Willie Mays’ National Baseball Hall of Fame plaque will travel from Cooperstown, New York, to Birmingham, Alabama, June 20 to in a landmark trip to celebrate Major League Baseball and Negro Leagues history.
The historic event will fall just two days after Mays’ death at home at age 93.
Mays’ plaque will be on display for fans to see during multiple events, notably a nationally televised [FOX] game at Rickwood Field between the San Francisco Giants and St. Louis Cardinals, Jon Shestakofsky, vice president, communication and content for the Hall of Fame, told NABJ Black News & Views.
Players from both teams will wear Negro Leagues uniforms; the Giants wearing San Francisco Seals [1946-1949] gear, and the Cardinals, St. Louis Stars uniforms.
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Rickwood is where the Birmingham Black Barons played their home games.
The late Mays played for the Barons as a teen before crossing the MLB color line in 1951 and joining the Harlem-based New York Giants before they moved to California in the late 1950s. Mays is arguably the greatest all-round player of the 20th century, based on home run hitting, batting average, and runs batted in production, stolen bases, and fielding.
In 1979, Mays was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
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Mays remains a folklore hero because of “the catch,” an improbable over-the-shoulder grab of a ball hit nearly 500 feet executed at the cavernous Polo Grounds ballpark in New York City in 1954. Mays’ catch happened at the first game of that year’s World Series, which the Giants won over the Cleveland Indians.
Mays [born 1931] passed away peacefully at home Tuesday night, but his Black Barons teammate, Bill Greason, was still living as of this writing. Greason played briefly for the St. Louis Cardinals in 1954, and later was a civil rights contemporary of Martin Luther King Jr.
It was unknown whether Greason [born 1924] would be able to attend the celebration in Birmingham.
While the MLB game in Alabama is a first, the players wearing Negro Leagues uniforms is not.
The Cardinals have worn the Stars uniforms many times over decades, reported mlb.com. Meanwhile, the Giants will be wearing Sea Lions uniforms for the fifth time at the June 20th game.
The game will be played a day after Juneteenth, a celebration and commemoration of Black freedom which became a federal holiday in 2021.
On May 29, MLB announced it would include Negro League baseball statistics with all professional baseball data. Inclusion means the achievements of 2,300 Black players will be analyzed and potentially considered for immortality by baseball scholars, journalists, and historians, NABJ Black News & Views reported.
Leading stars under consideration include Josh Gibson, Walter “Buck” Leonard, Oscar Charleston, Thomas “Cool Papa” Bell, John Henry “Pop” Lloyd, and David “Showboat” Thomas.
Leading Negro Leagues stars who went on to become MLB legends include Mays, Hank Aaron, Roy Campanella, Monte Irvin, Larry Doby, and Leroy “Satchel” Paige. Jackie Robinson, the four-sport UCLA varsity athlete, broke the professional baseball color line in 1946 with the minor league Montreal Royals, and then the next year joined MLB with the Brooklyn Dodgers.
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MLB and the National Baseball Hall of Fame have staged multiple events and community outreach efforts to promote the Negro Leagues, Shestakofsky said. During the Memorial Day weekend, Cooperstown opened the “Souls of the Game” exhibit. And that weekend, 30 former Black stars played in an East-West all-star game at Doubleday Field in Cooperstown.
Furthermore, the spokesman said, in 2023 NBT Bank sponsored 1,000 children from Albany, Utica, and Syracuse, New York and brought them to Cooperstown to see “We Play: The Black Baseball Initiative,” geared to 8- to 12-year-olds.
The writer is author of the forthcoming, “Sam Lacy and Wendell Smith: The Dynamic Duo That Desegregated American Sports” [July 17, Routledge] that includes a chapter about the Negro Leagues
