Remembering Willie Mays

On June 18, 2024, the Hall of Fame outfielder Willie Mays died of heart failure at age ninety-three in an assisted living facility in Atherton, California. Mays began his professional baseball career as a seventeen-year-old in the Negro leagues playing for the Birmingham Black Barons. He made his Major League Baseball debut with the New York Giants just two years later in 1951, after hitting .477 in Triple A. He was just the tenth black player in league history. He became one of the most heralded ballplayers of all time, playing twenty-two years in the Major Leagues, most of it with the San Francisco Giants.1I was in middle school in the Bay Area when Willie and the New York Giants moved to San Francisco in 1958 (at the same time the Brooklyn Dodgers relocated to Los Angeles). Before then, there had been no Major League Baseball west of the Mississippi. Like most Bay area kids, I had grown up rooting for the San Francisco Seals of the AAA Pacific Coast League. To make room for the Giants, they moved to Phoenix, Arizona, in 1957.While most San Franciscans were thrilled to have a Major League team, they didn't at first idolize Mays, especially not the way New Yorkers had. This was despite him being widely regarded as one of the best players in the game, and its greatest centerfielder. The slow adulation of Mays on the West Coast was probably due to fans identifying him with New York, while the Giants’ other stars—Orlando Cepeda, Willie McCovey, and Juan Marichal—were homegrown. All had broken into the big leagues in San Francisco.When my father took me to Seals Stadium to see the Giants play for the first time in 1958, I admired Mays's graceful movement on the field but was unenthused with the way he hit, as he seemed to bail on pitches (“stepping in the bucket”).But it wasn't long before Mays's incredible five-tool athleticism and exuberant style of play made him a local hero. “It was Mays's contribution to the 1962 Giants winning their first NL Pennant since moving from New York,” baseball scholar Howard DeNike argued, “that really cemented in the public mind his importance.”2 I noticed it in kids I was then coaching in summer ball. Back then, and perhaps today, boys often emulated the batting style of their favorite player. Among my charges, I began hearing more references to Mays and seeing his style—wide stance, long stride, and stepping in the bucket to open his hips—copied.All fans had come to appreciate Mays's entertaining style. When catching a fly ball, he used the “basket catch,” a nonchalant way of catching the ball with palm facing up and wrist tucked in close to their body. He didn't just run the bases; he ran them with abandon and often with his cap flying off. Some claimed that he wore his cap one size larger so that it would fly off more easily when running hard.Almost from the start of this career, Mays was known as the “Say hey, kid.” “When I broke in,” he explained, “I didn't know many people by name so I would just say, ‘Say, hey,’ and writers picked up on that.”3 When Mays returned to the Giants after two years of military service in 1954, a New York press agent convinced a record company to produce a novelty song. “Say hey” presaged the arrival of Mays as more than a ballplayer, noted journalist Rustin Dodd, “He was becoming a cultural force, another superstar in baseball's golden age, a poster child for a changing America.”4During his Major League career, Mays was chosen for twenty-four All-Star games, won two National League Most Valuable Player Awards, had over 3,000 hits, more than 300 stolen bases, and drove in more than 100 runs in ten different seasons. And with more than 600 home runs, he was, along with Hank Aaron, the top power hitter of his era.Some baseball icons are best remembered for their individual seasonal records, such as Babe Ruth's 60 home runs in 1927, Ted Williams hitting .406 in 1941, and Cal Ripken Jr. playing in 2,632 consecutive games. But Mays was a multidimensional star, most likely the finest five-tool player of all time (i.e., hitting for average, hitting for power, running the bases, throwing, and fielding).Perhaps more than any other feat, fans remember “The Catch,” one of the most famous defensive plays of all time. As many baseball fans know, Mays robbed Vic Wertz of the Cleveland Indians of a deep fly ball to center field—likely the game-winning extra-base hit in the eighth inning of the first game of the 1954 World Series. Mays ran full tilt with his back to the field and caught the ball over his shoulder, 400 feet from home plate. He then fell to the ground after making a monster throw back to the infield to prevent a runner from advancing more than one base. The black-and-white film footage of the catch has since been seen by millions of fans on TV and computer screens. Today, seven decades later, when a kid makes a difficult catch over his shoulder, it's still called a Willie Mays catch.John Thorn, the official historian of Major League Baseball, suggested that even if Mays had not been one of the finest hitters in the history of baseball, he would be remembered for his superior defense. “Soon after Mays reached the big leagues, he was proclaimed the greatest centerfielder in the game,” said Thorn, “A line once applied to Tris Speaker's glove—‘where triples go to die’—has attached itself to Willie's glove ever since.”5Referring to Willie's legacy, former Giants broadcaster Dave Fleming recently noted, “it's not just his numbers, his records, or the games he helped win. It is the pure joy that he brought to those fans who watched him and the loving memories that have been passed to future generations so they might know the magic and beauty of the game.”6 Similarly, Mays biographer James S. Hirsch explained, “What made Willie so appealing was how he played the game: the grace and the tenacity and the sheer entertainment value that he brought to playing the game, the style with which he played.”7Like Hirsch, several scholars have posited that Mays's style of play was influenced by his early days playing in the Negro leagues, in which teams played not just to win but also to entertain. As Mays told Hirsch, his objective when he came to the ballpark “was not just to help his team win but to leave the fans with something to talk about when they left the ballpark.” That desire may also explain the genesis of his basket catch and the flying hat. As sportswriter Thomas Boswell reflected, Mays was as “cool” as anyone who ever played the game.8Two days after Mays's death, the New York Times placed his picture prominently on the front page, a full fifty-plus years after his last game. If nothing else, this indicates that his importance extended far beyond his many baseball feats. Mays had become a cultural icon to generations of Americans and perhaps baseball fans around the world

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