.”

“[Jose] Vargas pointing to his country’s flag beneath his hat shows the deep love he holds for his roots. I’m glad to capture this on such a stage where he represents not only himself but also his culture, community, Grambling and the name on the back of his jersey. It carries immense meaning,” Plummer said. “Seeing and capturing moments like this is my favorite because they’re often easily overlooked.”

Jamea ‘Nadia’ Beavers, Spelman College

When Jamea “Nadia” Beavers took Advanced Placement art classes in high school, an introductory photography course sparked her interest. Upon starting college, she studied arts with a focus in photography. To gain more exposure and experience in sports photography, she started photographing events at Spelman and nearby universities, which led to a summer internship with MLB, where she was invited to shoot the HBCU Swingman Classic.

“As a growing photographer, I really liked having the opportunity to capture images of individuals who look like me, particularly in environments where diversity among Black and brown people is not as prevalent. This experience was incredibly positive as it allowed me to connect with many individuals, including players, fellow photographers, media professionals and even fans,”  Beavers said. 

She said being the first student photographer from Spelman to shoot the game meant a lot to her.

“Representing my HBCU at Swingman Classic and through this internship with MLB and connecting with Getty mentors was amazing,” Beavers said.

“Before the game, the players stood for both the national anthem and the African American national anthem, ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing,’ led by gospel artist Kirk Franklin. It was a great moment to see players look toward the flag with honor,” Beavers said.

“I took a lot of pictures from the ground using a millimeter lens,” Beavers said. “Taking action shots like this was new for me. Quickly I was able to adapt, even with the intense energy between the teams. I could see my pictures getting better as the game went on as it was my first time using this lens.”

“At the end of the game there was a large crowd of people, and I had to get through other photographers from various outlets to capture this photo,” Beavers said. “Seeing this through my lens was amazing. I could clearly see the joy on everyone’s faces, and it felt incredible.”

The HBCU student photographers also participated in the MLB All-Star Futures Game on July 13. More of their work can be found on gettyimages.com and @MLBDevelops on Instagram.

Following last year’s debut of the game that features players from Black schools and was a rousing success in Seattle of all places, there was a real question as to whether bigger would equal better, just because.

When 16,467 fans showed up at Globe Life Field to support the teams, the answer was clear.

The entire weekend featured all the usual trappings of the Commissioner’s Cup and Jennie Finch Classic, in which high-level teams from MLB academies nationwide play each other in a tournament. The Thursday before the game, the Urban Youth Academy was teeming with ballplayers and coaches and Hall of Famer Ken Griffey Jr. was there holding court. Everywhere you turned, one of ours was either helping or being helped, in a baseball sense.

One man remembers when he was the only one in the building.

“Coming out here to Dallas and starting from scratch where, you know, there’s nobody in the building and you’re having every kid you could think of to come out and you’re still only maybe having 30 kids,” Juan Garciga, senior director of the Youth Academy & Baseball Development for the Texas Rangers, said Friday.

Since 2018, the facility and program have gotten to the point where they now hold college signing ceremonies at the big league park for their players who make it to the next level. Some academies that have been around longer have had guys drafted out of high school, but for Garciga the process is still one that bears fruit, even if his kids aren’t all going to big-time Division I programs.

“In 2020, we had our first athlete who signed to go play college baseball. And he reached out to say, ‘Hey, can I do my signing at the academy?’ And so we did it here at the academy. He just felt like this was home — not a knock at his high school,” the Miami native, who used to work in the Miami Marlins front office, explained. “I think he just felt like the people that really helped him get to that point were academy staff members. We had some media come by and tried to make it a big deal because it was our first athlete, and you know, those kids that started with us in 2018. By the time they graduated, that number grew exponentially. It was just so cool to kind of be a part of their journey from when they’re 13, 14 years old, all the way to see it through.”

Opportunities to play, never mind grow, progress and potentially get seen are so scarce in this game for non-white American kids. With college kids practicing in front of the high schoolers, there’s a very real effect of being able to visualize a goal in reality, not just in theory. You too could get to college from the academy. And you too could get to play on a big league field in college.

“I think it’s important for any kid to have some exposure. I was also fortunate to have a dad that played, so I didn’t have to fight, claw and scratch to be seen,” Griffey said. “For some of these kids, we want them to live their dreams. Twenty years from now, we want them to be doing these interviews.”

Hanging out with Griffey, the Swingman himself, is the experience of a lifetime for the college guys and seeing is believing for many youths when we’re talking about establishing goals. As for Garciga’s academy, which lost the 2023 Commissioner’s Cup championship game in Seattle, this time round they made sure they got it done against the Cincinnati Reds Youth Academy, winning 14-0. Three of the kids on the 17U squad were on a 12U team that traveled to the 2019 Andre Dawson Classic in New Orleans, a tournament formerly known as the Urban Invitational that is an annual, round-robin collegiate baseball tournament designed by MLB to highlight historically Black colleges and universities and their baseball programs.

“Initially, we started working with the high school district that’s in this area, just because this is the primary community we’re trying to serve. So West Dallas and the Dallas Independent School District, but we don’t put any caps or restrictions on any of our training. So if there’s kids from other parts of DFW that want to participate and see value in the program, they’re allowed to. It just grew a lot through word of mouth, you know? You have players start to get better. And parents are like, ‘Oh, where’s he been going? Like, we see a difference,’ ” Garciga said. “Where we saw the biggest change was, first you hear something’s free, you wonder how good can it be. You have some players that are kind of middle-tier or higher-tier players who thought this was exclusively for kids who don’t own baseball gloves and don’t know how to play. We kind of flipped the script on them when they started seeing a little bit success and some of the unique opportunities those higher-level players got to do because we want to be all things to all people. We want to meet the kids where they’re at.”

A reminder: The goal for all of these efforts isn’t just turning out more players to feed the player pool beast. Dreams are fun, dreams are achievable, but dreams can fade. So, tangible options are still necessary.

“The goal is to get more kids to work in baseball,” Griffey said plainly at Oates Field at the complex. “A lot of kids are not going to be drafted, but you can still be in the sport that you love. I mean, there are plenty of jobs in Major League Baseball that you can do.”

Great moments in sports have several calling cards. The location, the uniforms, the players, the plays and, often, the broadcasts make up such an integral part of the experience. The broadcasts are often reserved for former players or, in many cases, a nepotistic role. That is, if your dad did it, you can do it too.

Calling games is no small skill. It’s not just talking junk with your buddies. The presentation of sports is as important to many as the competition itself and who does it affects how the public absorbs what they’re looking at. Core memories are made as a result of the voices we hear, and the faces we see make up so much of what we consider important.

This year, the MLB Voices program officially got underway, which the league office “aims to develop and grow the next generation of play-by-play talent in baseball.” The four young men who are part of the program were eager and ready to learn and shadowed some of the best broadcasters around, Seattle Mariners play-by-play broadcaster Dave Sims and MLB Network analyst Harold Reynolds.

Most fascinatingly, most of them didn’t even play that much growing up. But their love of the game is still ever apparent and palpable.

“I didn’t grow up playing baseball, and my family actually was not a baseball family,” Grayson Singleton, a 2023 Oklahoma State grad, said Friday. “I actually grew to love baseball by myself, you know, figured out like the intricacies of the sport and whatnot. I’m like, ‘Wait, is this actually interesting?’ So now it’s grown from something that was, ‘oh, here’s the only sport in summer’ to ‘I actually like watching baseball.’ I love it.”

He works in Norman, Oklahoma, covering the Oklahoma Sooners, and handles play-by-play duties in Oklahoma City for high school sports. Over the course of the weekend, the four participants bonded over their love of storytelling in sports.

Sedric Granger is an Ohio University graduate who’s an assistant sports information coordinator at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, and is the lead for baseball. He built connections at the National Association of Black Journalists to get to this point and credits much of his love of the game to an obvious group: his friends.

“Me being from Columbus, Ohio, the big Steam over there, as you have Ohio State Buckeyes, and it’s mainly all about football and basketball, baseball wasn’t really the main sport that would be even on TV over there,” Granger noted, with a short ’fro that looks like second coming of soul singer Sam Cooke. “So I just really didn’t grow up too much around the game aside from the Columbus Clippers. I’d go to the Columbus Clippers games, Dime-A-Dog Night and do those every once in a while, but I definitely wasn’t big into it. But I give a lot of credit to two of my best friends. Derek and Gabe are their names and they are big baseball guys. They played baseball in high school, and they have an absolute infectious love for the game and I hang out with them and watch a lot of sports.”

