Willie Mays scholars pose for photo near the baseball great prior to the Topps MLB at Rickwood Promotional Tour at Birmingham Civil Rights Institute on Tuesday, June 18, the same day Mays died. (Photo by Russell Kilgore Jr./MLB Photos via Getty Images)
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BIRMINGHAM, AL – JUNE 18: Willie Mays Scholars pose for photo during the Topps MLB at Rickwood Promotional Tour at Birmingham Civil Rights Institute on Tuesday, June 18, 2024 in Birmingham, Alabama. (Photo by Russell Kilgore Jr./MLB Photos via Getty Images)
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Times Staff
The hits keep on coming for the City of Birmingham one week after hosting its first ever Major League baseball game,
FOX Sports reported “MLB at Rickwood” had an average viewership of 2,346,000 its most-watched Major League Thursday night regular-season game since Sept. 22, 2022 with a viewership 41 percent higher than last year’s average for Thursday night regular-season games.
Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin told the Birmingham Times on Tuesday the city has never hosted a sporting event of this magnitude.
“Whether it’s the [2022] World Games … the [1996] Olympic soccer or other major events that we’ve had, nothing has come to this,” he said. “It was multi-ethnic, it was multi-racial, and it was multi-generational.”
Here’s a closer look in photos.
