Say HEY! Willie Mays, 75 on Saturday

Vic Wertz, born February 9, 1925.

https://i.postimg.cc/8CkNFYp2/vic.jpg

Totally forgot till a friend's FB post reminded me: 93 today.

I was going to update this thread but I didn’t want you to think he died

Willie Mays was standing at the batting cage. I stuck my hand out. "I'm Jim Bouton."

“Oh sure,” he said. “Jim Bouton. I know you.

“You’ve always been one of my heroes,” he said. “When I was a kid, my brother and I always used to go up to the Polo Grounds to watch you play.”

"Now, why'd you have to go and say you came to see me when you were a kid?" Willie Mays said, his voice squeaky with mock anger.

"And you know something, Willie?" Tommy Davis said. "He's only thirty-five years old."

Mays groaned. "Why couldn't you just come over and say 'Hi'?" he said. "Now I feel like an old man."

Funny, he doesn’t look like an old man. Especially when he plays baseball.

RIP

What? Wow and the national game on Fox on Thursday.

RIP

I saw a note on Instagram posted by the Giants about how he couldn’t attend the game due to not being able to move around well, which I assumed was just his age, but yeah. What a life he had. RIP.

RIP. One of the true all times greats.

Ah, geez, with that game coming up. He was a question in our monthly trivia last night (24 Willie Mays Drive). And when I was playing tennis tonight and members had to pick a shoe medallion from #1-40, I reflexively took 24.

literally just passed by the statue outside oracle. rip

For almost 30 years I've wondered if he ever tried to get the e-mail address I grabbed in the early '90s: say✧✧✧@rocketm✧✧✧.c✧✧.

(I guess the stars are automatic.)

My favourite quote of his, from the blog where he’s talking to Giants rookies in 2009, which I pasted upthread

“I know you guys are saying, ‘Oh, hell, he didn’t do all this stuff. Oh yes I did.’’

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GQZmS_FW0AAI0wJ?format=jpg&name=large

Cover I came up with for Radio On #4 (1994 or '95)

https://i.postimg.cc/Fsq8N7ty/willie.jpg

The text is from a Barbara Lewis song: "Tell me you can't stay put too long in one place/Without a word you go running off to some place."

CNN had Charles Barkley on: "Mr. Mays, Mr. Aaron."

The Greatest Ever.

RIP. Can't believe he's really gone, but what a life he had.

Mays vs. Koufax: https://stathead.com/baseball/vs/sandy-koufax-vs-willie-mays

Edge to Mays.

Mays vs. Gibson: https://stathead.com/baseball/vs/bob-gibson-vs-willie-mays

Whoah--now that's dominance.

at the risk of sounding like a hack baseball writer Jackson Chourio just hit an inside the park HR which very much looked like some of the Willie Mays highlights I've seen, helmet flying off just trucking around 3rd

Here's something I never knew: "Only two men no taller than 5'10" have hit more than 360 home runs: Mel Ott, who hit 511, and Mays, far out front with 660."

https://www.si.com/mlb/willie-mays-obituary-the-say-hey-kid

Incredible athlete. RIP.

RIP

Sheehan:

Close your eyes, just for a second, and picture a baseball player.

Is he in the box, bat held low, coiled, focused, potential energy seconds from becoming kinetic?

Is he rounding second, gliding more than he is running, triple on his mind?

Is his back to the diamond as he races across a sunny patch of green grass, chasing down a baseball that never had a chance to fall safely?

Is he young, the world at his feet?

Is he smiling?

Tell a fan to picture a baseball player, and there’s a pretty good chance their mind will turn to Willie Mays. Mays, who died Tuesday at the age of 93, days before MLB’s Negro Leagues tribute game in Alabama, was baseball, a do-it-all player who did it all with joy, with flair, with style. Mays, one of the last superstars to begin his career in the Negro Leagues, may have been the best to ever play our game. He did everything a baseball player could do to win games short of taking the mound.

