Rick Woodward was the grandson of pioneer Birmingham industrialist Stimpson Harvey Woodward, and when he purchased a majority share of the Birmingham Coal Barons from J. William McQueen in 1909, he immediately started planning a showplace. He contacted Connie Mack, the legendary Philadelphia Athletics manager, for advice on field dimensions. He modeled his park after two of the finest in the major leagues: Shibe Park in Philadelphia and Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. He bought land from the Alabama Central Railroad and hired the Southeastern Engineering Company of Birmingham to design a $75,000 structure. The 12.7-acre park featured concrete and steel stands flanking the basepaths and a tile-roofed cupola behind home plate for the press and announcer. It was the first concrete-and-steel stadium in Minor League Baseball. The Philadelphia Phillies came for spring training the very next year, and the Pittsburgh Pirates followed in 1919.

The roster of names that played at Rickwood reads like a Hall of Fame ballot. In 1931, Birmingham's 43-year-old Ray Caldwell outpitched 22-year-old Dizzy Dean in the opening game of the Dixie Series championship -- Dean had guaranteed a win. The Barons took the series, four games to three. Roberto Clemente played right field here on April 11, 1965, collecting three hits in a 5-1 Pirates victory before 6,109 fans. In 1967, Charlie Finley brought his Kansas City Athletics farm team to Birmingham, and players like Reggie Jackson and Dave Duncan honed their skills on this field before becoming the backbone of Oakland's championship dynasty. On April 2, 1974, Hank Aaron stood on Rickwood's diamond, on the verge of breaking Babe Ruth's all-time home run record, receiving proclamations from the mayor and the governor.

Rickwood Field was home not only to the Birmingham Barons but also to the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro leagues. It was on this field that Willie Mays, growing up in nearby Fairfield, began his professional baseball career in 1948 as a teenager with the Black Barons. The park carried the full weight of baseball's segregated history within its walls -- two teams, two leagues, one stadium. When Major League Baseball announced in 2023 that a regular-season game would be played at Rickwood on June 20, 2024, as a salute to the Negro leagues in observance of Juneteenth, the choice of location was deliberate. The St. Louis Cardinals defeated the San Francisco Giants, 6-5, in the first Major League game ever played in Alabama. Two days earlier, during a Minor League game at Rickwood, the public address announcer informed the crowd that Willie Mays had died. He was 93.

The Barons left Rickwood for Hoover Metropolitan Stadium after the 1988 season, but the old park refused to fade. Since 1992, the Friends of Rickwood have poured roughly $2 million into restoring grandstands, the press box, locker rooms, and the main entrance. In 1964, General Manager Glynn West had purchased 1,000 wooden seats from New York's Polo Grounds and installed them at Rickwood -- a transplant of history from one storied park to another. Since 1996, the Barons have returned each season for the Rickwood Classic, a throwback game where both teams wear period uniforms honoring a different era of Birmingham baseball. The ballpark has served as a filming location for biopics of Jackie Robinson and Ty Cobb, and the outfield fence carries 1940s-style advertisements -- some sponsored by descendants of Rick Woodward himself, advertising the long-gone Woodward Iron Company. The field underwent $5 million in renovations for the 2024 MLB game, including a new playing surface, modern dugouts, and a digital scoreboard, ensuring Rickwood keeps making history rather than simply preserving it.