The Say Hey Kid has left the building. By the time I was born, in 1959, Willie Mays was already a superstar. By the time I started high school he was headed into retirement. I never got to see him play, in person or on television, but his name was known to me from infancy. Not only was he right up there with baseball’s all-time greats—Ruth, Robinson, Aaron, Mantle, Williams, DiMaggio, Clemente—he was more than that. The esteem he commanded was on a par with George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, FDR. He was an American hero of the sort we no longer see, perhaps of the sort we are no longer capable of producing.