Mays hit for average, .301 lifetime. He hit for power, with 660 career home runs, and spent much of his career second all-time behind Babe Ruth. He ran, stealing 339 bases and leading the league four years in a row at a time when the stolen base was in retreat. That speed was always on display in center field, where he ranks among the best to ever cover the 8, in part because of an arm that was strong and true. In one of the deepest competitive environments in baseball history, the National League post-integration, Mays’s teams won four pennants and one World Series, falling a game short of two other championships. His signature play -- just “The Catch” -- in the 1954 World Series is one of the iconic moments in baseball history.

The Say Hey Kid -- a nickname of disputed origins, but likely tied to Mays’s use of the phrase -- had more tools, though. He connected with people. Growing up in New York well after Mays’s career ended, one of the first things I ever learned about him was that he played stickball in the street, just like, and with, regular New York kids. He was fun to watch, his hat flying off as he went first to third, as he turned a double into an out. He was regular-sized, listed at 5’10”, 170, hardly intimidating, looking like someone you might be able to strike out if he showed up on your block waving a broomstick. Four sewers and one lost Spaldeen later...

Mays’s career bridged black-and-white to color, grass to turf, leagues to divisions, flannel to doubleknit. By the time of his rookie season in the NL, 1951, just six MLB teams had put a Black man on the field. In 1973, his final year, six Black men started in the All-Star Game. Jackie Robinson was respected for his play and for his toughness under unimaginable strain. Mays, though, was the first Black baseball player to be loved, first by the baseball world, and then the wider sports world beyond that.

Well, except for sportswriters. You know the best argument for WAR? Mays led the NL in WAR ten times. He won two MVPs. Which of those figures makes more sense to you?

Mays’s greatness, though, wasn’t in the numbers, it wasn’t even in the great defensive plays and cannonball runs from first to home and 24 trips to the All-Star Game.

No, what we can take from Mays’s career, and his life beyond it, is this: Willie Mays was baseball’s most beloved player. Whether you followed his career from the grandstand or on YouTube, whether you argued Willie vs. Mickey vs. The Duke or are not entirely sure who those other guys are, if you love baseball, there’s a little piece of you missing today.

We’ve lost Willie Mays, and there’s no replacing him.

Goddamn, this was crushing to hear, especially with the Rickwood game coming up tomorrow. It's gonna have a lot more emotional heft now.

Waiting on what I expect will be a small-book-length post from Posnanski today.

Everyone got most upset with my Willie Mays autograph story last year (which still makes me laugh! sorry), so let me make up for it here.

https://i.postimg.cc/J4yVsZ76/rickwood.jpg

Amazing photo!

One thing I've thought about over the years was how it was always comforting knowing Willie was still alive and kickin' in SF where I live. Just made this place feel more relevant and somehow made the bygone eras of both the city and baseball here still feel alive in some capacity. I'm so happy he was able to witness the championships a decade ago. RIP, legend.

Highly recommend Leo Durocher's Nice Guys Finish Last, which has lots and lots and lots of Mays. I'll look for a good excerpt tonight.

https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/wp-content/uploads/satevepost/2021-04-12-willie-mays-leo-durocher-seps.jpg

"I don't move as well as I used to."

https://i.postimg.cc/Jz7ydJdB/mays.jpg

Posting too much, I know...They did kind of artfully not mention Gibson in #10 here:

https://www.mlb.com/news/willie-mays-best-stats-and-accomplishments

Love all these stories and memories. The game tomorrow is going to be intense.

I was Zooming last night with an internet friend (we've never met) from San Francisco who saw Mays all through his prime, going back to 1958, when he was five.

I think I have a 60s WM baseball card

Posnanski's Mays post went up today. It's less about Mays than trying to decide who is now the Greatest Living Player. I guess he wrote so much about Mays in The Baseball 100--Mays was #1--he didn't want to repeat himself.

He starts with the idea that Bonds is obviously the GLP, but eventually, and circuitously, settles on Griffey, which will no doubt raise the ire of many.

