Willie Mays, US baseball star, 1931-2024

In the century and a half that professionals have been playing organised baseball, only one play is still known as “The Catch”.

It was the first game of the 1954 World Series and Vic Wertz, the feared slugger for the Cleveland Indians, hit a towering drive to the deepest part of New York’s cavernous Polo Grounds.

For fans of the hometown New York Giants, the shot late in the tied game — with two runners already on base — appeared to be a death knell. But with the crack of the bat, the Giants’ star centrefielder Willie Mays began a sprinter’s dash straight for the outfield fence.

With his back to the infield, arms outstretched, Mays caught the drive, twirled, cap falling off, and hurled a mighty throw back to the infield, freezing the base runners in place. It “must have been an optical illusion to a lot of people”, a hyperventilating broadcaster told the national TV audience.

Mays, who has died at the age of 93, was the rare player who made such superhuman feats seem routine. For many, he remains the closest to what scouts consider the perfect baseball player, possessing all five “tools” needed for stardom — running, throwing, fielding, hitting and hitting for power.

“I think anybody who saw him will tell you that Willie Mays was the greatest player who ever lived,” said the late Monte Irvin, one of Major League Baseball’s first Black players and Mays’ mentor with the Giants.

Mays blasted nearly as many home runs as Babe Ruth (660, which at the time was second to the Babe’s 714) but also led the league in stolen bases four times. He fielded in one of the game’s most difficult positions and was so discerning as a hitter that he got on base more frequently than anyone else even at the age of 40. And he achieved all that despite losing most of two seasons during his prime to serve in the Korean war.

Mays accomplished his feats when baseball was in what many sport historians consider its mid-century golden age. It still had a genuine claim on being the national pastime, dominating not only other US professional sport leagues but rivalling Hollywood in its ability to create American popular heroes. Swing music groups wrote hit songs about Mays, and his face graced the covers not only of sporting magazines but of big news weeklies including Time and Life.

“There have been only two geniuses in the world: Willie Mays and Willie Shakespeare,” Hollywood star Tallulah Bankhead said in 1962. “But, darling, I think you’d better put Shakespeare first.”

Mays’ reputation was burnished by his friendly rivalry with crosstown star Mickey Mantle, the fellow centrefielder for the New York Yankees. Bitter arguments over who was the better player were part of the national conversation. (Stat-heads of the 21st century believe it is no contest — Mays and Mantle may have been similarly great at their peak, but Mays was greater for far longer.)

However unlike Mantle, whose Yankees won seven World Series during his playing days, Mays’ Giants managed only one championship — the storied 1954 match-up against the Indians. Mays lost twice to Mantle’s Yankees, in 1951 and 1962, and the Giants of the era often struggled to get to the finals due to another New York powerhouse in the same league: the Brooklyn (and then Los Angeles) Dodgers.

Willie Howard Mays Jr was born on May 6, 1931 in Westfield, Alabama. His father, Cat Mays, played in local, segregated Black baseball leagues and his mother Annie Satterwhite was a high school basketball star. In 1948 he signed with the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro American League, just a year after Jackie Robinson had broken the colour bar in the major leagues. Suddenly Black players, excluded for decades, were courted by many white scouts.

He signed with the Giants straight out of high school for a $4,000 bonus in 1950 and made his major league debut the following spring, after which he was named rookie of the year. Not long after, New York sportswriters gave him his nickname, the “Say Hey Kid”, because he often started speaking with the first two words. He had learned his signature “basket” catch in the Negro league, he explained, because its players were expected to be spectacular showmen.

At 5ft 10in and weighing about 180 pounds, Mays was not a physical superman. His strength lay in his legs, the source of his speed, and his hand-eye co-ordination. A natural hitter to left field, he adjusted his stance to hit the other way according to the pitcher he was facing and the dimensions of the ballpark. When the Giants moved to San Francisco and began playing at Candlestick Park, which jutted into San Francisco Bay and suffered from gusty winds, he preferred pulling the ball.

It was at Candlestick, where Mays played for most of his 22-year career, that I was able to watch him at the height of his powers for two seasons, 1964-65. An electric thrill ran through the crowd when number 24 came to bat with runners on base in a close game, or when an opponent belted a ball seemingly far over his head only for him to run it down and snag it over his shoulder with his basket catch.

Mays was married twice, adopted one child and said baseball had cost him two wives. But to a young Englishman weaned on cricket, he provided a masterclass in the finer arts of the American national sport.

Letter in response to this obituary:

Willie Mays’ greatness, one promise the rich did keep / From Henry D Fetter, Washington, DC, US