Even in the final years of Willie Mays’s baseball career, the great man slowed by nagging injuries, he was still magical for a 6- or 7- or 9-year-old to watch, a kinetic bundle of athletic prowess and joy, wrapped in a package of goodwill and human decency.

Mays, who died Tuesday at age 93, was to baseball what Louis Armstrong was to music: a groundbreaking, utterly original virtuoso who elevated and changed his craft forever.