Gleaned one interesting thing from a quick skim. In '69, when the writers chose their greatest all-time and greatest living players lists, they moved Mays to RF so they could get him onto the living list:

RHP: Walter Johnson (All-Time); Bob Feller (Living--died in 2010)
LHP: Lefty Grove (All-Time); Lefty Grove (Living--died in 1975)
C: Mickey Cochrane (All-Time); Bill Dickey (Living--died in 1993)
1B: George Sisler (All-Time); George Sisler and Stan Musial (Living)
2B: Rogers Hornsby (All-Time); Charlie Gehringer (Living--died in 1993)
3B: Pie Traynor (All-Time); Pie Traynor (Living--died in 1972)
SS: Honus Wagner (All-Time); Joe Cronin (Living--died in 1984)
LF: Ty Cobb (All-Time); Ted Williams (Living--died in 2002)
CF Joe DiMaggio (All-Time); Joe DiMaggio (Living--died in 1999)
RF: Babe Ruth (All-Time); Willie Mays (Living--died in 2024)

"There’s a little bit to unpack here, particularly the fact that the writers put Willie Mays in rightfield to get him on the living team, which, you know, on the one hand, I get it, because having an all-time living baseball team without Willie Mays would have been ridiculous. On the other hand, listing Willie Mays as a rightfielder is like listing Leonardo Da Vinci as an auto mechanic. I’m sure he’d have been able to do one helluva tuneup, but it entirely misses the point."

Thinking about Jerry West and the NBA logo, this is a great idea.

https://www.tsn.ca/video/buster-olney-willie-mays-absolutely-should-be-new-mlb-logo~2943148

Haven't won since Mays passing. Down to 2 starters. This year's team just isn't any good, mediocre.

I need something else to do.

Wrong thread

from the old tyme baseball photos thread, h/t gyac

I follow former SI photographer Walter Iooss on IG (you should too) and he posted this pic he took of Willie Mays the other day on Mays’s 90th bday. Pull this picture out every time someone says “they didn’t have athletes then like we have now.” pic.twitter.com/y6buSb1o54

— Harry Arnett (@harryarnett) May 7, 2021

no idea what that last line of my post is doing there

Greil Marcus, of all people--he is from the Bay Area--got a long "Ask Greil" about Willie Mays that he responded to today. I'll only include the last bit of the question; I like his answer.

I'm sure as a Bay Area native, you have fond memories of Willie Mays, as do all baseball fans for his talents were wonderous, but whatever his civil rights battles were, they were mostly private, sad to say. —JAMES R STACHO

I imagine that in some part of his being, every day Willie Mays said to himself, not in these words, but in his own, I am my own revolution. How did he feel that night in 1963 when in the bottom of the 16-inning scoreless tie with Warren Spahn and Juan Marichal on the mound for every pitch he ended it with a home run? Oh, I feel so fine, I am so lucky to be allowed to play this wonderful game? Or was it, Take that, you fuckers. Go back down in the ground, you Klan killers. You’ll never catch me.

A lot of people saw that. A lot of people felt that. There’s no way to measure to what degree Willie Mays might have inspired the people at the Cleveland Summit to do what they did even if he didn’t do it, even if he thought, I had to do my service, go on and do yours--which I doubt.

(The Cleveland Summit being the famous gathering of Black athletes in 1967 to support Ali--not attended by Mays or anybody else from MLB.)

He may well have thought that. I was reading about how Henry “Hank” Aaron* and Jackie Robinson were angry that Mays never spoke out over the racism he and they faced. There’s this interview I always think of, from 2009, totally casual talk to young Giants players:

“My father told me no matter what anybody said, never to fight. Turn the other cheek. I’d call him up and he’d ask, “Did you fight today?’ Back then, you had to make sure you were bigger than those people who called you names. They called you all kinds of names. But I knew for me to get ahead, I had to take all that kind of stuff. Every time somebody called me a name, I hit the ball.’’

Finally watched the Reggie interview earlier today--fantastic. (I had to laugh at a couple of side issues: when Reggie included A-Rod on his list of all-time greats, wondered if Jeter did a slow burn; and when Ortiz brought up the HOF, wondered the same about A-Rod.)

"I am my own revolution"--love that.

Any Black player pre-'68 or so had a second overriding fact to deal with aside from society in general: baseball was far more conservative than basketball or football.

Re the Reggie interview: knowing how much all the A's hated Charlie Finley when it came to anything related to money, I thought it was gracious of Jackson to mention Finley walking the team out when his country club wouldn't let Jackson attend a ceremony (they relented).