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.