The sky seems a little less bright today. The music sounds just a bit bluer. The stars feel farther away. Willie Mays is gone.
He stopped playing baseball more than fifty years ago, and yet you can see him, even if you never actually saw him. He’s chasing a fly ball, and he will never get there in time. Sayers was effortless. Orr was effortless. Griffey was effortless. But Mays? He runs like he’s racing after a missed bus. He exerts every muscle, each limb seems to have a mind of its own, and he moves with such speed and abandon that his baseball cap holds on for dear life until it cannot hold on and goes flying off his head like a rodeo cowboy getting bucked off a bull.
Yes, you see him, even if you never saw him, Willie Mays turns on a fastball, anybody’s fastball, Koufax’s fastball, Gibson’s fastball, Drysdale’s fastball, turns on it and sends the ball screaming like a toddler rushing back to mom. Nobody’s bat was quicker, his swing was Ali’s jab, a cobra strike, a magician’s sleight of hand, and if you ever dared throw at him—to scare him, to intimidate him, to move him off the plate—he’d hit the dirt, dust himself off, and shout out in his bird tweet of a voice: “Don’t you be throwing at me!”
“Then,” Tom Seaver would say, “he’d rip the ball off the wall.”
Sure, you see him, even if you never saw him, he’s settling under the ball, and the runner on third has his foot on the base, he’s tagging up, everybody in the crowd knows it, there’s a humming buzz in the ballpark, that feeling just before a Broadway curtain goes up, and the ball plunges into Willie Mays’ glove, and he unleashes a throw. “Unleash” is the word, the only word, because Willie Mays does not throw with his arm. He throws with all of himself, all of his 170 pounds of muscle, all of his hopes and disappointments, all of the love he has for baseball and life and the moment.
“There have only been two authentic geniuses in the world,” the actress Tallulah Bankhead said. “William Shakespeare and Willie Mays.”
A half-century has gone by since Willie Mays played his final game, but what of it? Time never constrained him the way it constrained even the greatest of athletes. All his life, even at the end, when he could barely see and couldn’t get around much anymore, he was that kid playing at Rickwood Field in the Negro leagues for the Birmingham Black Barons.
“Who that?” Satchel Paige asked Buck O’Neil after a baby-faced Mays ripped a double off a curveball. That was Satchel’s question to Buck anytime anyone ever got a hit off him—“Who that?”—and Buck explained that was Cat Mays’s boy. Cat Mays was a fantastic ballplayer known all around Birmingham.
Paige nodded, then turned toward second base, where Mays stood smiling. “That’s all for you today, young’un,” Satchel said, and sure enough, the next time Mays came up, Ol’ Satch threw three fastballs that the kid couldn’t even see. “Now, go sit down, little boy,” Paige said, and seventy-five years later, Willie Mays still couldn’t keep from smiling and laughing as he told the tale.
All his life, even at the end, Willie Mays was the twenty-year-old playing minor league ball in Minneapolis in 1951, when he got the call from New York Giants manager Leo Durocher.
“Willie, we’re calling you up to the big leagues,” Durocher said, happily.
“I’m not ready,” Mays said, immediately and with feeling.
‘What are you hitting there in Minneapolis?” an impatient Durocher grumped.
“Um,” Mays said sheepishly. “I’m hitting .477, sir.”
“Get your ass up here,” Durocher concluded.
Mays went to New York, twenty days after his twentieth birthday, and, as if to prove himself right and Durocher wrong, he went 0-for-5 against Philadelphia’s Bubba Church and Bob Miller and Jim Konstanty. Then, next day, he went 0-for-3. A day after that, he went 0-for-4. He started his career 1-for-26 and all but pleaded to be sent back to the safety of Minneapolis.
“I can’t hit the curveball,” he complained to friends, and when Durocher caught wind of that, he yanked Mays into his office and told him two things. One, Mays needed to pull up his uniform pants so that umpires would stop calling the low strike on him. And two, Durocher said that as long as he was the manager of the New York Giants, Willie Mays would be his centerfielder no matter what he was hitting.
Those were the words Willie Mays needed to hear. Three scorching weeks later, his batting average was .322. It turns out he could hit the curveball after all.
Joe Posnanski has been called “contemporary sports writing’s biggest star.” For more stories from Joe, subscribe to his Joe Blogs Substack newsletter at joeposnanski.com, where he writes about sports, pop culture, life, and all manner of nonsense.
No, time never applied to Willie Mays the way it applies to others. He is like a Kurt Vonnegut character, unstuck in time, everything, everywhere, all at once, simultaneously the Say Hey Kid playing stickball in the streets of New York and the wizard outrunning baseballs soaring toward the gap at Candlestick Park, and the slugger tearing into baseballs as if it is something personal, and the legend launching a million memories and making parents and grandparents feel like children.
Even Mays himself couldn’t quite understand it. “All I did was play baseball,” he would say when approached by another fan with tears in his eyes. On one level, this was true. All he did was play baseball. All Robert Frost did was write poetry. All Grace Kelly did was act in movies. All Albert Einstein did was think about the universe. All Prince did was play music.
But, of course, it was never just about playing baseball. The 660 home runs and 1,326 extra base hits and 339 stolen bases and 12 Gold Gloves tell a fine story. But none of those numbers are records. None of those are singular in baseball history. None of those get to the heart of Willie Mays.
No, at the heart is something indescribable.
At the heart is joy. That’s what Willie Mays radiated, even on those off days when he wasn’t feeling especially joyful. Watch him turn his back and take off after Vic Wertz’s fly ball in ’54. Think of the time he sprinted after Rocky Nelson’s shot and, having run out of time, simply snagged the ball out of the air barehanded.
“Did you see that?” he squeaked at Durocher when he got back to the dugout.
“No, Willie,” Durocher said straight-faced. “can you go out there and do it again?”
Listen to the awe of people who saw him play, even for a minute, people like Buck O’Neil, who said, “There were faster men, but not with a baseball in the air,” or listen to Durocher, who said Mays was the violin virtuoso Jascha Heifetz, the racehorse Nashua and Sammy Davis Jr. all rolled into one, or listen to the theater legend Ethel Barrymore, who said, “Isn’t Willie Mays wonderful?”
Isn’t Willie Mays wonderful? That’s a movie title.
Yes, today the sky is a little less bright, and the music sounds a little bluer and the stars seem farther away because Willie Mays, at age ninety-three, died on Tuesday. He died just two days before Major League Baseball comes to Birmingham, Alabama, to play a game at Rickwood Field in his honor. It’s a hard thing to imagine. The greatest living player is no longer living. Willie Mays is gone.
Only, of course, he isn’t gone. Willie Mays will never be gone.
Joe Posnanski has been named the best sportswriter in America by five different organizations, including the Sports Media Hall of Fame and the Associated Press Sports Editors. He has also won two Sports Emmy Awards. He is the No. 1 New York Times bestselling author of six books, and he co-hosts the PosCast with television writer and creator Michael Schur.
