Winn loses but baseball wins at Rickwood Field

Thursday’s game, at least from an emotional standpoint, seemed set-up for a San Francisco Giants win.

The game took place at Rickwood Field, the stadium franchise legend Willie Mays grew up going to as a kid, the diamond where he first played professionally as an outfielder for the Birmingham Black Barons, and in the wake of his passing, the game took on an even deeper meaning, not just as a tribute to the Negro Leagues but as a memorial service for the greatest to ever play the game.

Beyond Willie though, manager Bob Melvin had spent time playing for the Barons at Rickwood when they were an affiliate of the Tigers, and Mike Yastrzemski’s dad, who passed when Yaz was a teenager also played for the Barons in the early ‘80s.

The night was charged for most of the Giants lineup, but its significance wasn’t lost on the opposing St. Louis Cardinals either, especially Alabama native, Brendan Donovan. It was Donovan who ended up being the player of greatest consequence, going 3-for-4 with three two-out hits and three two-out RBIs, including a 2-run homer off Keaton Winn in the 1st and an impressive bloop into center that spoiled a nasty 0-2 slider from Taylor Rogers in the 5th.

That single would prove to be decisive, sinking the Giants 6-5 in Birmingham.

San Francisco has gone 2-5 over the past week. They’ve lost three one-run games. It was the second day in a row that the team stranded the tying and lead run on base in the 9th.

A knock in the final frame would’ve undoubtedly been sweet. Some hits, or even productive outs in support of a booming lead-off double by Jorge Soler in the 4th would’ve certainly helped San Francisco’s cause, but it’s hard to completely blame the bats in this one. They had to play catch-up all evening after the Cards tallied 5-runs off Winn over the first three innings. After a brief hiccup of positivity in his last start (6 IP, 3 ER, 6 K), Winn’s woes regained their form. The 2.2 innings pitched was his second shortest start of the season, and he’s now allowed 5 runs or more in five of his last six games.

Center fielder Heliot Ramos aired an opposite-field 3-run homer off St. Louis starter Adrian Pallante that tied the game briefly in the 3rd, but the top of the Cardinals lineup quickly mounted another rally with a leadoff double from Masyn Winn and single by Alec Burleson. Winn scored on a sacrifice fly, and Burleson advanced to third when Donovan, again with two outs, doubled to keep the inning alive and knock Winn from the game.

A spiked slider by Randy Rodríguez kicked under Patrick Bailey’s glove, skirted between the home plate umpire’s legs and skipped across the expansive foul-territory behind home plate to the backstop allowing Burleson to score.

The official scorer ruled the pitch as wild, and it certainly was in the dirt and in the batter’s box near the front toe of batter Matt Carpenter (who swung at the pitch), but looking at the replay, Bailey probably should have blocked the ball. It wasn’t a gimme based on how far the baseball bounced in front of Bailey and how unpredictable those hops could be, but he didn’t give himself much of a chance to mitigate those variables. He led with his glove rather than his body, stabbing at the breaking ball with his glove, trying to pick the hop like an infielder rather than focusing on knocking it down and keeping it in front of him. With a runner on third, and ultimately a one-run loss, it cost the Giants.

For all Bailey does well as a catcher—framing, pop time, caught stealing, he’s pretty much the gold standard in the league according to all these Statcast catching metrics—blocking is something he struggles with. He had -9 blocks above average in 2023, and his -1 mark so far this year is in the 34th percentile. Toronto’s Danny Jensen and Adley Rutschman both lead the Majors with 10.

Not to pile on the guy—the backstop did go 4 for 5 in the game—but he kind of blew a pick-off throw in the 1st too. After a leadoff walk, Masyn Winn made a break for second on a ball in the dirt but thought better of it. Caught far off the bag at first, he deked for second. The fake baited Bailey to throw down which allowed Winn to scamper back to his original bag.

It’s a play that won’t show up on any score sheets, but it looms large. Bailey had an out in front of him, an opportunity to erase a leadoff walk and bail out a struggling starter early in the game, and he rushed it. He made a hasty throw to second from the plate instead of taking control of the situation, throwing to first, orcharging at Winn, making him commit to a base before engaging.

Not an error, just a play not made. The Giants had a couple of those that weighed heavily in Wednesday’s loss, and unfortunately, the “lost out” loomed over the inning as well. Winn advanced to third on a single and scored on a sacrifice fly, then Donovan launched his 2-run blast with two-outs.

To be honest, the game was secondary to the circumstance surrounding it.

The Field of Dreams game a couple years back, though cool in concept, played too much into the sport’s penchant for self-mythologizing. For all the inevitable pomp of this Rickwood game, MLB did a nice job of getting out of the way, letting the people who made the place special take center stage.

They brought players from the Negro Leagues to the game, decked them out with jerseys, their names stretched across the backs, and lined them up along the baselines to take the field again. They let pioneers and heroes like Bill Greason talk about his experiences without interrupting him with limiting questions, and whether they anticipated it or not, they gave a platform for one of the legends of the game to speak his truth, to remind us that these early-20th century monuments of baseball like Fenway, like Wrigley, like Rickwood were not always sanctuaries, not Edenic-greens for all.

The home of Willie Mays’s Birmingham Black Barons, a legendary team that won the Negro League World Series in 1948, yet a place where those same champions, weren’t allowed to use the clubhouse—Rickwood Field really did emanate that complicated history.

Watching the game made me sad and proud and humbled. It made me long for the small and local, the chasing down of foul balls to return for a free soda or popcorn at the snack shack, as Hunter Pence noted on the KNBR broadcast. Its low roof, the stifling wooden stands that cooled as the sun set—that feeling of summer play, of summer joy, of summer resilience came through even for those who weren’t there every time the camera cut to the dusk light shimmering off the old scoreboard in center, or a wide shot of the whole field, the sepia-tone infield dirt, the dense woods stretching out beyond the outfield wall.

Of course Willie Mays fell in love with baseball here.