Willie Mays and What Happens When You’re That Good
The first person I ever personally heard say anything unflattering about Willie Mays was my mother.
This was sometime in the 1990s, and I was startled. Not because Willie Mays might not be perfect, but because my mother never said unflattering things about anyone.
In any case, now they’re both gone — my mother some years ago, rather quietly, and Willie Mays on Tuesday at the age of 93, triggering a well-deserved avalanche of tributes to one of the four or five best baseball players ever.
The five tools by which position players are measured in baseball are hitting, hitting for power, running, throwing and fielding. Willie Mays had five tools of gold, and he enhanced them by playing the game with a visceral joy. He made baseball look easy, which it isn’t, and fun, which it should be.
My mother knew and cared nothing about baseball. She worked at the West Hartford (Connecticut) Police Department, which had engaged Willie Mays as the paid attraction at a fund-raiser for some worthy community cause.
As a baseball fan, I asked her how that went. While she deferred on details, she said Mays clearly just wanted the whole thing to be over and was accordingly dismissive toward the people who had organized it. He fulfilled his contractual obligation, she added, but left no warm feelings among those who had been looking forward to meeting one of baseball’s most enduring icons.
It’s too bad. We’d like to think all the people we admire appreciate that admiration.
And conversely, it’s too bad that Willie Mays, who exuded such joy on the baseball diamond, didn’t find a little more pleasure in simply being Willie Mays.
Sadly, it’s not hard to figure why he didn’t. Life didn’t come as easily as baseball to a kid who was born black in the segregated South, and while Mays was masterful at deflecting racial questions, it was hard to miss the fact that even as he was becoming one of the best players in baseball, he was not allowed to stay at many of the same hotels or eat in many of the same restaurants as his white teammates. It was also hard not to miss the taunts from the stands and opposing dugouts, or the way his first bid to buy a house outside San Francisco in 1957 was rejected because home values would drop if the “colored” moved in.
Mays also had to spend much of his post-baseball life scrambling for money, which sounds almost surreal in an era when average players can make $10 million a year and stars who are not Willie Mays make up to $70 million.
Mays’s highest salary over a 22-year career was $165,000, which is why he had to spend much of the rest of his life playing Willie Mays. He rented himself out for charity events. He autographed baseballs for $300. He sold himself as a famous face of a gambling casino.
Presumably he enjoyed some of this. There had to be gratification in the sheer number of people who loved having seen #24 play baseball. There are worse gigs than getting standing ovations.
Still, you can see how it would get tiresome the hundred thousandth time some stranger asked him to recount the World Series catch off Vic Wertz, or be as excited as a random fan about a home run he hit off Warren Spahn in 1962.
On a more personal level, Mays told writers he had trouble watching ballgames, because he so badly missed playing in them. He lamented that his legacy, sturdy was it was, could have been even more impressive. Had he not been drafted into the Army during the Korean War and lost 266 games in the 1952 and 1953 seasons, he said, he would have hit more home runs than Babe Ruth instead of finishing 54 short.
Outside of baseball, he went through a painful divorce and eventually developed multiple physical problems, including severely diminished eyesight that must have been excruciating for a man who once had an otherworldly ability to watch a batter hit a ball 350 feet away and calculate precisely where that ball was going to come down.
“Willie, as he grew older, became more withdrawn and suspicious, more cautious, more vulnerable and with plenty of reason,” Leonard Koppett wrote in “A Thinking Man’s Guide to Baseball” (1967). “Life, both personally and professionally, became more complicated.”
Willie Mays is not the only athlete who found life more challenging when the game ended and let some of the subsequent frustration spill over.
Collectors tell about having a baseball signed by the two other great centerfielders of 1950s New York baseball, Mickey Mantle and Duke Snider, and paying their $300 for Mays to complete the set. Mays would sometimes write over one of the other signatures.
That’s just plain rude. That’s also the guy who would sign more than a hundred baseballs and give them away to children trick-or-treating at his house on Halloween.
If he might do the minimum at a paid event, he would visit children in hospitals on his own.
Like all magnetic athletes, Mays over the years developed a mythic image. He was the star who played stickball with the kids on the streets of Harlem. He was the laser-focused player who sometimes called pitches and defensive alignments from centerfield.
He was also the guy, as the New York Times noted in its obituary, who said the greatest player he ever saw in baseball was the man in the mirror. Willie Mays.
For anyone who ever saw him hit, hit home runs, throw out runners, steal extra-base hits or steal bases himself, that’s a discussion. To every fan’s delight, it will never be resolved.
This Thursday, Mays’s long-time team the San Francisco Giants will play the St. Louis Cardinals at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama, the oldest baseball stadium in America.
Rickwood is about nine miles from Westfield, where Willie Mays grew up, and it’s the park where he made his professional debut, in 1948 with the Birmingham Black Barons. He was 17. Two years later he signed with the New York Giants, for $4,000.
Thirteen years later, in 1963, the white Birmingham Barons, who shared Rickwood with the Black Barons, sat out the season rather than join the Southern League, because Southern League teams let blacks and whites play together. It wasn’t until 1964 that Rickwood allowed integrated seating.
Willie Mays took heat from Jackie Robinson, among others, for not being more outspoken about this kind of racism in baseball, and America. Hearing that question was one of that complexities of being Willie Mays, whose answer was that he was trying to change baseball, and America, in his own lower-profile way.
What we’re remembering today, though, quite rightly, is something narrower and simpler: On the green fields of baseball, Willie Mays wrote poetry.