The fact that basic camaraderie can fuel a passion is something that we tend to forget. Ambition and skill are not qualities spun out of thin air. It takes real people doing real things to foster growth, which is what the MLB Voices program is all about.

“Our group is really here as a shadow opportunity to network with some of the, you know, top-ranking officials in MLB. But also to understand what this experience means, not only from an HBCU perspective, but kind of from a holistic perspective,” Cam Thomas, a 2022 Missouri grad and event producer, explained. He’s a guy who is as polished as it gets at a young age and understands the opportunity that All-Star week has provided him.

“When you think about Ken Griffey Jr. and think about Harold Reynolds, and Dave Sims — the guys that are really the faces of this program kind of nationally — but think about where they were 20-25 years ago and think about where we are right now. It would be crazy to think that this group of mid-20-year-olds would have done this in the ’80s, or the ’70s.”

Fellowship and education are quality paths to success, even if brilliance isn’t required right out of the gate. Everyone wants to be an expert at everything, and consumers act like perfection is the only goal or even starting point. Half the battle toward getting there is recognizing that the smartest people on earth know that they don’t know everything, a mantra that these four are taking to heart as they learn.

“It’s not easy being comfortable with the fact that you don’t know everything, and seeking advice and knowledge from people who do know more than you,” Reginald Singleton Jr., a Howard University graduate from the class of 2023, said. He majored in television and film and minored in business administration. He’s from Louisiana, where there is no big league team, and has been a part of the New Orleans Youth Academy’s broadcast program.

“Baseball is a different rhythm for football, which is a different rhythm for basketball, in hockey, and golf and tennis. It’s a different rhythm that you have to learn and also realizing the dynamic between media and athlete. At the end of the day, what athletes want is for the media to be is fair. They don’t want necessarily for the media to take potshots at athletes or dog athletes. And if you’re fair, and you lay out the facts, that I think that’s when the relationship begins, and it can only improve from there.”

Sounds like a great foundational start to me.

In an athlete’s mind, every day is game day. On this day, game day, turned out to be rain day. As a result of hurricane conditions in Houston, Prairie View A&M’s band could not make the proceedings. It was an unfortunate twist to the day, spoiling the brainchild of Baseball Hall of Famer Andre Dawson, a Florida A&M alum, but not ruining the night.

There was still plenty of fun to be had and with the function being in Texas, not Washington state, the entire vibe was different. The inaugural event was almost like an awakening in terms of the Seattle community showing up for each other in a way that hadn’t been made available to them before.

Dallas did it differently. Besides the greater number of people, the purpose was more specific and honed. Most people there had a personal reason to show up, not just a collective one. While certainly two different geographic locations, Texas is also far closer physically to many HBCUs and thus the general buy-in to the experience has far more people ready and willing to show up and show out. Colors of Greek-letter organizations were the norm, not the exception. And even though it took a while to get cranking, by the end of the night the jumbotron had reached peak Black activity, which is what we love.

There were things you just couldn’t make up. A great-grandson of the late Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe, a legendary Negro Leaguer, was a starter in the game. A Japanese player who transferred from Middle Tennessee State to North Carolina A&T took the field, too. The cultural outreach of the game and event had a different footprint from the previous year, an excellent step when considering that this game will be held in Atlanta in 2025. ATL, shawty.

“It’s really cool like coming to an all-Black oriented event here. It feels like home. The music and the vibes are catered to us. It’s cool, you feel relaxed,” Courtney Blanchard, 35, said. Her friend has a son who plays Little League and said why not go to the game, along with her crew. She’s been to a couple of minor league games in Frisco, but that’s about it. “It’s also nice to kind of see us on a big field, you know? Predominantly. I don’t get to a lot of baseball games. It’s nice to come to something that’s affordable.”

Just having a good time with her homegirl at a ballpark. What a concept.

Others were there to basically rep the set.

“She wanted to come out and support the HBCUs. Yeah, all the young men, she’s not even a baseball fan,” Gary Courtney said, referring to his wife Elizabeth, who was wearing a Tuskegee University T-shirt. They heard about the function through the Kappa League, an outreach program of the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity. Their son participates in the program. Their older son is a Tuskegee student. They moved to Texas from Minnesota a few years back.

“Unfortunately, most HBCUs are severely underfunded. So there’s been some challenges as it relates to that with our son’s experience in Tuskegee,” Gary Courtney said. “But overall, it’s been good. It’s been positive exposure in terms of the historical perspective of the university, and supporting our community has been really enriching and great.”

The life lessons are as important as the ones in the classroom.

“Our son, he loves it. He loves the people. He loves the friendships he’s developed. So I think it’s been really good for him personally and professionally stepping into it himself as a young man,” Elizabeth Courtney said. “Our younger son, we’re trying to guide him in that direction, hopefully somewhere here in Texas. But HBCU for sure.”

In the end, the American League beat the National League 5-4, capping off a successful run for the MLB-MLBPA Youth Development Foundation event. My favorite person there was Tatsunori Negishi, the N.C. A&T player. Just taking in the moment after the game, he used the time to explain what his journeys in the U.S. have meant to him.

“I like it. It’s a little bit different from what I’ve experience before,” he said. “I took my time to adjust and I like my teammates and my coaches. I just made so many friends, throughout different cultures and values. Not everyone can do this. It’s big for me.

“I don’t do fried chicken. But I love mac and cheese. I eat it with steak.”

On a muggy night outside of Dallas, as the kids say, everybody ate.

“I never thought about scouting. I never thought about working in player development. Like, I had my mind on wanting to play,” Rembert told Andscape. “It was a tough transition because I felt like my dreams were, like, crushed. … I’m still in professional baseball, just on a different side.”

Like Rembert, other former baseball and softball players from historically Black colleges and universities are finding a home in MLB front offices and hoping to open additional pathways for HBCU graduates to enter leadership positions with the league. 

“I feel like that my grind started when I first started working for the Pirates,” Rembert said. “Just like, new guy, 23 years old, just starting out, just trying to make a name for myself and, like, move up the ranks, and it was just a lot of work.”

After starting as an operations assistant with the Pirates at the end of his 18-month fellowship, Rembert earned a full-time role as a scout. His daily workload includes doing a full breakdown of collegiate and high school players his team could potentially draft, and during baseball season, Rembert spends much of his time on the road talking to players.

“Different people get different starts. The main route for a lot of scouts is, like, they played professional baseball and maybe they coached at a high level and wanted to go into the scouting space. … It’s all about who you know, at the end of the day,” Rembert said. “It’s about relationships, [and] the MLB is, like, it’s such a relationship-driven business.”

Everything Rembert learned as a former collegiate baseball player in the Southwestern Athletic Conference have helped him transition from athlete to scout.

“Since I was a kid, like, I’ve always been evaluating players at the back of my head. … Now I get paid to do it,” Rembert said. “So, like, even when I was playing at Alcorn, I was always evaluating players because I was always trying to find a competitive advantage. I was always evaluating players to see what they did well [and] what they didn’t do well so I could beat them.”

A diversity program with the Atlanta Braves helped Tyrone Brooks, the senior director of MLB’s Front Office and Field Staff Diversity Pipeline Program, enter the league in 1996.

When the MLB started the Front Office and Field Staff program in 2016, Brooks knew he wanted to help others break into baseball.

“We’re making inroads as far as helping to get people into the industry, especially persons of color, and looking at what opportunities are out there,” Brooks said. “We just noticed there wasn’t enough completely out there, and that’s where part of my role is helping to be a conduit working closely with the 30 major league clubs and helping them in identifying talent.”

Brooks said he recommends candidates when teams have jobs available, and offers help in other ways.

“Also a big part is providing that support for individuals as they’re looking to make their way into the game and help them to hopefully live their dream and do something that they’re going to want to do and love for the next 25 to 30-plus years,” he said.

Over the last few years, many participants in the three classes of MLB diversity fellows have landed permanent jobs after completing their fellowships, he said.

