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Willie Mays

1931–2024 · 93 years Tier II

He learned the basket catch in the Army, not the majors

Portrait of Willie Mays
Unknown author — 1955 — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Westfield, Alabama was a company town built around an iron plant, and Cat Mays played for the plant's Black team. Annie Satterwhite was a high school basketball and track star. They never married and separated when Willie was three, and his father raised him with two young women, Sarah and Ernestine, in the house. Sarah took him to an AME church every Sunday. Cat played catch with him at five and sat him on the bench at industrial league games at ten. At Fairfield Industrial High School he led the county's Black schools in basketball scoring and played quarterback, fullback and punter. He signed with the Birmingham Black Barons at 17 on a deal that let him play home games only, so his football eligibility survived.

He came up to the Giants on May 24, 1951, went hitless in his first 12 at bats, then homered off Warren Spahn over the Polo Grounds roof and won Rookie of the Year. In 1954 he took the batting title at .345, hit 41 home runs, won the MVP, and made The Catch, a running over-the-shoulder grab of a Vic Wertz drive some 425 feet from home plate that kept Game One tied. He won 12 consecutive Gold Gloves and a second MVP in 1965 behind 52 home runs. He finished with 3,293 hits, 660 home runs, 2,068 runs, a .301 average and 156.2 wins above replacement, fifth of anyone who ever played. Nobody has more outfield putouts: 7,095.

The Army drafted him after the 1951 season. He spent most of two years at Fort Eustis in Virginia, played about 180 games for the post team, and missed roughly 275 for the Giants. When the club moved west in 1957 he bid on a house in San Francisco's Sherwood Forest and the seller refused him after the neighbors objected to a Black family. He collapsed from exhaustion repeatedly across his career and blamed his own method: he did not know how to play at less than everything he had, whether the game lasted four innings or nine. At Cooperstown in 1979 he told the crowd what the bill had been. He had sacrificed a bad marriage, he said, and then a good one, and he was standing there because baseball was his first love.

Bowie Kuhn banned him from baseball in 1979 for greeting guests at an Atlantic City casino, though his contract barred betting and the casino took no sports wagers. Peter Ueberroth reinstated him in 1985. He signed a lifetime deal with the Giants in 1993, helped talk San Francisco into building the park at 24 Willie Mays Plaza, and cared for his second wife Mae through 16 years of Alzheimer's until she died in 2013. In May 2024 Major League Baseball folded Negro league statistics into its records, adding his 1948 season with the Black Barons to his line. He died in Palo Alto on June 18, 2024, at 93, two days before the Giants played at Rickwood Field in Birmingham.

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

Willie Mays's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

  • The Catch other
    Game One of the World Series. He ran it down without looking for the last 20 feet.     1954
  • Say Hey (The Willie Mays Song) song
    The Treniers' record, made with Mays himself taking part     1954
  • Willie Mays' All-Stars company
    The barnstorming team he led through the South with Hank Aaron, Frank Robinson and Monte Irvin     1955
  • Four home runs in a game other
    April 30 at County Stadium, eight runs batted in, every drive past 400 feet     1961

Life in brief

with age at each point
  • 1948 aged ~17 Signs with the Birmingham Black Barons at 17 He played home games only, so he could keep his high school football eligibility.
  • May 25, 1951 aged 20 First major league game, at Shibe Park He went hitless in 12 at bats before homering off Warren Spahn.
  • May 29, 1952 aged 21 Inducted into the Army He missed roughly 275 Giants games over two years and learned the basket catch at Fort Eustis.
  • September 29, 1954 aged 23 The Catch, in Game One of the World Series The grab held the game even. The Giants swept Cleveland.
  • September 29, 1957 aged 26 The last Giants game at the Polo Grounds The crowd stood and cheered in the middle of his final at bat.
  • April 30, 1961 aged 29 Hits four home runs in one game at Milwaukee He had food poisoning and was not sure he would play.
  • January 23, 1979 aged 47 Elected to the Hall of Fame on the first ballot He took 409 of 432 votes and went in alone.
  • October 1979 aged 48 Banned from baseball over a casino greeter's job Peter Ueberroth reinstated him and Mickey Mantle in 1985.
  • June 18, 2024 aged 93 Dies in Palo Alto at 93 A public memorial filled Oracle Park on July 8.

Related

Contemporaries

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