Willie Mays is listed in the reference books as 5 feet 10 inches tall and weighing 170 pounds. In baseball history, he was much larger. He played for the Giants and was a giant in the sports culture of this sports-crazed country, and his death on Tuesday at age 93 is a cause for reflection.
While Mays’ name appears on top-10 lists in numerous statistical categories, he doesn’t have any outstanding records on a career or season-by-season basis, but it’s clear that he is one of the few deserving candidates for the title of greatest player of all time.
Though Mays has been retired for more than half a century, his talents remain remembered through grainy black-and-white footage of “The Catch,” in which he made a thunderous long ball catch with his back to home plate in Game 1 of the 1954 World Series. (It’s worth noting that no one could make that catch today, because the ball would fly over the fence in any modern major league ballpark.)
Mays was the 17th black player to break racial barriers in the National and American Leagues. The abuse suffered by pioneer Jackie Robinson is well known, but it would be foolish to believe that racist opposition disappeared among those who followed in his footsteps.
While Mays was not an outspoken activist like Robinson, she contributed to the pursuit of racial equality by simply doing her job.
And it’s an interesting coincidence that Mays died on the eve of Juneteenth, the holiday that marks the effective end of slavery in the United States, the same day that Major League Baseball kicked off a multi-day celebration of the Negro Leagues at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama, the city where Mays spent his childhood and the stadium where he began his professional career with the Black Barons.
In his book Willie’s Time, Mays’ biographer and co-author Charles Epstein argues that Mays was emblematic of the great changes in postwar America: the northward migration of black Southerners, the flow of people to the West Coast, and the rise of integration. Mays did not lead these changes, but she was a prominent figure who lived through them.
He also symbolized, at least in Minneapolis, the end of competitive minor league baseball. The 20-year-old Mays began the 1951 season with a bang with the Minneapolis Millers of the American Association, and fans expected him to spend a season there, just as Ted Williams had done a little over a decade earlier.
Mays lasted just 38 days with the Millers (batting .477) before the Giants summoned him to issue a letter of apology to the Minneapolis fans, which fueled fan dissatisfaction with the Triple-A status of both the Minneapolis and St. Paul teams and whetted their appetite for promotion to the major leagues, which they achieved nearly a decade later.
Mays mattered. His American life was full.
(c)2024 The Free Press, Mankato, Minnesota. Distributed by
Tribune Content Agency LLC.