“There’s all different ways for individuals to make their way in, and from the fellowship standpoint that has been probably our most successful way for folks to get fully entrenched within the front office,” Brooks said. “We’ve had over a 90% success rate of individuals coming into the program and getting hired in full-time roles beyond the fellowship.”

Like Rembert, former Grambling State University infielder Jalen Heath also benefited from the program. Heath, who graduated from Grambling State in 2019 with a bachelor’s degree, worked in accounting before returning to the sport he loved.

In college, he would follow draft trends and the transaction pages of his favorite MLB teams, but he didn’t know opportunities in baseball front offices existed until he met Brooks. 

“I was set on just working, getting a job and having a career in accounting,” Heath said. “I just wouldn’t be getting the same fulfillment out of it that I wanted from my career and my work. I missed baseball. It was a big part of me that was just kind of gone, so I kind of wanted to get back into it, be around it and make an impact that way.”

Heath is an operations assistant with the Pittsburgh Pirates. He spent the first year of his 18-month internship working in player development with the organization’s minor league team. Now he assists with monitoring MLB rules and transactions.

“You want to be a sponge about everything,” Heath said. “It’s one of the things where you have to be humble [because] it’s hard to know everything coming in … and so I think I’ve been blessed to have a pretty good support system around me with the Pirates and people in our organization who [I] can lean on and ask questions, ask for guidance and kind of help me train myself to be a better baseball professional.”

Although Heath is still in the internship, he also works with Brooks and participates in Zoom calls and panels to encourage former HBCU students and student-athletes to pursue a career in pro baseball.

“The ones that are interested, I try to reach out to them and answer any questions they may have or give them some advice. I try to tell them it’s a busy schedule for baseball,” Heath said. “I definitely just want to be available and be around to give back and do my part of supporting and fostering a culture of HBCU athletes breaking into the game of baseball and at the professional level, whether it be on the field or off the field.”

Former University of Arkansas Pine-Bluff infielder Braelin Hence comes from a strong baseball background. His father, Marvin Hence, played baseball, and his brother, pitcher Tink Hence, plays for the Springfield Cardinals, a Double-A affiliate of the St. Louis Cardinals.

“[My dad] played the game for a long time. I feel like you learn what you learn because of the people around you. So, my dad being such an advocate of baseball, I won’t say I didn’t have a choice, but even if given a choice, I still would have picked up baseball,” Hence said. “It’s been my first love. … It’s been something that has given me a lot of fulfillment in life. It’s kicked me down at times, but at the same time it’s picking me right back up.”

After a hip injury forced Braelin Hence to retire from the sport, he unofficially became an assistant coach at UAPB, and helping his former teammates inspired him to pursue a different career in baseball.

“I always had dreams of playing baseball. But, you know, certain things happen in life where it opens your eyes to new things and new possibilities,” Hence said. “So once the door was open, it was something that I knew I had to walk through. It was something I knew I wanted to work through. So it just became first nature to me, like, seeing another guy chase his dreams, and being able to help that and assist with that has been one of the most fulfilling things ever.”

At 24, Hence has a summer internship with the Los Angeles Dodgers organization. He loves working with players who are the same age as him and those who are younger.

He collaborates with coaches and players daily to determine ways to enhance their progress. He helps with scheduling practices, works with players on drills, equips batting practices and learns more about the technology side of the game.

“Just the ability to learn from working with players every day, all from different ethnic backgrounds, you learn more about the game from players than you’ll probably ever learn on your own,” Hence said.

Hence isn’t the only UAPB alum interning with the MLB this summer.

Alyssa Wesley, a former outfielder for Arkansas-Pine Bluff’s softball team, knew that once she graduated from college, she wanted to work for either the NFL or the MLB. Attending the NFL’s HBCU Careers in Football Forum in December 2022 “opened up my eyes” to how she could have a career in sports, she said.

“I was like, now that I got a sniff of it … this is what I was meant to do,” Wesley said.

At the urging of her friends, Wesley applied to the MLB’s summer internship program. She is currently the MLB’s baseball and softball development intern and works with the league office. As a part of her internship, she worked with the MLB for its first baseball and softball joint event, advises young girls on their college recruitment and how she landed an internship with the league.

“I’ve actually stayed connected with them, even [the] last couple days, just giving them advice on anything that can help them grow their careers, whether it’s on the field or off the field, whether it’s in the office or not,” she said. “So it’s really special to kind of keep giving back to the game because the game gave me so much playing.”

After she graduated from college in 2022, Wesley spent one season with UAPB’s softball program as a graduate assistant coach, which has helped her in her new job.

“It’s kind of funny, like, seeing the difference between inside the white lines and outside of white lines. … Since I played, then I also had coached, to now working in a front office for a major league corporate office, you definitely see the levels to everything,” Wesley said. “Just hearing the ideas on what they can do to not only just grow baseball but also grow softball is really special, too.”

Wesley’s summer internship ends in August, but she knows she wants an MLB career. During her time with the league office, she has built relationships with people in multiple departments.

Ultimately her goal is to get a full-time job in an MLB front office and continue to represent HBCU graduates working with the league.

“I feel even more proud to be a UAPB graduate, especially working at MLB. I want to put that HBCU on the map,” Wesley said. “I think every HBCU should be proud of that. … I think it’s real special to show what we’re doing and showing that people like us can do it. It doesn’t just have to be a dream. This is actually really possible.”

No swirling winds. No biting cold. No fever pitch ballgame. Just legend upon legend, friends, family and furthermore sitting in folding chairs in foul territory listening to elected officials, dignitaries and ballplayers, “Forever Giants,” laud the platitudes of the Say Hey Kid.

When Bill Clinton, the 42nd president of the United States of America, took to the podium just in front of the pitcher’s mound, receiving standing ovations both coming and going, it was clear that a level of class this country hasn’t seen in some time was being celebrated by the 4,500 who showed up to pay their final respects.

Mays never played at this park. And honestly, for those who weren’t close friends, a lot of the initial sting of Mays’ death had passed on, too. Following all the chaotic emotion of learning that the Birmingham, Alabama, native died during the very week that MLB was celebrating his very start in pro ball in his hometown at the very same time, the city by the bay took its collective breath to start the week while the team was on an off day.

MLB special assistant to the commissioner Joe Torre, a nine-time All-Star as a player and four-time World Series champion as a manager, told stories about making Mays wait at the plate as a catcher playing against him. Wild tales of Mays beginning and ending conversations before and after homers is the kind of thing you wouldn’t believe unless other actual Hall of Famers were there to recount the stories.

“I know he’s gone. But he left enough for all of us to hold on to,” Torre said on the podium. “Probably the most exciting player to ever play the game.”

There’s something about a ballpark with no one (really) in it or on it that feels so small, yet so large at once. If you’ve never been to the Gotham Club, a private space reserved only for members at Oracle Park, it features all kinds of history from the club formerly known as the New York Gothams, the team you see now in San Francisco playing as the Giants.

Former outfielder Ellis Burks, who played for the Giants from 1998 to 2000, and batted behind *cough* outfielder Barry Bonds and infielder Jeff Kent, made the pilgrimage. Once a part of an all-Black outfield playing for the Chicago White Sox, he was at a point in his career when he got to San Francisco where he was a touch unsure of himself.

Mays reminded him that he was there for a reason.

“I got traded to the San Francisco Giants. They got me off the field, I had to meet the team in Philly. You know, once you get traded to a team like the Giants, you immediately want to justify the trade, you want to try to go out and do the best you can. I struggled that first week. So, we come back here, Willie Mays calls me over with his high-pitched voice,” Burks explained with the kind of look on his face of a man who remembers how much a simple vote of confidence can do for someone.

“I said, ‘Mr. Mays, pleasure to meet you,’ this and that. He said, ‘Look, we know exactly what you can do. You’re trying too hard.’ Which I was. He could see that. That meant a lot to me that he called me over, really broke it down and said, ‘We know the kind of player you are. That’s why we came and got you from Colorado. Because we know what you can do. Just go out there and have fun.’ When he said that, it was like the weight was off of my shoulders.”

In 2000, he won the Willie Mac Award, given to the most inspirational player on the team, as voted by the organization, down to the fans. Burks was awarded a World Series ring in 2004 from the Boston Red Sox even though he didn’t make the postseason roster. Mays effectively reignited the former Blake Street Bomber’s career and spirit.

