Willie Mays

Baseball Player

• Born: May 6, 1931
• Place of Birth: Westfield, Alabama
• Died: June 18, 2024
• Place of Death: Palo Alto, California

BASEBALL PLAYER

Mays followed in the footsteps of Jackie Robinson, who broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball four years before Mays made his debut with the New York Giants. Mays’s contributions to the game were most evident in his acceptance by White players and fans across the country who were in awe of his defensive and offensive abilities on the field.

AREA OF ACHIEVEMENT: Sports: baseball

Early Life

Willie Howard Mays Jr. was born in 1931 in Westfield, Alabama, into a family that, while lower-class, was extremely athletic. His father was an above-average baseball player who starred for his company’s team. The elder Mays was known for his defensive skills, catlike reflexes, and speed. Mays’s mother had been a star athlete on her high school track team.

Mays’s father worked with him from birth, training his hand-eye coordination in an attempt to mold the boy into an excellent athlete. Mays’s parents divorced when he was three, and Mays stayed with his father, who kept the family afloat by working in a local steel mill. Mays’s refuge was sports. He would often spend the days in school and the evenings and weekends watching his father play for a semiprofessional baseball team sponsored by the mill. At age thirteen, the younger Mays was already making a name for himself in the baseball world. He spent time with his father mastering the finer points of the game. By the time he was fourteen, Mays was playing on his father’s team—and according to some accounts, competing with him for the same position in centerfield.

Mays attended Fairfield Industrial High School in Fairfield, Alabama. Mays was determined to avoid the same fate as his father, who toiled day after day in the mill. He saw sports as a way out of poverty, but his high school, in the segregated South, did not offer a baseball team. Mays instead played basketball and football, excelling in both. He played multiple positions in football and he averaged over 16 points a game for his basketball team, one of the highest scoring averages in the state.

Life’s Work

Mays left high school at the age of sixteen to pursue his dream of playing baseball. However, his father insisted he finish school, which he eventually did. In the South at the time, African Americans had limited employment opportunities, mostly consisting of part-time jobs, hard labor, and low-paying agricultural and industrial work. Mays chose another route, leaving Alabama for Tennessee in early 1947 for a brief stint with the Chattanooga Choo-Choos. Mays left Tennessee shortly thereafter to play for the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro Leagues. His pay was never more than $250 a month, but that was far more than he would have made doing manual labor in his hometown. While Mays was beginning his career, Jackie Robinson was integrating Major League Baseball. Robinson opened the door for many African American players, including Mays, to become stars at baseball’s highest level.

In his first few years with the Barons, Mays excelled in centerfield. His speed and batting made him an excellent candidate for the major leagues, and many scouts came to watch his home games. One of the most interesting stories about Mays’s early days involves the Boston Braves of Major League Baseball (MLB). Braves scouts had insisted on signing the speedy centerfielder, but Mays was never offered a contract. The Braves thus missed an opportunity to have two of the best players in the history of baseball, Mays and Hank Aaron, play side by side.

In 1950 the New York Giants bought Mays's contract and he was dispatched to the Giants’ minor-league team in Trenton, New Jersey. After batting .353 for the Trenton team in his first season, he was promoted to the Minneapolis Millers. Mays was a star in the making and in 1950 was earning $250 a month with a $4,000 signing bonus. Mays excelled at defense in Minneapolis and hit nearly .500 before being called up to the major league on May 25, 1951.

Mays’s rookie season was filled with ups and downs; his personal statistics were well above other rookies and his defense was impressive, but his New York Giants club trailed National League rival Brooklyn in the pennant race. Mays finished his first major-league season with twenty home runs and a rookie of the year award. Still, the team was struggling. Considered all but out of the pennant race, the Giants rolled off a sixteen-game winning streak and overtook the Dodgers for the pennant. The Giants faced the New York Yankees in the World Series and lost, four games to two, but Mays had already begun to show glimmers of his superstar potential.

Just as Mays was launching his career, in 1952 he was drafted into the United States military. He would miss the remainder of the 1952 season and the entire 1953 season because of the Korean War, although he did not see combat. The Giants failed to be competitive in their two years without Mays, who returned to baseball in 1954. That year, Mays led the league in batting and home runs and picked up the nickname "Say Hey." He went on to win the most valuable player (MVP) and athlete of the year awards, and his Giants once again earned a berth in the World Series.

In the first game of the 1954 World Series, against the Cleveland Indians of the American League, Mays made one of baseball’s most legendary plays. When Vic Wertz stepped to the plate in a tie contest in game one with two men on base, he hit a shot toward Mays in deep centerfield. Mays turned and ran, making an over-the-shoulder catch that would be shown for decades afterward as the greatest catch of all time. Most important, Mays’s catch preserved the tie game, and in extra innings, Mays scored the winning run. His play on offense and defense gave the New York Giants the deciding game-one win and eventually a sweep in the series.

Mays continued this stellar play throughout his career, winning twelve Gold Glove awards and hitting 660 home runs. He drove in more than 100 runs in eight straight years, won two MVP awards, and drew the praise of fellow greats such as Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, and Robinson.

