If we were doing a roll call of the greatest Major League Baseball players of all time, Hall of Famer Willie Mays would be mentioned in that roll call…and you wouldn’t have to wait long to hear his name.
Mays, who died on June 18 at the age of 93, was the prototype of what baseball aficionados would call a five-tool player. He could hit for power (660 home runs/.557 slugging percentage), hit for average (.301 batting average, and .394 on-base percentage), had speed in the field and on the basepaths (339 stolen bases), and was a great outfielder (12 Gold Glove awards.)
If you lived in New York at the time when the city had three teams—the Yankees, the Dodgers, and the Giants, he was part of an ongoing debate of who was the best player in the five boroughs in the 1950s—Brooklyn Dodgers star Duke Snider, New York Yankees star Mickey Mantle or Mays.
That debate was popularized into a 1980s song, “Willie, Mickey and the Duke,” by Terry Cashman. In 1954, a band known as Treniers had a song about Mays himself titled, “Say Hey (The Willie Mays Song).” Mays had more than one song that sang his praises.
But Mays’s life in baseball was as complicated as it was celebrated. He was arguably one of the first Black athletes with crossover appeal and he appeared in 1950s television shows like “The Donna Reed Show.” He was just as iconic an American sports figure in the 1950s and 1960s as Mantle. It wasn’t uncommon for Mays to “take a bow” on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
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At the same time, Mays was chided by Jackie Robinson in his 1964 book, “Baseball Has Done It,” for not using his celebrity status to push for change in American society at a time when the Civil Rights Movement was in full swing. Robinson referred to Mays as a “Do-nothing Negro.”
Yet, Mays, who was reportedly hurt by Robinson’s comments, was a witness to and a victim of the visceral slings and arrows of American racism despite his on-the-field and off-the-field stardom.
Bob Kendrick, the president and CEO of the Negro League Baseball Museum in Kansas City, told the Washington Post in 2021 that it was not Mays’ calling to be out front as Robinson was in the fight against American racism.
“Willie Mays made his indelible impact on civil rights in a completely different way. What Willie did, and what the vast majority of those players who transitioned from the Negro Leagues to the major leagues, did was they demonstrated that there wasn’t a level of superiority [based on race],” Kendrick told the Post three years ago.
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Mays grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, a city that was once called, “Bombingham” because of how rigidly racial segregation was enforced against Black people who dared to challenge the system. Mays honed his skills as a player with the Negro League’s Birmingham Black Barons and understood what playing baseball meant for the Black fans in Birmingham —thanks to mentors like his father Willie Howard Mays Sr. and Black Barons pitcher Bill Greason.
“We were playing for ourselves but also for the people in the community who’d come watch a game and get their minds away from any hardships,” Mays said in his book (co-authored by John Shea), ”24: Life Stories and Lessons from the Say Hey Kid.”
Mays played just 116 games as a minor league player with Trenton and in 1950, he experienced his first taste of racial slurs and bigotry in the way that Robinson experienced such things in Philadelphia during his first year with the Dodgers. Fifty-four years later, in 2004, the Hagerstown Suns honored Mays and the mayor of the Maryland community apologized. His no. 24 was retired.
Mays was moved by the gesture.
“I wasn’t hurt by the town in 1950. I was hurt by the people. It was good that I went back,” Mays wrote.
To me, one of the amazing stories that came out of Mays’ book was a section that focused on how he ended up with the New York Giants. He was scouted by teams like the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Chicago White Sox, and the Boston Red Sox—the last MLB team to integrate.
Mays came to the Giants, which already had Black players, Monte Irvin and Hank Thompson, by default mainly because, according to the book, he was not other teams’ “type” of player.
As it turned out, it was the Giants’ gain and everyone else’s loss, especially Boston’s. If Mays could have been on the same team as Ted Williams, the Red Sox might have ended their World Series “curse” long before the early 21st century.
That’s the insanity of American racism.
When the Giants franchise moved from New York to San Francisco in 1957, Mays, despite his fame and accolades, experienced the discrimination that non-famous Black people experienced at the time.
Mays and his then-wife Marguerite wanted to purchase a home in a scenic section of San Francisco. Mays and the owner agreed that he would pay $37,000 in cash for the property, but the neighbors and other real estate brokers complained about Mays’ presence in the neighborhood, citing concerns about the lowering of property values. This excuse was often used to keep Black Americans from purchasing homes outside of Black neighborhoods.
Because of this, the owner reneged on the deal to sell his home to Mays.
But the bad publicity that resulted from keeping one of the best players in the national pastime from buying a home in a city and state known for its progressive politics forced the owner to reconsider, sell to Mays, and eventually integrate the neighborhood.
In this instance in the late 1950s, Mays found himself on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement and exposed the housing discrimination that Black Americans were experiencing throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s.
Mays’s purchase of that home forced people to recognize that equality, as Kendrick put it, “shouldn’t be confined to the playing field but should be present in every walk of life.”
Although it wasn’t as electric as Jackie Robinson’s, Willie Mays and his determination to be a good ballplayer and a good person despite the obstacles impacted Major League Baseball in particular in a way that will be felt for years to come.