“Willie talked to everybody. And people listened. See, that’s the difference,” Dusty Baker, who managed the Giants from 1993 to 2002, said after the ceremony. “Willie didn’t just do a bunch of idle talk. When Willie said something, he meant it. He wasn’t no BSer, now.”

Baker had been in Birmingham for the Rickwood Field game but was too sick to make the festivities. Before then, however, when he heard that Mays wasn’t going to make it, he made sure to go visit him first. Johnnie B. Baker Jr. went to see his old friend June 17 in the Bay Area. Willie Howard Mays Jr. died the next day. Ten days later, another Forever Giant, Orlando Cepeda, died at age 86.

“I mean, it was a tough week for me,” Baker concluded.

Many people made sure to be there. Miller, the longtime Giants play-by-play announcer, certainly cut short a vacation to make it home to be the emcee to honor Mays on the day. He was on TV when the news hit, with former outfielder Hunter Pence, and they handled it the best they could.

“He made me a fan. You couldn’t really help but be a baseball fan, if you grew up here,” Miller explained after the three-hour ceremony that featured everything from Andra Day singing to Bonds, Mays’ godson, speaking and Michael, Mays’ only son, being presented with a military flag to honor his father’s service (in his baseball prime, no less) during the Korean War.

“As a kid, as a 10-year-old, which was when I was saw my first game in person, I think I thought he was a superhero. You know, like you saw in movies and TV,” Miller said. “And one of the cool things about coming to the Giants and getting really know Willie and seeing him at the ballpark is to realize that he wasn’t a superhero. He was a flesh and blood human being, and which makes it all the more impressive.”

TV sports commentator Bob Costas was ready to hop multiple flights if it turned out that Mays could have made it to Birmingham. He had a niece graduating from college, but was more than ready to make the trek if the Say Hey Kid actually made a public appearance.

“I was actually willing to like, take some sort of weird odyssey through Birmingham, and then back to Fairfield, Iowa, with like two connecting flights,” Costas said between burger bites in what’s known as the 415 Section behind the centerfield wall, named for the city’s ZIP code. “If Willie had been there and been able to [be there] … I got the sense over the last few months that not only was he not able to be there, but probably not able to do an interview. But I would have gone out of my way for that.”

The guest list was as star-studded as can be. I’m not sure that Clinton and film director Spike Lee will be in the same place at the same time again. By the time the ceremony was done, the cold wind that the city is so well-known for had set in, a reminder that had he not played in this particular place, his numbers as a big leaguer might have been even more astronomical.

For Michael Mays, who’s been on a whirlwind for a fortnight, the work, somehow, has just begun. He’s been glad-handing and listening to people tell him stories about his father for decades. Monday meant he could finally exhale a little before he got back to work. In short, he’s been a bigger star this summer than ever.

“The little 15 minutes of light is great. I hope I was able to refocus it to where it belongs,” he noted at the reception. “He’s still running the show as far as I’m concerned. I go back to doing what I’m doing. I’m a moviemaker by trade. We got the story. People been asking me my whole life when am I gonna tell it.”

To hear a man so purposefully state his current mission with poise and the path to executing it was remarkable to hear, considering.

“I’ve said to them, ‘when it’s over,’ ” Michael Mays said. “So, we start that work.”

Mays’ career ended 51 years ago. His life ended 22 days ago. His legacy across the country — from the Bay to Birmingham to the bricks of Harlem — will never be forgotten.

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Clinton Yates takes readers inside all things around MLB’s first game in Birmingham, Alabama, at Rickwood Field — the oldest professional ballpark in the United States.

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BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — By the time the game finally came around, it seemed like baseball was the last thing on anyone’s mind. An intensely emotional week in the seat of Jefferson County, Alabama, concluded with a reasonably average ballgame in terms of actual balls, strikes, hits and runs, but there’s no doubt about it that every player who suited up for this matchup — along with every person who walked through the walls of Rickwood Field — left that park a different person from the one who arrived.

The proverbial food at this baseball repast provided the solemn comfort needed, considering.

The St. Louis Cardinals, playing as the St. Louis Stars of the Negro National League, beat the San Francisco Giants, playing as the San Francisco Sea Lions of the West Coast Negro Baseball League, by a score of 6-5 in a game that nearly saw the Cards drop their third straight in walk-off fashion. That didn’t happen, but the result of the game paled in comparison to the weight of everything that we were forced to reckon with: the death of Giants legend Willie Mays.

“Obviously devastating news. This event that record was really developed with Willie in mind,” MLB chief baseball development officer Tony Reagins said during the game Thursday night. “I think what this event turned into was a celebration of Willie’s life. And I think we’re going to try to honor him in a way that hopefully his family is proud of. And Willie, you know, was 17 years old when he was here. And to have that backdrop, to have current major leaguers playing at Rickwood is exciting, but obviously this is bittersweet not having him here.”

Was this event and week a somewhat spiritual bookend to Mays’ life, in terms of things beginning and ending in Birmingham? Sure, but this was not some kumbaya moment for the most part. Yeah, it’s great to recognize the efforts on the field of players who paved the way for others, but the truth is that for a lot of these guys, the event opened wounds to the most traumatizing experiences of their lives.

“Coming back here is not easy. The racism when I played here, the difficulty of going through different places where we traveled,” Reggie Jackson said live on FOX when asked by Alex Rodriguez about his feelings of returning to Rickwood Field. Jackson played for the Birmingham A’s in 1967, the Kansas City/Oakland Athletics’ AA affiliate. “Fortunately, I had a manager and I had players on the team that helped me get through it, but I wouldn’t wish it on anybody.

“I said, you know, I would never want to do it again. I walked into restaurants and they would point at me and say, ‘the n—-er can’t eat here.’ I would go to a hotel and they say, ‘the n—er can’t stay here.’ We went to [then-Athletics owner and Ensley, Alabama, native] Charlie Finley’s country club for a welcome home dinner. And they pointed me out with the N-word. ‘He can’t come in here.’ Finley marched the whole team out.”

Let’s just stop and remind ourselves of something: The racism is and was the problem. The system of white supremacy that was coded into law, never mind the collective conscious, robbed us of not only the best entertainment we could have possibly had in terms of an integrated game, but also the humanity of the individuals involved.

The truth is that I saw Jackson randomly when he got to town. We were in the same hotel and I was in the lobby having a nightcap when the Hall of Famer rolled in. I would say we’re familiar with each other, but I thought back to the time he called me over at batting practice during the World Series once in Houston to talk about then-Houston Astros manager Dusty Baker, Black man to Black man. It was honestly an honor I’ll never forget.

But this night he seemed a bit flustered, which I just chalked up to travel weariness, a thing many Americans know well. But after his appearance at the Southern Negro League Museum on Thursday, and his moment during Fox Sports’ pregame show, it’s easy to understand that he had basically landed back in the hell that created the persona that many know now.

At the luncheon held Thursday morning to honor the families of former Negro Leagues players, he let it out. A question was asked about one of his best memories from Alabama, and he told a story about the legendary Alabama football coach Bear Bryant, who told him in an apparent moment of congeniality, that the Crimson Tide needed more N-words like him at running back to compete with the best. Think about that. That was a good​ memory, apparently.

The story of that football team’s “journey” to integration has its own complicated history, but basically, Bryant, the man with the houndstooth hat, had to take a couple of vicious beatdowns from teams with Black players before they realized that you can’t win the SEC with 22 Forrest Gumps running around your field.

“Fortunately, I had a manager Johnny McNamara that said if I couldn’t eat in the place nobody would eat. We’d get food to travel,” Jackson said. “Had it not been for Rollie Fingers, Johnny McNamara, Dave Duncan, Joe and Sharon Rudi … I slept on their couch, three, four nights a week for about a month and a half. Finally, they were threatened that they would burn our apartment complex down unless I got out. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

“The year I came here. Bull Connor was the sheriff the year before and they took minor league baseball outta here, because in 1963, the Klan murdered four Black girls […] at a church here and never got indicted. … Life magazine did a story on them [the Klan] like they were being honored. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

Jackson did not play in the Negro Leagues. But he played in Alabama. And one last time, he knocked it out of the park.

