Mays, Willie

Source:

 African American National Biography

Mays, Willie

(6 May 1931– ),

baseball player, was born Willie Howard Mays Jr. in Westfield, Alabama. His paternal grandfather, Walter Mays, and his father, William Howard Mays Sr., were semiprofessional baseball players, and his mother was a high school track star. After his parents divorced when he was three years old, Mays was raised by his father and two adopted sisters in Fairfield, Alabama.

Mays starred in football and basketball at Fairfield Industrial High School. As the school had no baseball team, Mays began playing semiprofessional baseball as a young teenager. By age fourteen he was playing right field with his father's semiprofessional steel mill team. In 1947 his father introduced him to Piper Davis, the manager of the Birmingham Black Barons, a professional baseball team in the Negro American League. He got two hits in his first game for the Black Barons and was signed for $250 per month, even though he could play only home games because he was still in high school. In a sign of things to come, Mays hit a double in his first at bat against the great pitcher Satchel Paige of the Kansas City Monarchs. He played for the Black Barons from 1947 through 1949.

The Boston Braves scouted Mays in 1949 and 1950 but did not sign him. However, Eddie Montague, a scout for the New York Giants, reported that Mays was the greatest ballplayer he had ever seen, and the Giants signed him at a salary of five thousand dollars on the day Willie graduated from high school. They paid the Black Barons ten thousand dollars for Mays's contract. In 1950 Mays was assigned to a minor-league team in Sioux City, Iowa, but because the team would not accept black players, he was subsequently sent to the Trenton, New Jersey, minor-league team. In 1951 he was promoted to the New York Giants' top farm team, the Minneapolis Millers. He batted .477 during the first two months of the season and was promoted to the New York Giants on 25 May 1951. Despite his short stay in Minneapolis, he became such a fan favorite that the Giants placed an advertisement in the local newspaper to apologize to the community for promoting him.

Willie Mays is doused with champagne in the dressing room at Chicago's Wrigley Field after his New York Mets defeated the Chicago Cubs to win the National League East division championship, 1 October 1973. (AP Images.)

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Mays's impact on the Giants was immediate and profound. Although he did not hit well in his first games, his fielding prowess was so extraordinary that the Giants' manager, Leo Durocher, affirmed that Mays was to be his regular center fielder no matter how poorly he batted. His hitting improved as he helped the Giants win the National League pennant in his first season. Mays's performance earned him the Rookie of the Year award. His enthusiastic “Say Hey” greeting and impassioned play led to his nickname, the “Say Hey Kid.”

In 1952 Mays was drafted into the U.S. Army and assigned to Fort Eustis, Virginia. During this time he played baseball and created his distinctive technique of catching fly balls at the level of his belt buckle, his famous “basket catch.” He finally returned to a languishing New York Giants team in 1954. When a fan noticed Durocher greeting Mays, he remarked, “Leo is shaking hands with the pennant.” Mays won the batting title, hit forty-one home runs, and was awarded the National League Most Valuable Player award. That year he led the Giants to the pennant and the World Series championship against the favored Cleveland Indians.

The 1954 World Series was marked by one of the most remarkable fielding plays in baseball history, known as “the Catch.” In the eighth inning of the first game, with the score tied and two runners on base, Vic Wertz of the Indians hit a fly ball over Mays's head in center field. Mays turned around, ran straight back, and caught the ball over his shoulder 450 feet from home plate. He twirled around in one motion and threw to the infield, which kept any runners from scoring. “The Catch” epitomizes Mays's place as the greatest fielding center fielder in baseball history.

