Willie Mays turned 80 on Friday.
Even if you were born after Mays retired in 1973, I hope you’re aware of who he was.
Willie Howard Mays joined the New York Giants 60 years ago on May 25, 1951. He had signed with them a little less than a year earlier as an amateur, after failing a tryout with the Boston Red Sox. He thought he had done OK for Boston, but their standards were higher, I suppose. Of course, the Red Sox had found Jackie Robinson’s skills lacking as well a few years earlier, so perhaps they were simply being consistent. When they finally added a black player in 1959, it was utility infielder Pumpsie Green, who went on to hit .244 over four seasons of part-time play. It was Boston’s way of saying, “Look, we tried it, and it didn’t work out. Now can we go about our business?”
Mays was the NL rookie of the year in 1951 and was the league’s MVP his next full season in 1954. He was in the Army for most of 1952 and all of 1953. He won the MVP again in 1965 and had nine top-six finishes in between. He finished his career with the fifth most MVP votes in history.
After beginning his career in the Negro Leagues, Mays played his first game in organized baseball for the Trenton Giants, who happened to be playing in Hagerstown, Md. It’s safe to say Hagerstown in 1950 was not terribly progressive when it came to things like black baseball players playing with white ones. Mays’ appearance on the field at Municipal Stadium was not exactly greeted with the same enthusiasm that Bryce Harper’s was last month. Catcalls, racial epithets and similar insults were hurled at Mays by some of the locals, who apparently thought this whole desegregation thing was a bad idea. To make amends, the city of Hagerstown invited Mays back in 2004 for a public apology. He accepted and was quite moved by the ceremony. The town’s mayor later proposed naming a street for Mays or perhaps renaming the ballpark for him, but that idea died amid local criticism that he had never lived there or played for the local team.
How great was Mays? There has been no one since who you could legitimately say was comparable. Sure, his godson, Barry Bonds, eclipsed most of Mays’ numbers, but even before the steroids mess, you never heard anyone who saw them both in their primes say Bonds was just as good.
John Lennon once said if you had to call rock and roll something else, you’d call it Chuck Berry; between 1951 and 1971 baseball’s synonym was surely Willie Mays.
Examiner columnist Phil Wood is a baseball historian and contributor to MASN’s Nats Xtra. Contact him at [email protected].