There is simply no way to disconnect the visceral feeling of racism in the American South as a Black person walking around every day. Does it mean that people in hoods are burning crosses on our porches these days? No, but it’s not like this is ancient history. A Hall of Famer on live television dropping hard R’s and referring to lynching in the broadcast? Welcome to Birmingham.

“Had it not been for my white friends, had it not been for a white manager and Rudy, Fingers and Duncan and Lee Meyers? I would have never made it,” Jackson said. “I was too physically violent. I was ready to physically fight someone. I’d have gotten killed here because I would have beat someone’s a–. And you’d have saw me in an oak tree somewhere.” Jackson finished with the kind of laugh that only Black men of a certain age and a certain experience and a certain bravery can emit out loud.

On the night, things were lovely on the surface. Mays’ son Michael made it back to the park to open the proceedings, the bands played on, etc. The game went fine, and the throwback to 1950s-style black-and-white footage was very cool from a visual standpoint, reminding us of the first American sports highlight, Mays with the catch in center field. But that didn’t happen in Alabama. Not by many miles. It was in New York, which Michael Mays calls home.

“Stand to your feet,” he said to the crowd with his authoritative Harlem accent. “Let him hear you, he’s listening.”

He was referring to the spirit of his father up above, a touching moment for a man who’s had a week of mental toll the likes of which no one else can imagine.

There are more players and people than I care to admit who attended these functions and put on a smiling face because the recognition gave them a sense of gratification they deserved. But it doesn’t change the lives they lived, the stories they heard as children or the abuse they endured both physically and psychologically.

MLB learned a lesson this week that I’m not sure anyone was prepared for. The game was never going to fix anything and still hasn’t. There were only two Black players on the field last night. And if you want to have a conversation about the reality of the world in and around the game both then and now?

On a sweltering June night, Mr. October reminded us: Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.

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Clinton Yates takes readers inside all things around MLB’s first game in Birmingham, Alabama, at Rickwood Field — the oldest professional ballpark in the United States.

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BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — What do you do when your favorite uncle dies at the family reunion? You cry.

For the 7,866 fans who were in attendance on Tuesday night at Rickwood Field, a Double-A Southern League matchup between the Montgomery Biscuits and Birmingham Barons, everything changed that night. Even though we all knew we wouldn’t see him at MLB’s ode to the Negro Leagues a few days later, because of the pomp and circumstance of the proceedings all week, no one was prepared for the possibility that we would never actually see Willie Howard Mays Jr. ever again.

While the news spread among folks via social media, by the time it was announced over the PA system, the already somewhat mystical energy that exists in the oldest professional ballpark in America, had transformed to a completely surreal haze.

In the very yard that Mays had made his pro debut as a ballplayer in his hometown, we were mourning his death in the middle of a game in which teams were wearing uniforms bearing the likeness of those who graced said stage so many decades ago.

If you closed your eyes to wipe away the tears while the crowd sang the song “Say Hey, Willie Mays” as it played over the PA in the hot Alabama night, you could envision Mays in ebullient stride rounding the bases one last time. When you opened them, you could see the same highlight on the big screen in front of you in right field.

When the San Francisco Giants and St. Louis Cardinals face off Thursday night, what was supposed to be a celebration is now a commemoration. Are they that far off from each other in spelling or sentiment? Maybe not. But in many hearts, the gulf will be huge.

“It was awful. It was absolutely awful,” Randy Winn, longtime Giants player and current team analyst on NBC Sports Bay Area said after the unveiling of a Mays mural in Birmingham’s Railroad District on Wednesday. “I never prepared for it. You know Willie was in his 90s. Luckily, I was with a group in the Giants traveling party, and the guy who was in charge came over to me, he’s like, ‘Hey, we’re gonna have to make an announcement. Willie passed.’ I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh.’ So he made the announcement to the group. And this is a lot of longtime Giants supporters, season ticket holders, people that knew Willie personally.”

To that point, everyone this week around town felt that they knew Willie personally because the light he emanated was so personable. In the Willie Mays Pavilion just past foul territory in left field at the park that night, former players CC Sabathia, Dexter Fowler and Justin Upton just sat there in shock as the MLB Network played a montage of the 24-time All-Star’s life. As a person who uses words for a living, I’m still not sure I have to words to truly describe the feeling in my gut in that moment.

“Cubs two, Giants nothing here at the bottom of the fourth inning at Wrigley Field. And a ball … called a strike. The count is one and one. Strike two, you’re going to have to forgive me here,” play-by-play announcer Dave Flemming said on KNBR, the Giants Radio Network as the team Mays helped revolutionize West Coast baseball with, played at Wrigley Field that night. The hesitation in his voice on the radio broadcast is palpable. A grown man choking over his words from grief was a very relatable feeling.

“I’m having a hard time saying the words, but we found out just a little while ago and the Giants have now made an announcement. Here’s a ground ball to second Estrada throws out Pete Crow-Armstrong. The all-time greatest Giant. No. 24. Willie Mays has passed away today at the age of 93. Right as we get ready to head to his hometown and honor great Willie Mays,” he stammered through audible tears. “We have to say goodbye.”

Segregation doesn’t define Birmingham but it certainly still outlines a lot of its existence. There was a time that the city was bigger than Atlanta. By a lot. 

“Birmingham used to be twice as big as Atlanta. Birmingham, Alabama, was the bigger of the two cities in the early 1940s and ’50s because of steel. Because of World War II, we was cranking out all the tank metal, so you had to run with us,” comedian and Birmingham native Roy Wood Jr. told me on Monday for ESPN Daily. “So much so that Delta Airlines said, ‘Hey, we would love to build an airline terminal here in Birmingham and make Birmingham the hub of the travel … But if you don’t mind, we really need the airline terminal to be integrated. Do you mind, Mr. Bull Connor, if we just have Blacks and whites together at the airport?’ and Bull Connor was like: ‘GET THE DOGS!’ ”

It was a joke in the context of delivery, but very real in the context of current effect. Around the corner from WBHM, the adorable Alabama public radio station, is the UAB Blazers baseball/softball complex, which is genuinely one of the nicest I’ve ever seen in the country. Meanwhile, there are fewer public ballfields than there are public high schools in Birmingham.

Meaning there are still somewhat obvious signs of the differences. Wednesday, at the Southern Negro League Museum, the MLB-MLBPA Youth Development Foundation announced a $500,000 grant to the Negro Leagues Family Alliance. Short version: The big leagues were handing out some cash to families who deserved it and, in some cases, separately had to resort to effectively begging for some numeration for their efforts, never mind their dignity.

That affair was a classy one, with champagne, delicious shrimp and grits, chicken and waffles, hors d’oeuvres and a lovely Top 100 hits instrumental playlist by the Smooth Jazz All-Stars. Listening to a saxophone riff of Rihanna’s “Work” while reading displays about how brothas had to make it out of the steel mill baseball league first — after working all day to even have a chance at the Negro Leagues, let alone the majors — is quite an experience.

“Last night when I got the news that Willie Mays passed, similar to all of you, I was saddened,” Birmingham mayor Randall Woodfin said from the podium to a packed house that included many family members of Negro Leaguers. “When I woke up this morning, I had a different thought. And the thought is that there is no better way. There is no better way to celebrate in the day designated to celebrate Black excellence. If you paid attention to the former president [Barack Obama] who gave Willie Mays the highest honor civilian you could give, he said that without Willie Mays, he would not have made history in the White House. And think it’s fair to echo those sentiments and simply say that Willie Mays brought to our world and our country massive impact and change. With one bat he knocked down so many walls.”

To be quite honest, until that point, I had completely forgotten that it was Juneteenth.

There was a churchlike energy at the function that could not and would not be ignored. When MLBPA executive director Tony Clark got to the dais, the “visiting pastor” vibes were off the charts. He warned that he might go long and got very personal very quickly. He pointed out that this was his first visit to the space, and it reminded him of his first time at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York, where he spent four-fifths of his time there looking at the Negro League exhibits.

“If I didn’t know my history, I wouldn’t know who I am. Can I get an amen?” he preached. “All of us being here is the right place at the right time.”

The doors of the church were open, and the crowd said, “amen.”

