Willie Mays’s legacy expands across cultural generations
Willie Mays turned 93 on Monday.
We often measure our own immortality and human finitude by the timeline and aging of those we revere and venerate.
For builders, the generation born before 1946; baby boomers, the demographic born between 1946 and 1964; and Generation X, those born between 1965 and 1980, Willie Mays is a measure of duration, continuity, and inevitability.
Mays is arguably the greatest baseball player in the history of the sport. His place at the top is decisive for many longtime followers of the game that has been dubbed America’s national pastime—an appellation, according to the Library Congress, that was coined in 1856 by the Sunday Mercury, a weekly New York newspaper published from 1839 to 1896. The impact of baseball on this nation’s complex existence is why Mays is a cultural icon.
Sports historian, journalist, and baby boomer Mel “Doc” Stanley has frequently made his case to this writer for Mays being unsurpassed.
“There is no one who has ever been as good as Mays as an all-around player,” Stanley said. “If you consider what he did as a hitter, fielder, and base runner, playing most of his career at Candlestick Park, from 1960 to 1971—one of the hardest stadiums to hit and field with the wind whipping off of the water (San Francisco Bay), Mays is hands-down the best of all-time.”
Mays retired in 1973 at third on Major League Baseball’s home run list, with 660—behind only Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron. He averaged a remarkable homer every 15 at-bats at Candlestick.
“If Mays didn’t spend most of his career at Candlestick, he would have hit more than Babe (714) and Hank (755).”
Like his friend and contemporary Aaron, Mays was born in Alabama—Aaron in Mobile and Mays in Westfield. Both were products of the oppressive Jim Crow South and the Negro Leagues. (Aaron played just three months for the Indianapolis Clowns in 1951 before joining the Boston Braves, which later became the Milwaukee, then Atlanta, Braves organization.)
Mays roamed the outfield, primarily playing center field for the Birmingham Barons, New York/San Francisco Giants, and New York Mets, the latter from 1972 to 1973 when he was in his early 40s and well past his prime, a shell of his amazing height of eminence.
Many Harlemites who grew up there in the 1950s can recall seeing Mays strolling through their neighborhoods, enjoying an evening at a local eatery, or famously playing stickball with them on their blocks. One of the most celebrated and recognizable figures in the United States of that era, “the Say Hey Kid,” as he was affectionately known, Mays embraced one of this country’s most prominent Black enclaves as his home.
The 2022 documentary “Say Hey, Willie Mays!” by filmmaker Nelson George illuminates and situates the various aspects of Mays’s indelible life; a life that has reflected many facets, hopeful and tortured, of the United States of America.
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