RIP Willie Mays

One of the all-time greats. An aptly named Giant. Legend from a legendary period in the game.

 

Of you could transpose players to a different era, I'd love to see Mays hit and play CF for 81 games in Coors Field.

 

If you were a kid of a certain age living in the Bay Area, you had this PSA memorized, all the way down to the "If you see a blasting cap, remember now, don't touch them! Tell a police! Or a fireman! Whatever it is!"

 

Willie to Kobe: "You're just No. 8 now."

 

As a Giants fan, this stings bad. I’m too young to have seen him play, but he was a living legend. Every time I got to the park, I pass his statue out front.

He was a true ambassador for the game and for the Giants. He bridged the New York and San Francisco eras and was a legend in both cities. Just an all around class act. The park just won’t be the same.

RIP, Willie.

 

The new Mays bio and the relatively new Horace Stoneham bio are excellent resources materials for Mays fans.

 

He became a star, 1954, a year after I was born so I grew up with him. My Dad, who played fastball in Winnipeg, was a baseball encyclopedia… he liked baseball more than hockey. He would talk about DiMaggio for hours and later Mays, too. We watched every Giants game that ever got broadcast in W Canada since 1960. Obviously the 1962 WS plus a surprising number of Game of the Week broadcasts.
We would go out to the closest school yards and play long distant ‘catch’. I had a strong right arm from hundreds of hours making long throws to my buddies on playgrounds and baseball diamonds. I would throw it as high as I could, with distance, and he would drift under it and make the basket catch then do the classic Mays underhand throw back to me. And it had something on it when it hit my glove. It was the one thing my Dad and I had in common and did together…throwing hard curve and fastballs back and forth almost everyday when I was a kid and lived at home. We would take turns doing the catchers squat and see who could hit the glove. Really good times that I can only hope other kids could and did experience.
The Twins were my 60s AL team and the Giants in the NL. Juan Marichal was such a great pitcher to watch. Overall I saw Mays probably 20 times on TV and he never failed to do something, either making a great catch or hammering a double in the gap. He probably never had a bad game.
After my parents divorced my mother got remarried and her new married name was Mays. A Mays-ing!
RIP to possibly the very best.

 

He was one of the only old timers I would’ve liked to see play. RIP.

 

I mentioned NPR’s Road to Rickwood podcast on the main baseball thread. Episode 2 is centered on Mays, who grew up on the neighboring city of Fairfield before breaking in with the Birmingham Black Barons while still in high school.

RIP. Feels surreal that he’s essentially going to have a nationally broadcast wake on Thursday.

From Fairfield, Mobile and Montgomery respectively.

 

All three gone now.

 

Writing about fandom in Three Bricks Shy of a Load, Roy Blount Jr. as a child idolized Mays and finally got to meet him covering an All-Star game. Blount made sure to study up in order to impress the Say Hey Kid with his ardent baseball insight. So they meet in the clubhouse during practice and it's all Blount can do to contain his bubbling excitement. "Willie," he says, "do you realize you had eight RBIs in the last seven games without the benefit of an extra-base hit?"

Mays looks at him. "Man," he says, " I don't keep up with that shit."