Meanwhile, the recognition of Negro Leagues statistics was top of mind and discussed by many in terms of validation regarding more things than numbers. The man who will never get the full credit he deserves was in the building, just taking in the proceedings. You might recall his work on the Negro Leagues Statistical Review Committee, which was honored that day, too. As humble as anyone could ever be, baseball historian and Negro Leagues expert Larry Lester had to compose himself a bit, with the weight of everything that had happened in the last month, never mind the last two days.

“I am exhausted. Tired. But appreciative of all the efforts of Major League Baseball,” Lester said, wearing a script red Kansas City Monarchs hat. “This means a lot to me. I mean, I’ve been researching baseball since I was a kid, for more than 50 years. And I didn’t do it for recognition. I never needed anybody’s acceptance. But it just brings joy to my heart that a lot of these fellas — that I spend time in their living room and breaking bread with them — that they’re finally being recognized for who they really are. I’m a little bit sentimental. You know, I grew up with Satchel Paige’s kids and Buck O’Neil’s wife was my grade school teacher. I did this because I really love baseball.”

Beyond that, he reminded me that for all the staggering numbers Mays put up, something as random, somewhat convoluted and structural as stadium design probably kept him from even greater statistical heights. The Polo Grounds in New York City wasn’t just a cool name. It was actually that and the dimensions are famously absurd.

Left field: 279 feet. Left center: 450 feet. Center field: 483 feet. Right center: 449 feet. Right field: 258 feet. If you can’t visualize that, it’s like basically shoving a baseball diamond into a vertical rectangle and saying, “the hell with it, it works.”

Meanwhile, when the Giants moved to Candlestick Park in San Francisco after playing a season at Seals Stadium, the wind there was the stuff of legend. You can’t really add weather to math and come up with any reasonable extrapolation other than it made it a lot harder to hit home runs.

“I had to turn it off. I just couldn’t handle it,” Lester said, referring to the news of Mays’ death. “He’s such an iconic figure. I don’t know how you can underrate his greatness. But I think in some ways we have, because [Mays] made it through very tough ballparks, Candlestick and the Polo Grounds. So, if his stats were put in with ballpark factor, he would be greater. Six-hundred sixty-six home runs does not do him justice.”

Word of advice: If you’re playing in a celebrity softball game, in your lone at-bat, don’t hit a frozen rope in the direction of a pro athlete who also happened to play on the diamond in college at one of the premier programs in the country. Because you will think you’ve got potentially a hustle double, and you will look up at the replay board to wonder how that play actually happened, and you will head back to the dugout and ask the umpire how did they catch that. And without saying a word, their face will read: pretty easily.

Jameis Winston, I will never forgive you.

In all seriousness, Rickwood Field hosted the celebrity “Fam Jam” softball game Wednesday night, an event complete with bands, a cookout and a Metro Boomin concert following the fun, and it was a blast.

A year ago, standing on the field hours before the announcement that MLB would be refurbishing the surface and playing an actual regular-season game there, Sabathia said to me: “I want to play a softball game here.” There were only about a dozen or so other people even in the park at that moment of the morning and it was easy to tell from his gaze how he was visualizing it.

Less than a year later, it happened. Former players Derek Jeter and Barry Bonds were honorary captains at the plate and Ruben Studdard sang them folks’ favorite song, after an historically Black university choir sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” The rules and lineups were, let’s just say, fluid, but did have little quirks, like in the second inning when basket catches were required in homage to Mays. For all the frivolity and ridiculousness of the affair, one thing was most consistent: the umpires.

“I am a fan of the Negro Leagues. And I did know that it existed. I had never been here before,” Natola Hawthorne, one of two Black female umpires working the game, said. “It was an opportunity to be a part of the history of Rickwood. Knowing that Willie Mays played here, then being a Black umpire, it was just the whole nostalgia of the weekend that they were putting together.”

Whoever in the league office made the decision to put two Black women in charge of officiating a bunch of large and loudmouth human beings playing a kids’ game needs a raise. For all the ridiculous antics and competitive nature of the evening, one thing that was clear was that we were NOT finna cut up and embarrass folks in front of company, so to speak. And the energy they brought made everyone feel like everything was going to be OK.

“You know, you don’t really have your parameters yet. Can I talk to you guys? Do I just have to stay professional? All of that was going through my mind,” Hawthorne explained with a laugh Thursday. “So when you guys were like asking me questions. Yes, I can answer. But do I smile? It’s just, it was a lot. But you know what? In that moment, I was like, ‘Look, I just have to be me and do what I know how to do and enjoy myself.’ ”

Speaking of barrier breakers, Hawthorne is one herself, in many ways. She went to the MLB pro umpire school a few years back and didn’t get hired, but was still in the pipeline, so when this came up, she said yes. A former football referee, she got a wild hair to try baseball after reffing youth games at Buck Godfrey Stadium, right next door to Georgia State’s baseball facility in Atlanta.

“I’m on the football field like, ‘Yo, y’all. I belong over there. Right?’ And they’re like, ‘What do you mean over there? That’s a baseball field,’ ” she explained, sort of noting the absurdity of the idea that her colleagues expressed. “Like, I think I belong over there. And they’re like, ‘Right now you do this football game. So we’re gonna focus on this football game, and then we’ll talk about over there, because that’s foolish.’ So that’s when I went searching like for the Little League, and it just went from there.”

Her mentor, Kedrin Wright, put the idea in her head that she was going to be the first Black female MLB umpire and they’ve put in the work to try to get her there. It hasn’t been easy, but it’s been fulfilling, and clearly with some perks.

“I believe the dynamic. Courtney [Clements] and I being there, changed the atmosphere of how you all played the game. I think it would have been a little more stoic and straight, not as fun flowing, if others were out there.”

She’s absolutely right. Just as important, the day after we were forced to come to terms with the thing none of us ever wanted to fully believe could happen in the death of Say Hey Kid, there was genuine fun on that field — the kind of fun that he brought to the game, the kind of fun that was so infectious that his peers at the highest level could not ignore it.

On the wall at the Southern Negro League Museum, there’s a large quote that reads: “They invented the All-Star Game for Willie Mays.” That’s from Hall of Famer Ted Williams.

In 2024, we lost the 24-time All-Star who won 12 gold gloves and two MVPs the day before we were to give him the kind of flowers he truly deserved. On this day it’s obvious, the All-Star Game should be named after Willie Mays.

Say, hey, that’s a good idea.

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Clinton Yates takes readers inside all things around MLB’s first game in Birmingham, Alabama, at Rickwood Field — the oldest professional ballpark in the United States.

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Andscape senior columnist Clinton Yates explains Rickwood Field’s significance to baseball ahead of Thursday’s game between the San Francisco Giants and St. Louis Cardinals, including the arrival of a 17-year-old Willie Mays on the scene for the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro Leagues and what chroniclers of Black baseball feel Rickwood represents.

Check out Yates’ other letters from Birmingham here:

Baseball legend Willie Mays is in Birmingham in spirit
Major League Baseball descends on Birmingham and Rickwood Field

Now I know. Numbness, acknowledging that a part of you, part of your youth is gone, never to be reclaimed. Mays died Tuesday. I received word from alerts with some seeking comment wanting to put Mays in context and in perspective.

All I knew was that a bit of springtime had died.

Mays was my introduction to baseball, my introduction to my favorite team of all time: the San Francisco Giants of the mid-1960s. Those were the Giants of first baseman Orlando Cepeda and pitcher Juan Marichal.

Mays was also part of my continuing introduction to Black style as introduced to mainstream America by Black sports stars. The basket catch was and is one of the coolest innovations in sports, along with Muhammad Ali’s shuffle, Earl “The Pearl” Monroe’s spin move, Julius “Dr. J” Erving’s flying-from-the-foul-line Afro-blowing dunk. Mays’ basket catch was part of a revolution in mainstream sports — the birth of the cool in sports.

When I think of Mays, I think about growing up in the little hamlet of Phoenix, Illinois, and watching the Giants teams on black-and-white TV. The moment fixed in time was how he once robbed the Chicago Cubs third baseman Ron Santo of an extra-base hit. Santo hit a deep fly ball in the gap between right and center field. In another place, another time — against another center fielder — Santo could have expected an extra-base hit. But Mays ever so coolly glided over, ran the ball down, made the catch and made it look easy. He flipped his shades back and coolly walked back to center field.

