The incomparable Willie Mays passes away at 93
The venerated Willie Mays, iconically nicknamed “The Say Hey Kid,” widely viewed as the best baseball player in the long and storied history of the sport, has transitioned to rest in power with the ancestors.
Mays passed away at the age of 93 on Tuesday “peacefully and among loved ones,” as shared by his son Michael Mays through the San Francisco Giants, for which the elder Mays played most of his career.
Last week, in a press release by the Giants, Mays, who was born on May 6, 1931, in Westfield, Alabama, said he would not attend tonight’s Major League Baseball game between the Giants and St. Louis Cardinals at historic Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama, just a 15 minute drive from Westfield.
Rickwood Field is the oldest ballpark in the country. It was built in 1910 and was the home to the Negro Leagues Black Barons, a team for which Mays manned the outfield as a high school teenager for 13 games in the 1948 season. Tonight’s game at Rickwood is a tribute to the Negro Leagues in observance of Juneteenth.
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“Rickwood Field? I knew about it as a kid,” said Mays. ”It was always there. As common as a church or a school or a movie theater. I grew up with Rickwood around the corner… The majors? I didn’t dream about the impossible. I was taught to see your goal in your mind and work toward it. I could work toward getting to Rickwood Field and the Birmingham Black Barons. I didn’t need to dream for that. For that, I needed to work hard. So, I did.
Rickwood became my training ground. My start. My first job. When things changed in ‘47 with Jackie (Robinson) coming in? Well, then I started to dream big. You never forget your firsts. Rickwood Field is where I played my first home game. Rickwood Field is still here. So am I. How about that?”
The most apt word to characterize Mays as a player is breathtaking. At 5’10,” his combination of speed, power, skills, innate sense of angles, distance and trajectory of the ball, and flair for the dramatic were unparalleled. His statistics are mesmerizing: A 24-time All-Star. Two-time NL MVP. Twelve Gold Gloves. Four Time NL home run leader. Four-time NL stolen base king. The 1954 NL batting champion, the same season he won his only World Series.
Playing for the New York Giants in the Polo Grounds in Harlem prior to the franchise moving to Seals Stadium in San Francisco in 1958 before settling into windy and cavernous Candlestick Park in San Francisco beginning in the 1960 season, Mays, along with the Yankees’ Mickey Mantle and the then Brooklyn Dodgers’ Duke Snyder, formed the most famous trio of center fielders to compete in the same city, in the same era, in the annals of baseball.
Many Harlemites growing up and living in America’s most prominent Black community in the 1960s recall seeing Mays playing stickball with youth or frequenting local establishments, as humble and unassuming as one of the nation’s most recognizable people could be.
He was a central figure in defining the Black experience of overcoming the oppressive demonization of African descendants in the Jim Crow South and the rejection of systemic racism by embodying and reflecting Black excellence as he grew into manhood.
If Sirius is the brightest star in the Earth’s night sky, Willie Mays is its human equivalent.
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