After the 1954 season, the Giants’ fortunes faded. In 1956, Mays married Margherite Wendell Chapman. They had one child, a son. Because of financial issues in New York and the market for baseball out West, in 1958 the Giants relocated to San Francisco, where they added future All-Stars Orlando Cepeda, Felipe Alou, and Willie McCovey. The move to San Francisco took a toll on Mays. Although he continued his defensive and offensive brilliance, he struggled off the field and was divorced in 1961. Mays became the captain of the team in 1961 and quickly made his mark, hitting 4 home runs on April 30. In 1962, Mays and the Giants again won the National League pennant. Once again, the Giants met the Yankees in the World Series, though after a disappointing offensive showing from Mays the Yankees won in seven games.

Mays’s best season arguably might have been 1965, when he hit 52 home runs, or 1966, when he drove in more than 100 runs. However, after twelve years of playing at least 150 games a season, his age caught up with him. Late in the 1960s he was injury-prone and his numbers began to dwindle. He became close to fellow Giants outfielder Bobby Bonds and became godfather to Bobby’s son Barry. Barry Bonds would eventually set records years later in a successful career with the Pittsburgh Pirates and San Francisco Giants.

Mays would marry Mae Louise Allen in 1971 and would be traded after the season to the New York Mets. The 1972 season was embattled with a players' strike, and younger players in the league revered Mays for his patience in waiting out the strike. Mays never regained his spark in his return to New York and at forty-plus years old, age was catching up on him. He would be part of the 1973 Mets team that made it to the World Series and lost to the Oakland Athletics, but his role was limited. His remained with the Mets after he retired in 1973, working as a coach and in the front office, and was eventually inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1979. His statistics upon retirement easily placed him among the all-time leaders in home runs (660), hits (3,293), runs scored (2,062), and All-Star nominations (24).

Mays left his job with the Mets in 1979 to take a position at a casino in public relations, leading the MLB to ban him from all its events. It was not until 1985 that he was reinstated by the MLB commissioner. In 1986 he rejoined the Giants organization as a special assistant, and when new ownership took over the team in 1993 he was given a lifetime contract to keep a position within the organization. The team unveiled a statue of Mays in 2000 when they established a new ballpark.

In the twenty-first century Mays would continue to be recognized as a great athlete and exemplar of racial tolerance by various organizations, receiving honorary degrees from Dartmouth College and Yale University, among other awards, and in 2007 he was named to the California Sports Hall of Fame. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama in 2015. In addition to the MLB officially changing the name of the award given to the most valuable player of the World Series to the Willie Mays World Series Most Valuable Player Award in 2017, Mays was honored at the San Francisco Giants' stadium with a birthday celebration after he turned ninety in 2021, making him the oldest surviving player in the sport's Hall of Fame at that point.

In May 2024 the MLB added stats from the Negro Leagues to its own records, affecting the career stats of Mays and a number of other African American players who had begun their careers in the Negro Leagues. While this addition did not affect Mays's career total of 660 home runs, it did add ten hits to his total, bringing the total from 3,283 to 3,293.

Mays died in Palo Alto, California, on June 18, 2024.

Significance

Mays came from the poor South, watched and learned the game of baseball from the older men around his town, and worked his way up from local pickup games to the Negro Leagues and ultimately to Major League Baseball. He was often referred to as the perfect teammate and was responsible for holding many poor Giants teams together during tough years. He did so amid the tense racial climate of a newly integrated sport. Mays will be remembered for his flashy play and brilliance on the field, but his significance to baseball can be found in his character and consistent play over a brilliant twenty-two-year career. In 1999 he was ranked the second-greatest baseball player of all time by the Sporting News, behind only Babe Ruth.

Bibliography

Castrovince, Anthony. "10 Hits Added to Mays’ Ledger, But HR Total Stays at 660." Major League Baseball, 18 Jun. 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/06/18/sports/willie-mays-dead.html. Accessed 20 Jun. 2024.

Goldstein, Richard. "Willie Mays, Baseball’s Electrifying Player of Power and Grace, Is Dead at 93." The New York Times, 29 May 2024, www.mlb.com/news/willie-mays-negro-leagues-stats-adjustment. Accessed 20 Jun. 2024.

Gutierrez, Paul. "Willie Mays Arrives at Oracle Park in Style as San Francisco Giants Celebrate His 90th Birthday." ESPN, 7 May 2021, www.espn.com/mlb/story/‗/id/31407431/willie-mays-arrives-oracle-park-style-san-francisco-giants-celebrate-90th-birthday. Accessed 19 July 2021.

Hirsch, James S. Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend. New York: Scribner, 2010.

Klima, John. Willie’s Boys: The 1948 Birmingham Black Barons, the Last Negro League World Series, and the Making of a Baseball Legend. Hoboken: Wiley, 2009.

Linge, Mary Kay. Willie Mays: A Biography. Westport: Greenwood, 2005.

Mays, Willie. Say Hey: The Autobiography of Willie Mays. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.

Saccoman, John. "Willie Mays." Society for American Baseball Research. SABR, 28 Jan. 2014. Web. 30 Mar. 2016.

Vincent, Fay. We Would Have Played for Nothing: Baseball Stars of the 1950’s and 1960’s Talk About the Game They Loved. The Baseball Oral History Project 2. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008.

"Willie Mays." National Baseball Hall of Fame, baseballhall.org/hall-of-famers/mays-willie. Accessed 20 Jun. 2024.