Bernadine Birdsong confesses: She doesn’t know sports. Not even football, admits the owner of Michael’s, the elegant restaurant on Birmingham’s southside with a left-field home run view of Region’s Field. On this day, while relaxing on her back porch, she laughs: “Isn’t that a shame?”
Not surprisingly, given the location of her business, baseball, of all the sports, “is the one I do kind of understand.”
Birdsong certainly knows business. Knows why it is vital for small businesses such as hers to capitalize when major events come to the city.
“It’s life-changing,” she says. “They’ll come in and have an impact in one week that it would have taken me a month to raise.”
Last month, Major League Baseball descended upon Birmingham for several days of events surrounding MLB at Rickwood: A Salute to the Negro Leagues, which culminated with a regular-season game between the San Francisco Giants and St. Louis Cardinals. That week, Michael’s hosted two major MLB functions.
On Wednesday, June 19, the two-tiered restaurant fed 150 people including Giants’ players and staff, as well as personnel from the FOX and MLB networks. The downstairs dining area was set up for player interviews that would be used on pre-game shows, while food was served upstairs on the terrace that sits just beyond Regions Field.
“They took over the whole place,” Birdsong says.
The following day, Michael’s hosted a brunch for about 250 — MLB officials, former Negro League players and their families, and city officials. “They were everywhere,” Birdsong says, including inside the adjacent Negro Southern League Museum.
From the onset of its decision to host a regular season game at historic Rickwood Field, MLB was cognizant that its presence in Birmingham would be measured by far more than runs, hits, and errors. Far more than attendance. Far more than the number of celebs and major-league stars—past and present—who came to town for a few days in the summer.
Far more even than its broad and sincere embrace of the Negro Leagues and its surviving players that was at the center of the celebration.
In Birmingham, with a storied history that changed race relations in this nation, impact would matter.
Financial impact, particularly on often overlooked businesses owned by people of color and women.
Impact on the long-neglected neighborhoods hugging the 114-year-old venue that is the oldest active ballpark in America.
Impact on people and youth who may not have the opportunity to attend the game between the San Francisco Giants and St. Louis Cardinals.
According to MLB, it hired almost 40 diverse (minority- and women-owned) enterprises and individuals as part of producing its events. Most are located in Alabama — Birmingham, primarily, but also Montgomery and Huntsville; a few were also from Atlanta. Here’s a list provided by MLB:
o Absolute Cleaning
o Mac & Snacks (Huntsville, AL)
o Jernigan & Jernigan (Montgomery, AL)
o Jolly Cakes (Birmingham, AL)
o Magic City Photographers
o Chris Coleman – DJ
o Sleek
o Naughty But Nice Kettle Corn
o DJ Blaze
o Mykeon Smith
o VIBE Furniture and Décor
o Birmingham Professional Firefighter’s Association
o Vectour
o Negro Southern League Museum
MLB did not provide how much was spent overall with diverse businesses but provided a statement: “The businesses were crucial in various functions hospitality, concessions, event planning, construction, HBCU tours, entertainment, artistic design,” said an MLB spokesperson.
Among the most substantial spend was a $4.45 million contract with Black-owned construction company A.G. Gaston Engineering to oversee the challenging transformation of 114-year-old Rickwood’s aged playing area into a major-league venue satisfying all quality and safety standards.
“It’s really, really cool to be a part of the transformative project,’ says Brian Hamilton, Gaston’s CEO. “It is a community asset. It has national implications. It is a cornerstone of a broader story about the African American experience. It just seemed to be fitting and appropriate that we would even be considered much less have the opportunity to participate. So, we were really excited about it.
“And, of course, you can’t put a price on a first opportunity to work with an MLB or other major-league entity.”
MLB also said that through BaAM, its event production partner, 225 mostly Birmingham-based people were employed to help execute the events. They were recruited via open calls and with the help of various groups, including:
o HICA – Hispanic Coalition of Alabama
o Rock City Church
o Faith Chapel
o Sixteenth Street Baptist Church
o Sixth Avenue Baptist Church
o Lawson State Community College
o Miles College
o Urban Impact
o Birmingham Business Resource Center
o Birmingham Promise
o Birmingham Division of Youth Services
o The Dannon Project
o Birmingham Neighborhood Associations
o BMEN – Blazer Male Excellence Network
BEYOND RICKWOOD
On the morning of the game, April Brown, MLB’s senior vice president of social responsibility, spoke of the “power of the sport to enrich communities” while announcing the league’s donation of a hydroponic Freight Farm to the A. G. Gaston Boys & Girls Club on the city’s west side, part of what the league says was nearly $150,000 it invested in various community efforts across the city.
“The vision is that once everything starts growing it will be a continual cycle of fresh fruits and vegetables that can be offered to residents in the area,” Brown added, as MLB Commissioner Robert Manfred and Giants President and CEO Larry Baer sat nearby.
In addition, MBL says reps from the Cardinals and Giants toured Alabama A&M, Alabama State, and Miles College while in the area, and met with more than 300 students from Tuskegee, Lawson State Community College, Talladega, and Stillman to talk about the Rickwood event and careers in baseball. MLB said both teams are committed to following up with virtual workshops for students at Alabama HBCUs.
