Willie Mays was a pioneer, a responsibility history foisted on many of his time. Mays debuted for the New York Giants only four years after Jackie Robinson crossed the color line, becoming, at the age of 20, the 17th Black player in Major League Baseball’s modern era. At the time Mays stepped to the plate, batting third on a Friday at Shibe Park, only five teams had integrated. Eleven others had yet to feature a Black player, and one—the Boston Red Sox—would wait nearly a full additional decade to relent.
This piece of the Willie Mays legacy is not neglected. He’s honored as part of that vanguard. Tomorrow night in Birmingham, his Negro League origins will be on full display. Still, it’s easy to forget about the center fielder’s barrier-breaking legacy, and there’s a good reason for that: He was too good. Willie Mays was so spectacular, so electrifying, so legendary in those ninety degrees between chalk foul lines that when we teach children the history of the game of baseball, Mays occupies a different category than Jackie Robinson or even Satchel Paige. Yes, Willie Mays was a pioneer. But he was also, quite possibly, the greatest baseball player of all time.
I’ll leave that specific debate to others. There are numbers involved, and historical contexts, and a whole lot of hypotheticals. Whether Mays was the greatest to ever do it or “merely” in the top five, the man was an icon, among the best to ever play history’s biggest sport in history’s biggest sporting country. Over multiple millenniums of human athletics, from the ancient Olympics to today’s World Cups, Willie Mays was one of the best to ever physically compete against his fellow man. That is what we lost yesterday. Somehow, on top of that transcendent thing, we lost even more.
This site has heard the story before, but as a quick retelling: I was given baseball by my father, my brothers, Pat Hughes, and Ron Santo. We’ll get to Hughes and Santo in a moment. My dad—he who gave baseball to my brothers and me—received the game from Willie Mays.
My dad grew up on a farm outside of Ashton, Iowa. Ashton, of course, is a small town outside of Sibley, which is of course a small town outside of Worthington up across the Minnesota state line. Worthington, of course, is a small town outside of Sioux Falls, a small city over in South Dakota. My father was raised amidst cornfields not unlike those in Dyersville, a few hours to the east, and whether there’s a magic in those ears or it was simply the 1960’s, he fell in love with the game of baseball. More precisely, he fell in love with Willie Mays.
Iowa is no-man’s land for professional sports, and it was even more a no-man’s land in my father’s childhood years. The A’s were still new to Kansas City, three hundred miles south, and they stunk. The Twins were newer to Minneapolis, two hundred miles northeast, and while they had some good seasons around those years, they didn’t have Willie Mays. Willie Mays was a San Francisco Giant, and so despite his location on an old homestead fifteen hundred miles away, the child who’d grow to become my father was a Giants fan.
It wasn’t easy to follow the Giants from afar. But AM radio reached Ashton from Chicago and St. Louis. Often, it reached from Cincinnati. Occasionally, I think he could get Pittsburgh on a clear night. So, in the darkness of a childhood bedroom, my dad fiddled with a transistor radio, writing down the stations carrying the Giants’ opponents’ broadcasts. By daylight, when he wasn’t working, he played Giants games in the raindrop-shaped infield of the gravel driveway, singles and doubles and home runs determined by how far he hit various “baseballs” which ranged from a heavy rock for the poorer hitters to something like a bouncy ball for Mays.
My dad grew up, but Willie Mays stayed with him. For a long time, possibly even last summer, my father sent his favorite player birthday cards. Once, a friend of my dad’s managed to get Mays to send a birthday card back. We took a family vacation to California in 2008, coincidentally at the time the Giants were celebrating the 50th anniversary of their move to the West Coast. We happened to catch a Giants–Dodgers game, and beforehand, as part of those 50th-anniversary celebrations, we saw both Willie Mays and his godson emerge from behind the outfield fence to be honored together. I think about that night a lot. I think also about the night four years later when my dad picked my brother and me up from college, driving us to Detroit to watch the Giants clinch the World Series. Surely, my dad has been happier at some other monumental moment in his life. But aside from him dancing, Coors Light in hand, in those stands along the first base line at Comerica Park, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it.
Though my dad remains a Giants fan, he didn’t push the Giants on us, his sons. Games started later in the 90’s and 2000’s than they did in the 1960’s, and games especially started later on the West Coast. Instead, I became a Red Sox and a Cubs fan, with the Red Sox interest fading around the time I reached high school. The Cubs stuck with me. Why the Cubs? They were the team on the radio.
I suppose those summer nights in Iowa, radio tuned to the Giants game, probably had something to do with my father’s listening habits forty years later in suburban Illinois. In my dad’s car, if the Cubs were on, the Cubs were on. We drove to a lot of baseball games of our own in the late afternoons. We spent a lot of hours listening to the Pat & Ron Show. Had Hughes and Santo not been so charming, or had Ed Farmer been more charming, I may have been a White Sox fan. But it was the Cubs. 720 AM. WGN.
Those afternoons in the car certainly have something to do with my own listening habits, as it was listening to the Cubs game while walking the dog that I heard the news last night that Willie Mays had passed. I exited the app immediately to call my father, and when I returned to the game—Giants vs. Cubs, Wrigley Field, Pat Hughes and Ron Coomer on the call—I received a full hour of Hughes and Coomer remembering Mays in between pitches, hits, and outs. Coomer told of his own dad taking him to Wrigley Field as a child in 1973. The Mets were in town, and Willie Mays was by then on the Mets, and the Coomer family needed to see Willie Mays before he retired. He took batting practice alone. The fans appreciated that. Hughes spoke of growing up in the Bay Area during the days of Mays and McCovey, and how every kid in Little League wanted to wear number 24. He mentioned how he might be a broadcaster thanks to falling in love with baseball during those seasons, watching Willie Mays with his father up at Candlestick Park.
Sports are a thing handed down, generation to generation, primarily from fathers to sons. Sports—especially baseball, the most mythic and romantic—are an inheritance. Someone falls in love with the sport, and for generations to come, that sport stays in the family, passed down beside eye colors and Christmas cookies. Sometime in these next ten years, my son will inherit baseball from me, listening to the Cubs in the car, playing catch in an alley or a backyard. Thirty years before his time, I received baseball from my father, listening to the Cubs in the car, hitting tennis balls onto Lake Avenue back home in Crystal Lake. Thirty years before my time, my father fell in love with baseball on an isolated farm in Iowa, listening to Willie Mays on the radio, hitting rocks and rubber balls on a raindrop diamond. I never saw Willie Mays play. I never met the man or even read a biography. But I, alongside millions of others, lost an ancestor yesterday, one of those founding father figures in a world to which I belong.
Say hey.
Say who.
Say Willie.
Rest in peace.
Very nice. 😊