A truly great ballplayer: Willie Mays (May 6, 1931–June 18, 2024)
Last Thursday, Major League Baseball (MLB) celebrated its “Tribute to the Negro Leagues” with great pomp, a tribute by the professional leagues to black baseball players that existed from the late 1880s to 1960. Black people were not allowed to play in MLB clubs until the middle of the 20th century. The spectacle was marked by a match between the St. Louis Cardinals and the San Francisco Giants (final score 6:5) at Rickwood Field, Alabama, the former ballpark of the Birmingham Black Barons. The event was not least a memorial service for the baseball star Willie Mays, one of the greatest ballplayers of all time, who had died two days earlier. The US sports magazine The Athletic Mays promptly ranked first in a top 100 ranking of 2020.
Willie Howard Mays Jr. was born on May 6, 1931 in Westfield, Alabama, a mere 13-minute drive from Rickwood Field, where the son of a steelworker family played his first professional game for the “Black Barons” in the “Negro American League” in 1948. After Jackie Robinson, who was the first black to break the “color barrier” in baseball with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, Mays belonged to the first generation of black MLB players.
The “Say Hey Kid” made his debut in 1951 at the age of 21 for the NY Giants. The start was a bit rocky, with only one hit in 26 attempts. But that one hit was a real hit – a home run against Warren Spahn of the Boston Braves. Spahn, like Mays in the Hall of Fame, later joked: “I’ll never forgive myself. We could have been rid of Willie forever if I’d just thrown that one strikeout.” Fortunately, things turned out differently – Mays finished his first season as “Rookie of the Year.”
In 22 MLB seasons, Mays hit 660 home runs (sixth on the all-time list) and 3,293 hits (13th). His batting average of 30.1 percent is incredible. Mays’ real specialty, however, was defense in center field – this is where he became a legend. In the first game of the 1954 World Series between the NY Giants and the Cleveland Indians (now Guardians), Mays caught a basically uncatchable ball in the eighth inning, which went down in history as “The Catch.” Mays prevented Cleveland from taking a 3-2 lead. After ten innings, the Giants won 5-2 – and then the World Series 4-0. The then 23-year-old was voted MVP of the World Series and the National League. He did the latter again in 1965.
In his New York years, before the Giants moved to San Francisco in 1958, Mays was considered an extremely approachable star in the predominantly black district of Harlem. Photos show him playing the street version of baseball “stick ball” with children in his free time. After his sensational 1954 season, Mays soon became a pop culture icon. The rhythm and blues band The Treniers released “Say Hey (The Willie Mays Song)” in 1955, and Chuck D’s “The Amazing Willie Mays” was released in 2023 – an ode by the Public Enemy head to the star with the number 24. It is no longer awarded by the Giants and the New York Mets, where Mays ended his career in 1972 and 1973.
On the Monday before the “Tribute to the Negro Leagues,” Mays announced that he would not be able to travel to Alabama in person for health reasons. The next day, on June 18, he died at the age of 93 in Palo Alto, California.
