MIKE BURKE
Allegany Communications Sports
Willie Mays was the joy of baseball and easily may have been the greatest player who ever lived.
It’s nonsensical to use numbers to try to describe Willie Mays, though he is the only one to have the numbers he has in countless categories in baseball history. Just to see him run and to play baseball better than anybody else and with more joy than anybody else was all you needed to realize what Willie Mays will always mean to baseball and what he will always mean to our country.
He was legendary in the truest yet most defying sense, for though he was so very real and authentic, few believed it when they witnessed him play. His name alone, and the sound of it, Willie Mays, evokes happiness, wonderment and a smile.
A warm and thrilling feeling embraces the spirit when you think of Willie Mays.
His walking to the Polo Grounds, where the New York Giants played their home games, and his stopping to play stickball with the kids in the streets of Harlem, then buying them ice cream was straight out of Norman Rockwell.
America was in love with Willie Mays.
The news of his death on Tuesday afternoon at the age of 93 left all of baseball heartbroken, as he had been on our minds, with tonight’s MLB at Rickwood Field game in Birmingham, Alabama, between the San Francisco Giants and the St. Lous Cardinals set to be a celebration of Mays’ career, which began with the Birmingham Black Barons, and of the Negro Leagues in general.
“Today we have lost a true legend,” Giants chairman Greg Johnson said in a statement. “In the pantheon of baseball greats, Willie Mays’ combination of tremendous talent, keen intellect, showmanship, and boundless joy set him apart. A 24-time All-Star, the Say Hey Kid is the ultimate Forever Giant. He had a profound influence not only on the game of baseball, but on the fabric of America. He was an inspiration and a hero who will be forever remembered and deeply missed.”
Few ballplayers matched the overall brilliance of Mays, who ranks sixth all time with 660 home runs and won 12 Gold Glove Awards for his defense in center field, which he helped turn into the game’s most glamorous position in the 1950s, when he, Mickey Mantle and Duke Snider all played in New York. Mays was the first player to exceed 300 homers and 300 stolen bases in 1969, reflecting his exhilarating combination of power and speed.
“The only man who could have caught it, hit it,” wrote Bob Stevens of the San Francisco Chronicle.
“Willie Mays’ glove – the place where triples go to die,” which is what Ring Lardner wrote about Tris Speaker long before it became a baseball axiom for Mays for the entirety of his career.
“What can I say about Willie Mays after I say he’s the greatest player any of us has ever seen – he hits, he hits with power, he fields, he runs and he throws. If he could cook, I’d marry him,” said Leo Durocher, Mays’ first manager in the bigs, whom Mays said was “like my father away from home.”
Watching Willie Mays play baseball, even as a kid, which I was, you always knew when he was going to make a catch because he would hit the pocket of his glove, including on The Catch in the 1954 World Series, the most famous Willie Mays moment of them all.
Yet The actual Catch, according to Mays, was not even his most meaningful part of the play.
“Catching it wasn’t the problem,” Mays said. “The problem was (the Cleveland Indians’ Larry) Doby on second. On a deep fly to center at Polo Grounds, a runner could score all the way from second. I’ve done that myself more than once. So if I make the catch, which I will, and Larry scores from second, they still get the run that puts them ahead. All the time I’m running back, I’m thinking, ‘Willie, you’ve got to get this ball back to the infield.’”
And he did, which, if you’re a baseball fan, you know because you’ve seen the highlight of it a million times.
I grew up, and continue to try to do so, as an Orioles fan. My favorite ballplayer for eternity will be the late Brooks Robinson, who died last September. But the favorite player of one of my best friends growing up, Doug Wade, a guy I played ball with nearly every day of the year, was Willie Mays.
Growing up in The Wonder Years, when we played ball, or any variation of it, we were always our favorite players – I was Brooks, James Conley was Frank Howard, Chris Ruppenkamp was Roberto Clemente and Doug Wade was Willie Mays.
We respected that and we rooted for our buddies’ favorite players (which I came to regret in October 1971), but that’s how it was then. That’s how baseball was then – at every level. Even ours.
As elementary-school students, the first book any of us likely bought through the Arrow Book Club was “The Baseball Life of Willie Mays,” by Lee Greene, and we pored over every one of those 170 or so pages. We couldn’t get enough of Willie Mays, because we couldn’t get enough baseball.
And Willie Mays was, is and will always be … baseball.
Everybody loves Willie Mays.
Mike Burke writes about sports and other stuff for Allegany Communications. He began covering sports for the Prince George’s Sentinel in 1981 and joined the Cumberland Times-News sports staff in 1984, serving as sports editor for over 30 years. Contact him at [email protected]. Follow him on X at @MikeBurkeMDT