Mays married Margueritte Wendell in 1956, and they adopted a son, Michael, in 1959. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1961. The breakdown in his marriage coincided with the Giants' move to San Francisco in 1958. Although he was the star of the team, Mays was not immediately accepted into the community and was kept from buying a house in a white neighborhood when homeowners protested. On the diamond he was often unfavorably compared to San Francisco's local hero, Joe DiMaggio, who, ironically, had been Mays's boyhood idol. Mays let his play overcome the critics. He led the Giants to a pennant in 1962, and in 1964 he became the first African American ever to captain a Major League Baseball team. Two years later, Mays signed a contract with the Giants that made him the highest-paid player in baseball history. Sporting News voted him the Player of the Decade for the 1960s. Mays married Mae Louise Allen in 1971, a year before the Giants traded him to the New York Mets, and two years before he completed his career as the Mets' player-coach. In 1979 he became the ninth player to be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility.

Mays's greatness lies in his superiority in all areas of the game: running, fielding, throwing, power hitting, and hitting for average. The adulation of his fans for one of baseball's greatest all-around players rests on Mays's twenty-two-year career of consistently phenomenal statistics and defensive plays. From 1954 through 1962 he led the National League in at least one offensive category every year. He holds the records of 7,290 outfield chances and 7,095 putouts and led the league in outfield double plays from 1954 to 1956 and, remarkably, ten years later, in 1965. He also holds seven club records for the New York Giants (for which he played only five full seasons) and fifteen club records for the San Francisco Giants.

Mays's career totals put him in the top ten in nine offensive categories, including 2,992 games played, 660 home runs, 63 multiple-home-run games, 1,903 runs batted in, and 2,062 runs scored. He won the Most Valuable Player award in 1954 and 1965 and led the league in batting in 1954. He also led the National League four seasons in home runs and four consecutive seasons in stolen bases. He had ten seasons batting over .300, ten seasons batting in at least 100 runs, and twelve consecutive seasons scoring at least 100 runs. He hit at least 30 home runs in eleven seasons, 20 doubles in sixteen seasons, and 5 triples in twelve seasons. In 1971 he hit 5 triples at the age of forty.

Mays is one of only three players to have 500 home runs and 3,000 hits and one of only six players to hit 4 home runs in a single game. He was the first player to have 20 doubles, triples, home runs, and stolen bases in a season (1957), 30 home runs and 30 stolen bases in a season (1956 and 1957), and 50 home runs and 20 stolen bases in a season (1955). He also was the first player to reach 300 home runs and 300 stolen bases. In recognition of all these accomplishments, Mays was selected for the National League All-Star team twenty-four consecutive times.

Despite all Mays gave to the game, the baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn banished him from baseball in 1979 because he was hired to work in public relations by Bally's Casino; Major League Baseball had long prohibited players and coaches from having any association with gambling entities. He was finally welcomed back into baseball in 1985 by Commissioner Peter Ueberroth. The San Francisco Giants then hired him in 1986 as a special assistant to the president and made this a lifetime appointment in 1993.

Mays's impact on baseball, sports, and society goes well beyond his statistics and awards. Remembering his humble beginnings, he has continuously promoted activities to help underprivileged children. During his adolescence he watched Saturday football games at Miles College, a black school in Birmingham. In 1968 he returned to Miles College as national chair of their fund-raising campaign to build the Willie Mays Health and Physical Education Center. During his years as a New York Giant, he was famous for playing stickball with neighborhood children in Harlem; in San Francisco in the 1960s he became a mentor to O. J. Simpson, who was at that time a wayward teenager from the city's Potrero Hill housing projects. When Mays returned to New York with the Mets, he supported New York's Fresh Air Fund to allow inner-city children to spend time in summer camps outside the city. Mays's Say Hey Foundation, formed in 1980, is dedicated to providing higher education for underprivileged children.

Mays has actively promoted the inclusion of Negro League players into the Hall of Fame. When the Hall of Fame proposed setting up a separate exhibit for Negro League players and their accomplishments, he forcefully argued that Negro League baseball should be recognized as part of the highest level of baseball and that its players should be integrated into exhibits of baseball's greatest athletes. Although blacks and whites played separately, he believed they should be remembered together. In 2000 the San Francisco Giants honored Mays by addressing their new ballpark 24 Willie Mays Plaza and adorning it with a nine-foot-tall statue of the “Say Hey Kid.”

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