Willie Mays

Willie Mays, a perennial all-star center fielder for the New York and San Francisco Giants in the 1950s and ’60s whose powerful bat, superb athletic grace and crafty baseball acumen earned him a place with Babe Ruth atop the game’s roster of historic greats, died June 18. He was 93.

The San Francisco Giants announced his death on social media but did not provide other details. Mr. Mays was the oldest living member of the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

“If there was a guy born to play baseball,” Boston Red Sox legend Ted Williams, one of his 1950s contemporaries, said late in life, “it was Willie Mays.”

With such demigods as Jackie Robinson and Hank Aaron, Mr. Mays, from Jim Crow-era Alabama, was one of the earliest Black players to reach exalted heights in the formerly segregated major leagues. His body of work from 1951 to 1973 included 660 home runs — then the third most of all time — despite a nearly two-year absence for military service.

Baseball has had 150-plus players with higher career batting averages than Mr. Mays’s. There have been swifter base runners and a few more-prolific sluggers over the decades. But Mr. Mays could do it all: The record book says no one showcased a more formidable combination of power, speed, arm strength, wizardry with a glove and steady hitting than No. 24 of the Giants, whom many regard as the best defensive center fielder ever.

Most devotees of hardball history consider Mr. Mays second to Ruth in the game’s pantheon. Some rank Mr. Mays ahead of Ruth, an ace pitcher turned outfielder for the New York Yankees who revolutionized the sport with his titanic bat in the Jazz Age. Advocates for Mr. Mays argue that Ruth didn’t possess Mr. Mays’s all-around skills and never had to compete against Black major leaguers.

At 20, Mr. Mays was National League rookie of the year and helped the Giants reach the 1951 World Series. His 3,293 career hits — including 10 hits in the old Negro American League that were added to his total in 2024 — gave him a robust .301 lifetime average. He was named to 24 All Star teams in 18 seasons, some in years when two such games were played.

While a lot of sluggers were brawny and less than nimble in the field, Mr. Mays, listed on Major League Baseball’s website as 5-foot-11 and 180 pounds, dominated opponents with his glove, legs and throwing arm. A miraculous catch he made in the 1954 World Series, racing toward the center field wall with his back fully turned to the infield, is among the most celebrated plays in the annals of the sport.

Starting in 1957, Mr. Mays won 12 consecutive Gold Glove awards for defensive excellence in center field, the most spacious position, where quick reactions and fleetness of foot are paramount. He collected more Gold Gloves than any other center fielder in history, even though the award didn’t exist until his fifth full season.

At the same time, his disruptive speed and guile as a base runner augured a revival of an undervalued aspect of the game.

In the 1950s, a decade loaded with fearsome hitters, the “small ball” tactic of base stealing was mostly an afterthought — but not for Mr. Mays, the first player with 300 or more career home runs to also tally at least 300 thefts (he swiped 339 bases). Only seven others have done it since. Although his yearly totals weren’t jaw-dropping by later standards, he stole more bases (179) in the 1950s than anyone else in the majors.

“Willie Mays is the greatest player I ever laid eyes on,” declared his first Giants manager, Leo Durocher, a teammate of Ruth’s in the late-1920s.

After Robinson broke baseball’s racial barrier in 1947 with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Mr. Mays, three weeks out of his teens, became the 17th Black player to arrive in the big leagues. He debuted for the New York Giants on May 25, 1951, and went hitless in 12 at-bats on the road. Then, in his first plate appearance at the Polo Grounds, the Giants’ old ballpark in Upper Manhattan, he recorded his first hit — “a towering poke that landed atop the left-field roof,” the New York Times reported.

Counting the home run, Mr. Mays, a right-handed batter, began his career 1-for-26, a miserable stretch. “I was crying,” he recalled almost 70 years later. “I wanted to go back” to minor league Minneapolis. But Durocher kept him in the lineup, insisting, “Son, you’re my center fielder.” After Mr. Mays found his stroke, he finished his rookie season with 20 homers and a .274 average.

In scouting parlance, he emerged as “a five-tool player,” with exceptional abilities to hit for power, hit for average, run, field and throw. Yet plenty of five-tool stars have come and gone. What made Mr. Mays transcendent were the dazzling degrees to which he excelled at all five skills for the better part of two decades.

Known for his full-throttle energy on the diamond, his joy and brio, Mr. Mays was a headliner in the postwar golden era of New York baseball, before the Giants and Dodgers decamped to San Francisco and Los Angeles to start the 1958 season. During that Gotham heyday, one or two of the city’s three ballclubs, led by the dynastic Yankees, played in 10 World Series in 11 years — including seven “subway series” — and each team featured a Hall of Fame-bound center fielder.

