19 Jun The Say Hey Kid

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.

Even though I essentially knew Willie Mays only as a historical figure, he seemed omnipresent to anyone who followed baseball. His career has remained one of the primary measurements for greatness, and even in the era of near-superhuman specimens like Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge, that is unlikely to change. Not ‘unlikely’, actually. Never.

Willie Mays played the game when it was still in its purest form. When he made his legendary over-the-shoulder catch in Game One of the World Series at the Polo Grounds on September 29, 1954, he was about 450 feet from home plate—a distance that would place him several rows up in the right field bleachers in every ballpark in the league today. There was also no DH, no 25-man pitching rosters, no pitch clocks or replay reviews. It’s a tough game now and was even tougher then, and the Kid excelled at every aspect of it.

Hats off to the great game’s greatest all-around player. Thank you, Willie.