Willie Mays’ sunny, wholesome image was not accidental; the image was crafted to make baseball’s greatest all-round player.
Willie Howard Mays Jr., who died June 18 at age 93, was born May 6, 1931 in Westfield, Alabama, a suburb of Birmingham, reported Arthur Ashe in volume III of “A Hard Road to Glory: A History of the African-American Athlete Since 1946.” Both parents were athletes — mom Annie was a champion high school sprinter, and dad, nicknamed “Cat,” played semi-pro baseball. Willie’s parents married at 18, then divorced when he was 3 years old. Afterwards, the boy lived with his father, Willie Sr., and two older orphan girls who helped raise him with an aunt.
Young Willie was a gifted three-sport athlete [football and basketball, in addition to baseball], who was supervised. The teenager played side by side with dad in an industrial league, then joined Willie Sr. in 1948 on the Negro league Birmingham Black Barons. While in high school, Willie Jr. was not allowed to travel with the Barons while classes were in session. He finished high school, but skipped his senior prom, because he signed a contract with the New York Giants, then was rushed to the minor leagues, first stop Trenton, New Jersey.
Before New York, Boston had the first shot at Mays, but blew it. A Boston Braves [National League] scout touted the future “say hey kid,” but management shrugged. Giants scout Eddie Montague boasted with supreme confidence that Mays was best prospect he had ever seen. The Giants organization was honorable. They bought out Mays’ Black Barons contract for $10,000, unlike Branch Rickey and the Brooklyn Dodgers who in fall 1945 took barrier breaker Jackie Robinson from the Kansas City Royals without compensating the owners, who were white, Negro League Baseball Museum historian Bob Kendrick told me in 2023.
After Robinson, Negro league teams were compensated for talent, thanks largely to Newark Eagles co-owner Effa Manley. She laid down the law before releasing Monte Irvin, Mays’ future Giants teammate and mentor, from the Eagles to Major League Baseball.
Mays was 17 when he played in the last Negro league World Series in 1948 and then moved on to white professional baseball. Ten of Mays’ Black Barons hits were added to his career total of 3,293 because MLB last month announced it would include Negro league data with white professional ball numbers.
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Mays’ ability to excel at hitting for average, home run-power, and run batted in production, base running and base stealing, along with defensive catching and throwing, is comparable to Babe Ruth, a slugger and pitcher, by baseball historians. Assessing Mays’ legacy, experts note that Mays has the edge because Ruth did not get the chance to compete against Black ball players.
Willie Mays died two days before the Thursday, June 20 MLB game between the San Francisco Giants and St. Louis Cardinals in Birmingham one day after the federal Juneteenth holiday, Mays’ National Baseball Hall of Fame plaque was moved from Cooperstown, New York, for the first time and temporally displayed at Rickwood Field, where Mays and his Black Barons played.
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Personally, Willie Mays is my No. 1 sports hero. When I was about 5 in the late 1950s, the packaging on my first plastic bat and ball depicted Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, and Duke Snider, respected big boppers for the Giants, Yankees, and Dodgers, and all residents of New York, the capital of baseball.
Years later, I loved to hear stories of Mays playing stickball with children on Harlem streets before walking from his rooming house to the former Polo Grounds ballpark, located where the summer Rucker pro basketball tournament now takes place.
Mays and his Giants, plus the Brooklyn Dodgers, left town at the end of the decade for California. In 1962, my father gathered up the family, mom, my younger brother, and me, for a drive from Brooklyn to Philadelphia. The trip was to see Willie Mays, who came east with San Francisco to play the Phillies. Mays was barely recognizable from the cheap seats, but it was my first baseball game and an incredible thrill.
As a youth, I closely followed Mays’ heroics. During a Saturday televised NBC game, Giants right fielder Bobby Bonds settled under a long fly ball that possibly could leave San Francisco Candlestick Park. In a split second, Mays came flying in, then he leaped across Bonds near the top of the fence to catch the ball. Mays knocked down his teammate and friend, and collapsed too, holding the ball.
Like his improbable game-saving catch in the 1954 World Series, Willie Mays had a flair for the dramatic, capped with gee-wiz enthusiasm.