“Willie, Mickey and the Duke,” the song goes: Mickey Mantle (and before him Joe DiMaggio) of the Yanks, Brooklyn’s Duke Snider and Mr. Mays, who as a rookie would often play stickball with youngsters in front of his Harlem rooming house. Afterward, he’d treat the kids to ice cream, then walk to work at the Polo Grounds.

“Snider, Mantle and Mays — you could get a fat lip in any saloon by starting an argument as to which was best,” columnist Red Smith reminisced in 1972. “One point was beyond argument, though: Willie was by all odds the most exciting.”

In the outfield, where the durable Mr. Mays compiled a record 7,112 putouts, he caught a lot of balls unconventionally, holding his glove near his belt buckle for his signature “basket catch.” And he admitted to wearing ill-fitting caps to ensure that he would run out from under them as he dashed around the bases or chased a long flyball.

“You have to entertain people,” he told sportscaster Bob Costas in 2006. “That’s what I wanted to do all the time.”

Mr. Mays’s nickname, the “Say Hey Kid,” was bestowed by a New York sportswriter who noted the young player’s habit of chirping “hey” when he had something to say (as in “Hey, how you doin'?” and “Hey, where you been?”), according to biographer James S. Hirsch, author of “Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend,” published in 2010.

With 660 career homers, Mr. Mays ranked third, behind Aaron and Ruth, until 2004, when the Giants’ Barry Bonds — Mr. Mays’s godson — eclipsed him. In 2015, Alex Rodriguez also passed Mr. Mays in home runs. But Rodriguez and Bonds were tainted by evidence of illicit steroids use. Albert Pujols, who has never been credibly linked to steroids, hit his 661st homer in 2020, dropping Mr. Mays to sixth on the all-time list.

Always averse to controversy, Mr. Mays professed to have no opinion about ballplayers who used performance-enhancing drugs. “I don’t even know what that stuff is,” he said. On April 12, 2004, when Bonds, under a cloud of suspicion, launched his 660th home run, his 72-year-old godfather walked on the field to embrace him… 

-The Washington Post, Paul Duggan

Willie Mays, baseball star of prodigious power and grace, dies at 93 - The Washington Post

 "The only man who could have caught that ball just hit it." - Remembering Willie Howard Mays

“Mays is the only man in baseball I’d pay to see play.” — Ty Cobb

 “Willie Mays is the greatest ballplayer I’ve ever seen. I never saw Joe DiMaggio play, but if Joe DiMaggio was better than Willie Mays, he belongs in Heaven.” — Roberto Clemente

 “Outside of Joe DiMaggio, Willie Mays is the greatest all-around baseball player of my time. Certainly, he’s been the most daring. Mays would steal home, a tough play and one in which you’ve got a great chance to look bad. Willie didn’t even think of that, he’d just go. Nine times out of ten, he’d make it.” — Mickey Mantle

“You used to think if the score was 5-0, [Mays] would hit a five-run homer.” — Reggie Jackson

“[Mays] scooped the ball up at the base of the 406-foot sign, whirled and fired. It came in on one bounce, directly in front of the plate, and into the glove of catcher Tom Haller, who put it on the astonished Willie Stargell. It was described by old-timers as the greatest throw ever made in ancient Forbes Field.” — Bob Stevens, San Francisco Chronicle, August 25, 1965

“I couldn’t believe Mays could throw that far. I figured there had to be a relay. Then I found out there wasn’t. He’s too good for this world.” — Willie Stargell

“They invented the All-Star Game for Willie Mays.” — Ted Williams

“Willie Mays, to me, was the best ballplayer I ever saw in my life. …Nobody in the history of baseball is going to see anyone like Willie Mays. Everybody loved Willie in the clubhouse. Willie used to do a lot of things for different players, especially the rookies. Willie used to take players to clothing stores to buy them clothes. Sometimes he would get free clothes, shoes, and stuff, and give them to the players. He was like the mother of the team.” - Juan Marichal

"Willie Mays was to me the greatest player I ever watched. People ask me that, and I don't hesitate....he could have been an All-Star shortstop, that's how good an athlete he was...he could run backwards as fast as he could forward." - Don Zimmer

"If somebody came up and hit .450, stole 100 bases, and performed a miracle in the field every day, I'd still look you right in the eye and tell you that Willie was better” - Leo Durocher

"The best Major League ballplayer I ever saw was Willie Mays. Ruth beat you with the bat. Ted Williams beat you with the bat. Joe DiMaggio beat you with the bat, his glove and his arm. But Willie Mays could beat you with the bat, with power, his glove, his arm and with the running. He could beat you any way that's possible." - Buck O'Neil

“Hopefully, they can say, ‘There goes the best baseball player in the world.’ I honestly believe I did everything in baseball that a baseball player can do, and I did it with love.” — Willie Mays