He was part of the scenery, like a Van Gogh on your refrigerator, right there with the grocery list and the ice dispenser. If they’d set up a recliner or massage chair or a throne for the exalted Willie Mays, nobody would have minded. All he needed was a seat at the table.
This was in Scottsdale, Ariz., where the San Francisco Giants hold spring training, in the tight little locker room off the first-base dugout. The Giants now dress in a much bigger space, a lavish modern clubhouse. But for years they gathered in cramped quarters, going about their mornings with the game’s greatest all-around player right there among them, over by the door to the hallway, seated at a table with his signature on it, swapping stories.
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It was like this all over, not too long ago. Hey, that little guy with the funny ears and welcoming grin, puttering around the Yankees’ clubhouse every spring? That’s Yogi Berra. And the dapper fellow with the deep, commanding voice, up in the third row of the press box in Cleveland, studying the action below? Oh, just Bob Feller.
You didn’t take them for granted — the invisible halo of baseball sainthood always hovered — but you figured, against reason, that they’d always be there. They always had been. It just seemed right.
Baseball endures, and the death of Mays on Tuesday, at 93 years old, could not have been surprising. He had been in decline for years. Younger legends still blend in, like Ichiro Suzuki in Seattle, still in uniform for daily pregame work, forever hoping, it seems, for another at-bat.
But the generation of stars from the Mays era is fading, the stars of the ’50s.
In April it was Carl Erskine, an All-Star pitcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers, who died at 97. Erskine faced Mays 75 times and gave up eight of his 660 home runs. Last summer, at his home in Indiana, Erskine still marveled at their encounters, the way Mays would pull majestic fouls into the upper deck, scaring pitchers from pounding him inside — even though, as Erskine saw it, that was the only way to have a chance at getting him out.
“He was a pure hitter,” Erskine said. “Those guys, there’s just a handful of them in baseball, they break all the rules about how you stand, how you grip. But they’re the best hitters in the league.”
Like Erskine, Mays was a rookie in 1948, the year after Jackie Robinson integrated the Dodgers. Mays played that season in the Negro Leagues, with the Birmingham Barons at 17 years old. As a boy in Fairfield, Ala., it was the pinnacle of what he imagined.
“It was my dream to play for the Black Barons,” Mays says in his book, “24: Life Stories and Lessons from the Say Hey Kid,” written with John Shea in 2020. “I thought that’d be the highest level I’d reach. My dad used to take me to the games, so Rickwood Field meant a lot to me.”
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Mays died two days before Major League Baseball’s tribute game at Rickwood on Thursday between his Giants and the St. Louis Cardinals. The timing will add poignancy to the event, a chance to ponder the meaning of the man and his mountain of achievements.
About those — well, it’s a sea of black ink, league-leader status in all of these categories, in one year or another: runs, hits, triples, homers, stolen bases, walks, average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, OPS, OPS+, total bases. He also won a Gold Glove every year from 1957, when the award was created, through 1968, when he was 37 years old.
If you’re into wins above replacement, Mays led the National League 10 times, per Baseball Reference, and only four players ever collected more than his 156.2 WAR — Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson, Cy Young and Barry Bonds. That’s three guys born in the 1800s who played in the segregated majors, and Bonds, Mays’ godson, whose ties to steroids have kept him out of the Hall of Fame.
It’s fairly easy, then, to make the case for Mays as the best ever, notwithstanding our modern fixation with Shohei Ohtani, a breathtaking two-way talent who — to be fair — does not play in the field and struggles to stay healthy on the mound. Mays didn’t pitch, of course, but he was always available: From 1954 through the end of the ’60s, only Hank Aaron played more games.
Aaron, who died in 2021, is perhaps the only player from the early integration era — or maybe even the entire history of the sport — who can be reasonably compared to Mays.
“You can certainly make the case that Hank was the better hitter of the two by a narrow margin — and Hank was also a great outfielder and baserunner — but Willie was just a magnificent all-round player who exuded joy,” the Hall of Fame broadcaster Bob Costas said on Tuesday.
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“He just transmitted it. It’s like Michael Jordan and basketball: If you’d never been to a basketball game and no one told you who was who, your eyes would go to Michael Jordan. And if you’d never been to a baseball game and no one told you who was who, your eyes would go to Willie Mays. Even if he was 0 for 4, even if there was no spectacular play, even if it was just the way he did it, the way he carried himself. He was Willie Mays.”
That unmistakable joy could sometimes cast Mays as a two-dimensional caricature: a childlike, instinctual talent with a piercing laugh who played stickball after games in the streets of Harlem.
“Often the condescension was unconscious, but it was nonetheless corrosive,” wrote George F. Will in “Men At Work: The Craft of Baseball.” “The truth is that Mays was, from the first, a superb craftsman.”
As a fielder, Mays designed his trademark basket catch to give him a quicker release on his throws. As a hitter, Frank Robinson told Shea for “24,” Mays adapted his swing to drive more balls to right at Candlestick Park, knowing that forbidding winds would impact many flies to left. As a baserunner, Mays learned to track hits while running without slowing down, and prided himself on not needing a base coach for direction.
It was a captivating blend of skills, smarts and style, spanning the coasts at a time of extraordinary change in the game and the country.
In 1991, in an essay from Scottsdale, Roger Angell wrote of a spring training chat with Mays, a shared memory of a catch-and-throw at the Polo Grounds 40 years earlier, by a very young Mays against Brooklyn. All who witnessed it, Angell wrote, from the players to the fans to maybe even Mays himself, “understood that something new and electric had just begun to happen to baseball.”
New. Electric. And no going back. If you love the game, you’re grateful for Mays and all he brought to it. His generation flickers, but its fire burns forever.
(Top photo of Mays with the New York Giants in 1955: AP Photo/File)
