From the San Francisco Chronicle
Willie Mays, the spirited center fielder whose brilliance at the plate, in the field and on the basepaths for the Giants led many to call him the greatest all-around player in baseball history, died on Tuesday in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 93.
Larry Baer, the president and chief executive of the Giants, said Mays, the oldest living member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, died in an assisted living facility.
Mays compiled extraordinary statistics in 22 National League seasons with the Giants in New York and San Francisco and a brief return to New York with the Mets, preceded by a 1948 stint in the Negro leagues. He hit 660 career home runs and had 3,293 hits and a .301 career batting average.
But he did more than personify the complete ballplayer. An exuberant style of play and an effervescent personality made Mays one of the game’s, and America’s, most charismatic figures, a name that even people far afield from the baseball world recognized instantly as a national treasure.
Commentary
Somewhere in the springtime my readiness to explore mysticism faded. It was all just too much. I was writing too much and I was quite overstimulated. But like all obsessions and addictions, they run their course. When there’s nothing left to eat, the party is over.
I say this because I did a lot of baseball writing this year. The book I am compiling right now is specifically about the baseball work. This would be some essays that I wrote but also the dice baseball games and quite a few other thoughts about baseball that came to me. But at the heart of all of the baseball writing, there was Willie Mays. I thought a lot about babe Ruth and I thought a lot about some of the great stars who have played the game. We argued who was the greatest pitcher of all time. But it always came back to Willie Mays. Some of the most beautiful pictures I could come up with had Willie Mays in it.
When I first started writing about baseball, I needed some dialogue from Willie but I got the strangest inspiration back. He told me he was tired of being Willie Mays. After that, he was always there. It’s like I was just another guy hanging out in the locker room next to Willy’s table. This is the place they gave him when he visited the locker room. No one was allowed to sit in Willy’s chair. But he showed up and had something to give every time. I started digging around, I landed on the argument of whether or not he would have had babe Ruth’s record instead of Hank Aaron. He ended up 54 home runs short. 95 short of Hank Aaron. But I couldn’t help thinking of the level of conspiracy keeping Willie Mays from getting that record. There were the two full years in the army. Even if nothing else ever changed, do you think Willie Mays was good for 27 home runs in a year in the Polo Grounds during his prime?
I started digging around and landed on the argument of whether or not he would have had babe Ruth’s record instead of Hank Aaron. He ended up 54 home runs short and 95 short of Hank Aaron. But I couldn’t help thinking of the level of conspiracy keeping Willie Mays from getting that record. There were the two full years in the army, The basic stats of which were that he played to 90 game seasons and hit 40 home runs in both of them. If you do the math, over 150 games, this is slightly less than 67 home runs. That’s right. No, it was not major League pitching but Mays was Ruthian nonetheless. Even if nothing else ever changed, do you think Willie Mays was good for 27 home runs in a year in the Polo Grounds during his prime?
But then it got worse. They moved the whole team out to San Francisco and changed the whole dynamic. The original open Candlestick Park was strange and windy. It suppressed offense. And even though the total area of the field and foul territory was less, far less than the Polo Grounds, there were quite a few home runs down the line that wouldn’t be there and quite a few more that simply gets stopped by the wind.
And then there was the real estate in San Francisco. Sometimes living around negative people will bring hate into anyone’s heart. After being the most welcome celebrity in the world, Willie Mays and his wife had a hard time finding a house. It turns out he was black. I guess he had forgotten somewhere along the way or perhaps he felt that being Willie Mays superseded that. The people of San Francisco let him know however that these sorts of things were never going to change. Not for anybody and not even for Willie Mays.
I personally believe that Barry Bonds was the greatest hitter who ever lived. But there are great personality flaws and there were even flaws in his game that Willie Mays just didn’t have. It’s like Barry Bonds learned how to play baseball in such a way to make baseball work for him. Willie Mays was formed by baseball and baseball taught him how to work. It’s not just the vast ability. It’s not just the vitality and the desire to play the game at the highest possible level. It’s about understanding as a pioneer that there is something special possible if you’re willing to work harder than anyone else to get it. That’s the difference between Barry Bonds and Willie Mays. Barry Bonds learn to play baseball in a world that was built by Willie Mays.
Anyway, people get old. People get old and that’s all there is to it. No one lives forever. Oh sure, you can watch him running back towards the center field bleachers to make that catch again and again. There are plenty of films of him playing. All-Star games, regular season matchups. Even the World series. There’s plenty of film out there and you can watch films of Willie Mays forever. But people are more than the pictures we take. We are more than the pictures and the box scores. We are just flesh and blood. Some of us a bit more put together than others but still, it’s the inherent flaw with being a person. By the early 1970s, really just couldn’t really play baseball well enough to remain on a major league roster. He just got old.
Thank you, Willie. Thank you for changing the game. Thank you for being something very beautiful and for a very beautiful lifetime. Thank you for agreeing to be a great man. Thank you for agreeing to be a face for generations. Thank you for everything you gave to the game of baseball.
And you never know, maybe somewhere out in the cosmos Willie Mays finds himself once again on a rickety old bus banging its way through the deep south so that the guys can get to their next game. Maybe it’s still the negro leagues but maybe they get to stay in the best hotels and eat the best food and nobody ever bothers them about the color of their skin.