Careers in sports medicine were also provided during that week, MLB said, at a two-day workshop in Birmingham in partnership with the American Sports Medicine Institute “to assist underrepresented talent in sports medicine interested in furthering their careers in baseball,” said the MLB spokesperson.
MLB, which five years ago halted a potential investment in a youth academy in the city due to frustration, now says its “larger investment in youth baseball & softball development will continue for youth in Birmingham for years beyond MLB at Rickwood.” Stay tuned.
Finally, for the by-the-numbers curious: MLB says 2,283 pounds of food was donated by concessionaires and FOX broadcasting to Grace Klein Community to feed low-income families, and 2,519 pounds of food waste from concessionaires was collected by Birmingham-based Compost Only for community gardens in East Lake and Bush Hills.
HOW IT STARTED
Birdsong initially heard from MLB officials several months ago and believes they were tipped off to the place by Roy Wood, Jr., the Birmingham native/comedian who is a devoted promoter of his hometown.
Wood confesses: “I just like the food at Michael’s and always liked Ms. Birdsong,” he told me this week.
He suggested the place as a venue to tape a February MLB Network conversation about the game between him, Michael Mays (Willie Mays’ son), Negro League Museum President Bob Kendrick, and MLB Network announcers Jake Peavy and Harold Reynolds.
“I’m sure she left a good impression,” Wood says. “Her good food, good service, and being at the epicenter of baseball, as well, it was more than enough to impress the MLB brass.”
AN UNTOUCHED RELIC
The event was almost three years in the making, and the field — what lay beneath the surface after those 114 years, and whether it could be made major league ready — was undoubtedly the primary factor that could have squashed it.
It was the fall of 2021 when Jeremiah Yolkut, MLB’s vice president of global events, reached out to Gerald Watkins of the Friends of Rickwood and said he wanted to come to the venue that so many people had told MLB about. But Watkins couldn’t tell a soul. Ultimately, two FOR board members — also sworn to secrecy — were allowed to accompany Yolkut and global events senior manager Robert Field when they visited the ballpark not long thereafter.
Why so hush-hush? “Once you tell people you’re coming from MLB they, well, this is going to be a new franchise,” Yolkut said with a smile.
It didn’t take long for Yolkut and Field to see what everyone was talking about. “Right away, we looked at each other and said: We’ve got to play a game,” Yolkut said.
“And unlike most places we go where it’s pristine and polished, that’s not what we saw here,” he added. “It was that feeling you get when you walk through the gates. Even though we knew the field that was previously here wasn’t gonna be able to host a major-league game, the aura of the legends that were here, the look, the feel, the taste, even the stuff that didn’t look so good, it was inviting. It said: If you want to tell the story of the history of our game, not just the Negro Leagues history, but the history of our game, there’s probably no other venue in the country that could do what this venue could. It almost felt like it was a relic that was untouched in a good way.”
Hamilton received the call, oh, a little more than a year ago. At the other end of the line was someone from Toronto, Canada representing BaAM, a “creative experience” company, so screams its website. At the time, Hamilton didn’t know much about the folks making the cold call.
He didn’t yet know their client roster included almost every major sports league, including MLB.
“They wanted to know if I was interested in exploring an undisclosed project with an undisclosed client for an event with an incredibly tight timeline,” Hamilton recalls. “I said, ‘Sure.’”
Ultimately, Gaston dug in on the project with BaAm and Brightview, MLB’s field consultant. Gaston began work on the site on October 23, 2023, and ultimately had almost 50 people under supervision.
“I think the trickiest part of it was how are we going to handle the field build,” Yolkut confessed while in Birmingham. “There were a lot of surprises when they started taking the field up — all kinds of issues with sewer lines, drainage issues, site conditions. No one’s been underneath it all those years; there was probably patchwork done on different spots. So, there were definitely a lot of times where the field build was really complicated.”
Complicated, but not unconquerable, says Hamilton.
“Delivering on the project was never in doubt,’” he says, “in terms of our ability and effort and things that we can control. “Sure, there’s always an element of unknown when you’ve got a group of people who’ve never worked together before working on something that’s never been done before. But our confidence in the portion that we were asked to deliver was never in doubt. But it was much less about our ability to deliver than our ability to be a part of something that’s sort of bigger than ourselves.”
More than 24,000 people walked through the gates of Rickwood Field last month, but the residual effect of its transformation should reverberate for years, especially with diverse enterprises.
Birdsong says Michael’s still benefits from MLB’s presence. “To have your name out there so people know you exist,” she says. “Having that many eyes on you at one time brings more and more people your way.”
That’s impact. Life-changing impact.
Roy S. Johnson is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists’ Hall of Fame, an Edward R. Murrow Award winner, and a Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary. His column appears on AL.com, and digital editions of The Birmingham News, Huntsville Times, and Mobile Press-Register. Tell me what you think at rjohnson@al.com, and follow me at twitter.com/roysj, or on Instagram @roysj.