Cool.

I spent hours in my backyard trying to master the basket catch and never did, but I became aware of trying to be cool — the art of taking something very difficult and making it seem effortless.

I did not meet Mays professionally until the early 1990s when I was at The New York Times covering an Old-Timers’ Game at Shea Stadium. There he was in the clubhouse, reminiscing with fellow old-timers. I was tongue-tied. I had no idea what to say or what I expected Mays to do. Maybe I expected him to grab a baseball, toss it in the air and show me how to make the basket catch. Except that by the 1990s, the basket catch had become so mainstream that the idea that it had been an innovation was beyond belief.

A few years later, I found myself at some event sitting at a table with Mays and filmmaker Spike Lee. It was there that I discovered Mays and I had shared an affinity for cursing. That broke the ice. We communicated.

He talked about experiencing segregation as a major leaguer traveling with the Giants, and Black players not being welcome at certain hotels. “Hell, we were the ones hitting all the home runs,” I remember him saying, referring to Black players on the team.

He talked about how he got his revenge later on when he refused to stay at the hotels that once refused him.

I checked in on Mays periodically after that, just to see how he was doing, though I had not checked in for a while. And then, Tuesday evening I began receiving text messages and alerts that Mays had died.

Basketball legend Bill Russell, football great Jim Brown, now Mays. News of his death took some of the air out of my balloon; I couldn’t understand why. I had more consistent contact with Brown, but his death hadn’t affected me in the same way. I realized that it was because Mays represented a part of my youth — the promise of youth, effervescence, joy, optimism.

Gone.

The last time I saw Mays was at a middle school in Harlem in New York City, close to where I once lived in Sugar Hill. Mays was on a goodwill trip on behalf of the Giants. Mays was supposed to hand out autographed baseballs to a group of kids at the assembly. When he got to the last student, he realized that he had run out of balls.

Not wanting to disappoint, Mays pulled out a $100 bill and gave it a boy, whose eyes were as big as saucers. When former MLB second baseman Harold Reynolds asked the young man to tell Willie Mays thank you, the kid said, “Thank you, Willie Mays.”

Later, I sat in the principal’s office with Mays joking about the event. I’m not sure what else we discussed, I just remember how cool it was being relaxed and in the presence of someone I admired so much.

Mays was my introduction not only to baseball but to a certain ethos around Black style in sports. He was the dunk, the spin moves, the Ali Shuffle. He was the basket catch.

When someone dies in their 90s, it’s customary to say that they lived a long life, and Mays did. A long life, but sad news for me because his death is like the death of springtime.

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Clinton Yates takes readers inside all things around MLB’s first game in Birmingham, Alabama, at Rickwood Field — the oldest professional ballpark in the United States.

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Editor’s note: The San Francisco Giants announced that Willie Mays died Tuesday afternoon at age 93.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Long after the curtain closed at the historic Carver Theatre on 4th Avenue, two New Yorkers were arguing about basketball. The resurgence of Kristaps Porziņģis and the Boston Celtics, who in about two hours would go on to win their 18th NBA championship, is a confounding prospect to these New York Knicks fans.

But these aren’t just any two guys from New York City. One is legendary cultural polymath Nelson George. The other is the son of Willie Mays, Michael. The two had just finished a Q&A session following a screening of the HBO documentary Say Hey, Willie Mays!, which brought folks of all types out to the building that is also home of the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame.

The function was no small affair. Everything from traditional African garb to Sunday service best was on the backs of those in attendance and the let out featured more tall tales about arguably the greatest baseball player of all time from people who’d run into him in all walks of life over the years.

Willie Mays’ presence in spirit, if you will, is everyone. This is his hometown. But the 1954 World Series champion won’t be attending the first MLB game to be held at Rickwood Field, where he roamed the spacious grass in center field first in 1948 in Negro American League for the Birmingham Black Barons at age 17.

“He’s 93. It’s a lot,” Michael Mays said on stage regarding the decision for his father not to be there. “I think deep down what it is, is he don’t show up halfway. And I think he feels like, you know, we’ve all been pitching him, just show up. And you know, you just do your one little thing, and it’ll make all the difference in the world. No, if he can’t stop and do what he does with every single person, and give everybody their due and their time, he feels like he’s cutting corners, and he’s not gonna do that.”

Fair enough. When you’re an American icon whose presence and skills have helped transform various major tenets of society — baseball and say, the television industry to name a couple — you don’t do things on anyone’s terms other than your own.

If you’ve never seen the 2022 film directed by Nelson, it’s more than worth your time. The project looks at Mays as an allegory to how this country developed in those years, while various characters we all know from around the sports and pop culture world talk about how much Mays changed their lives and careers.

“Willie was so naturally effervescent and such a gifted storyteller and so comfortable in front of the cameras, that much of white America felt comfortable with him,” sports commentator Bob Costas says in the film. “I remember asking Willie about this. There are no Black people on any of these sitcoms but Willie Mays would just show up, as if that was a natural course of things. So, here’s Donna Reed having lunch with a white lady, and all of a sudden Willie Mays shows up. The incongruity of the scene is apparently lost on most viewers, and then he walked away with the check.”

Costas recalling that kind of once-in-a-lifetime scenario with an incredulous chuckle isn’t the only laugh-out-loud moment in the movie, but the emotions in the theater that sits square in the Birmingham Civil Rights District, were quite palpable. When the story gets to the point of his career when he was playing for the Mets in the 1972 World Series but didn’t get a final at-bat in a crucial situation following his return to New York, there was an audible groan from the crowd.

“I’ve been down here a lot lately, I’ve also been shooting another project in Selma, in this last year,” George told the packed house. “I think my perceptions of the South and Alabama have definitely been shifted by being here. And by meeting people and seeing the relationship between the history that we know, and the reality of life from the ground, and so much about what happens in storytelling is conflict. Most people are driven by conflict and how they tell stories. And certainly, that’s very attractive. But there’s a nuance and an interplay that people have with each other down here that is very unique. One thing we tried to do in the film is connect Willie to history.”

In Birmingham, you don’t have to go far to connect to that history whatsoever, as it’s all around you. Right there on 4th Avenue, it doesn’t feel like much has changed writ large since the Fairfield Industrial High School product was on the come-up. Down the block, a restaurant called Green Acres serves delicious fried catfish with plenty of pictures from the old days on the wall. It’s the kind of place that has a newspaper framed with then-President Barack Obama’s first inauguration on the front, and a CD jukebox that plays a lot of gospel music.

“An amazing film. Never thought that a documentary about baseball would bring tears to my eyes,” Samantha Briggs, vice president of education at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, said during the session. “But I was sitting over here boo-hooing. So, thank you. I love how you brought out the story about the fathers, [that] really stood out as something special.”

Of course, often the best stories aren’t the ones told in front of everyone. They’re the ones left on the cutting room floor.

“You know, it’s funny. I initially pitched a four-hour doc, right?”

George is talking about how this movie could have swelled to a full-blown mini-series, because of the breadth of Mays’ life and the people he encountered. There were just too many topics to reasonably cover. But my favorite story has to do with another star, his contemporary, singer Frank Sinatra. The two, along with the rest of the Rat Pack, often ran in the same circles.

The short, safe-for-work version is that once Sinatra started bringing white women around to gallivant with the guy known as Buck, Mays just stopped returning Sinatra’s phone calls to party in public. Imagine having the kind of juice where Ol’ Blue Eyes and his crew are making desperate attempts to get you to kick it with them.

Listening to Michael Mays tell childhood stories of his dad felt like so many different family type gatherings I’ve been to over the years. The part where after everyone leaves the cookout and the uncles are still sitting in the backyard telling stories while the kids try to stay up just to see what they can get away with.

Black men showing love to each other and lifting one another up through the reminders of our experiences is what kept so many players motivated enough to go on. And the only person you could credibly believe that would hang up on the 44th president of this country for only lobbing a phone call and not showing up in person to his birthday party, or hilariously turning away St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Bob Gibson from his doorstep when he was in town for a lunch invitation — is Willie Mays. Because of course.

