Baseball star rated as one of the sport’s best of all time
Willie Mays, a perennial all-star centre fielder for the New York and San Francisco Giants in the 1950s and 60s whose powerful bat, superb athletic grace and crafty baseball acumen earned him a place with Babe Ruth atop the game’s roster of historic greats, died on June 18. He was 93.
Mays was the oldest living member of the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
“If there was a guy born to play baseball,” Boston Red Sox legend Ted Williams, one of his 1950s contemporaries, said late in life, “it was Willie Mays”.
With such demigods as Jackie Robinson and Hank Aaron, Mays, from Jim Crowera Alabama, was one of the earliest Black players to reach exalted heights in the formerly segregated major leagues. His body of work from 1951 to 1973 included 660 home runs – then the third most of all time – despite a nearly two-year absence for military service.
Baseball has had 150-plus players with higher career batting averages than Mays’. There have been swifter base runners and a few more-prolific sluggers over the decades. But Mays could do it all: The record book says no-one showcased a more formidable combination of power, speed, arm strength, wizardry with a glove and steady hitting than No. 24 of the Giants, whom many regard as the best defensive centre fielder ever.
Most devotees of hardball history consider Mays second to Ruth in the game’s pantheon. Some rank Mays ahead of Ruth, an ace pitcher turned outfielder for the New York Yankees who revolutionised the sport with his titanic bat in the Jazz Age. Advocates for Mays argue that Ruth didn’t possess Mays’ all-around skills and never had to compete against Black major leaguers.
At 20, Mays was National League rookie of the year and helped the Giants reach the 1951 World Series. His 3293 career hits – including 10 hits in the old Negro American League that were added to his total in 2024 – gave him a robust .301 lifetime batting average. He was named to 24 All Star teams in 18 seasons, some in years when two such games were played.
While a lot of sluggers were brawny and less than nimble in the field, Mays, listed on Major League Baseball’s website as 5-foot11 and 180 pounds, dominated opponents with his glove, legs and throwing arm. A miraculous catch he made in the 1954 World Series, racing toward the centre field wall with his back fully turned to the infield, is among the most celebrated plays in the annals of the sport.
Mays won awards for defensive excellence in centre field, the most spacious position, where quick reactions and fleetness of foot are paramount. At the same time, his disruptive speed and guile as a baserunner augured a revival of an undervalued aspect of the game.
In the 1950s, a decade loaded with fearsome hitters, the “small ball” tactic of base stealing was mostly an afterthought – but not for Mays, the first player with 300 or more career home runs to also tally at least 300 thefts (he swiped 339 bases). Only seven others have done it since. Although his yearly totals weren’t jaw-dropping by later standards, he stole more bases (179) in the 1950s than anyone else in the majors.
“Willie Mays is the greatest player I ever laid eyes on,” declared his first Giants manager, Leo Durocher, a teammate of Ruth’s in the late 1920s.
After Robinson broke baseball’s racial barrier in 1947 with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Mays, three weeks out of his teens, became the 17th Black player to arrive in the big leagues. He debuted for the New York Giants on May 25, 1951.
In scouting parlance, he emerged as “a five-tool player,” with exceptional abilities to hit for power, hit for average, run, field and throw. What made Mays transcendent were the dazzling degrees to which he excelled at all five skills for the better part of two decades.
Known for his full-throttle energy on the diamond, his joy and brio, Mays was a headliner in the post-war golden era of New York baseball, before the Giants and Dodgers decamped to San Francisco and Los Angeles to start the 1958 season.
Mays’ most famous defensive play lives in lore as “The Catch,” against the Cleveland Indians in the 1954 World Series opener. It was an over-the-shoulder grab of a smash by Vic Wertz late in a 2-2 game, with two Cleveland runners on base. Mays sprinted deep into the valley of centre field at the Polo Grounds, his back to the infield, and somehow tracked the ball as it rocketed above and directly behind him. He caught it in full stride just shy of the wall, about 450 feet from home plate.
For Mays, it was the second of four trips to the Fall Classic and his only championship. He won his only batting title in that 1954 season, with a .345 average, and the first of his two National League Most Valuable Player awards. The World Series MVP trophy, named after Mays since 2017, is a bronze rendering of The Catch.
He retired in 1973 after a season with the New York Mets.
Born May 6, 1931, in Westfield, Alabama, near Birmingham, Willie Howard Mays Jr was the son of a 16-year-old schoolgirl track star and a young mill worker dubbed “Cat” for his quickness as a semi-pro ballplayer. In 2015, President Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Mays’ marriage to the former Marghuerite Wendell ended in divorce in 1963. Eight years later, he married Mary Louise “Mae” Allen, who died in 2013. Survivors include a son, Michael Mays, from his first marriage. He also is survived by his godson Barry Bonds, who is the alltime home run leader in baseball.
– The Washington Post