“He was the first one to the party in terms of what we’re doing. While all this energy was getting a head of steam on it, I think it’s very relatable,” Michael Mays said as the confetti fell in TD Garden on a nearby TV. “Plus, Nelson’s the only to address that Uncle Tom stuff, but to do it appropriately, like, he didn’t run from it. He didn’t duck that. Also, to get Dad to talk about his mother. He never, never talks about Annie. He called me and was like, ‘would that be cool?’ I was like, ‘man, I don’t know.’ And he did and you know, some risk-taking paid off, right?”

As for George, he’s been a documenter of Black American life for longer than I have been alive and has shown the globe things we’d never see without his vision. His experience at the 114-year-old Rickwood Field for the documentary was one that quite a few people will also feel when they walk through the turnstiles.

“I’ve been doing books and films and art and all that stuff forever,” Nelson said with the smile of a kid who fell in love with the game long ago. “That day on the field was the most fun I’ve ever had.”

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Clinton Yates takes readers inside all things around MLB’s first game in Birmingham, Alabama, at Rickwood Field — the oldest professional ballpark in the United States.

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BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Six decades ago, within the walls of the low-slung brick facade of the A.G. Gaston Motel, one of the greatest threats ever seen to regular American life was brewing. Serving as base camp for many civil rights groups, the mere idea of giving Black people their dignity in public spaces was ready to turn society on its head.

In April 1963, Martin Luther King Jr., who had been jailed for “parading without a permit” during a march protesting segregation in Birmingham, was put in solitary confinement. From there, he penned the now famous “Letter From A Birmingham Jail.” Less than a month later, that very hotel was bombed after white business leaders in town agreed to integrate lunch counters and hire Black folks. Less than a week later, former Brooklyn Dodgers player Jack Roosevelt Robinson showed up and spent the night there.

“I don’t think you realize out here in Birmingham, what you mean to us up there in New York. And I don’t think that white Americans understand what Birmingham means to all of us throughout this country,” Robinson told a crowd of a couple thousand at the Sixth Avenue Baptist Church. “I think the conscience of America is beginning to awaken. I think the first steps that were made here by the Birmingham business and Dr. King and the other leaders down here is an indication that perhaps the conscience of Birmingham is beginning to awaken. The only thing that we’re demanding is that we’d be allowed to move ahead just like any other American city.”

The newsreels and pictures that brought living, breathing footage to the place not so kindly nicknamed “Bombingham” were enough to bring the man who broke MLB’s color line to town. Robinson wasn’t alone in his efforts by any means, but his presence meant that the eyes of the baseball world nationally had reason to train their eyes on the South.

There were riots, children were put behind bars and there are troves of scholarship and entire academic disciplines obviously dedicated to that time in America, specifically in that place. It’s a stench that many natives have tried hard to get rid of, but with much difficulty. 

“Birmingham has great people and great opportunities. I had a successful career of almost 38 years in corporate America here in Birmingham,” Bobbie Knight, president of historically Black Miles College, said of her hometown. “I ended up in higher education as a second career. But the first career was amazing. Now I’m not gonna tell you it was not without some issues — and some racial tension at times. But for the most part, Birmingham has been great to me. You’re looking at Birmingham when you look at me and you look at my success story. I did it all in the city of Birmingham.”

Miles College will play its home games at Rickwood Field next season. But the overlap of racial tension didn’t just embody itself in one city or even one ballpark in Alabama. In Magic City, it was caught up in one man: arguably the most famous white supremacist of his time — Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor.

Once a broadcaster of the Birmingham “white” Barons, his bigoted reign as Birmingham commissioner of public safety and president of the Alabama Public Service Commission, with his résumé of brutal opposition to integration, would make him first-ballot unanimous vote into the Racism Hall of Fame. The first time the city got a real close-up?

It was Connor who turned on the water hoses and sicced dogs on people. It was he who worked in concert with the Ku Klux Klan to let them beat the Freedom Riders, who were touring the South to protest segregation, before police intervened, when they came to town. In American terms: He was your favorite racist’s favorite racist.

A decade before, when Robinson had showed up in support of the Children’s Crusade, he had planned an All-Star game that featured both Black and white players at Rickwood Field. Ten days before it was to happen, Connor called it off, citing a city ordinance that forbade mixed athletic events. Robinson benched all of his white teammates and carried on with the game. This time, Birmingham is far more prepared to be in the spotlight. And with MLB honoring the Negro Leagues on the very field he once segregated himself, Connor would be rolling in his grave.

The Birmingham Barons now play at Regions Field, where the Southern Negro League Museum is located just a few blocks away. It’s an interesting existence, what with the history of the franchise, overall. Michael’s Restaurant, which is owned and operated by a sista named Bernadine Birdsong, is next to the museum.

As the official steakhouse of the UAB Blazers, they get a lot of people through there, unrelated to hardball entirely. Birdsong is from the city and just young enough to have learned about most of the concerns people still have through generational knowledge, to an extent. It doesn’t form who she is, but certainly has informed her world for some time.

“My mom, she knew a lot about [the Negro Leagues], because a lot of those people she knew, like they went to high school together, you know, lived in the neighborhood,” she explained. “I was like, oh, my God, I can’t believe this like happened right here, you know?”

It’ll be fascinating to see what corners of the place known as Magic City that MLB can bring out. This isn’t just one baseball game coming to town, it’s a week full of experiences and events that will bring more attention to this place than it’s seen since Connor was beating up Negroes like hotcakes, to quote an old line by comedian Dave Chappelle. You ask folks around town and their interest ranges somewhere between laser focus and bemusement.

MLB is coming here? To play in a century-old park? What on earth for?

That kind of honesty from real people is a stark reminder that Alabama is still Alabama. The days of segregationist Gov. George Wallace and the National Guard are not ancient history by any means.

“I think it has evolved. I think when people come to Birmingham, and they experience it, they’re pleasantly surprised. It’s not what you think,” Birdsong pointed out on a hot summer day in which the Barons were on the road. “I used to travel a lot for work. And I was in Australia. And there was like this big thing on the news about Birmingham, halfway around the world. And they were having this big talk discussion about the golf course, there was a private golf course here that wouldn’t let Blacks in. I mean, this was in 2000. And they were having this big discussion about it in Australia, and I’m there. And they say how do you live in that place. I was like, ‘you know, you just live there and you don’t even really think much of it.’ So it’s not like blatant in your face until something like that happens.”

It wasn’t just ballparks that were segregated. We’re talking pools, golf courses, everything. Nowadays we often think of segregation as sort of a soft process, or a more socialized norm, rather than a hard fast law that separates people by the color of their skin. But it’s an effect that takes generations to change. MLB is not about to fix the generational trauma of segregation, not by a mile.

“It’s still very prevalent. And you can see it, like when I received an incentive to move my restaurant here from where I was, I used to be inside, to a loft hotel in Homewood, which is not very far from here,” Birdsong said. “So, I was the very first Black restaurant to receive any kind of assistance to move a restaurant [from the city]. Four, five years ago, that was very controversial. There were people who were like fighting against it, didn’t want me to have it. ‘Why did she get it? Why didn’t somebody else get it?’ It was like a big controversy that was a little bit embarrassing because we’ve had Black mayors since the ’70s. But like business ownership, less than 1%. We’re 72% Black [in population], but very few Black-owned businesses.”

Al Holt had a unique relationship with the Black Barons. His uncle was the manager for years. Sort of like in the film The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings, he was responsible for the strong box. That is, he held the money, as a young man, until he was old enough to play. His recall about the basics of segregation is clear.

“Well, you know, there’s certain things that you could do and certain things you couldn’t do. And, when you wanted to go see the white barons, you pay your money at the gate, go around and come up on the right-field side,” Holt explained while showing me around the museum. “I had an opportunity to see those people without going through all that.”

By the time he got to play for the Black Barons, it was everything he thought and more. His picture still hangs in the museum, along with a newspaper story about a great game of his. He uses a wheelchair now, but his pride still stands strong.

“Baseball was the main thing. They look at you different, they treat you different, you a celebrity,” he said with a smile. “In other words, you was just like the major league ballplayer. You know, you come home and folks flock to y’all.”

With a flock of outsiders coming to town to watch the St. Louis Cardinals and San Francisco Giants play exactly one baseball game, the memories of this town will exist in more ways than just glory.