barry m. bloom
·5 min read
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – News sped through the stands at Rickwood Field during a Tuesday night Double-A game that the great Willie Mays had passed away at 93. Suddenly, there was a video message on the scoreboard and the crowd of 7,866 gave Mays an impromptu standing ovation, breaking into the signature chant, “Say Hey, Say Hey.”
Rickwood is the oldest pro ballpark in America and the site where MLB planned to honor Mays and the Negro Leagues with a game Thursday. Mays got his start in the stadium and today the red brick Willie Mays Pavilion sits down the third base line- just beyond Section 24, of course.
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Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.
Mays had been suffering through a debilitating illness, stealing the impeccable eyesight that allowed him to navigate through 23 seasons and hit 660 home runs on the way to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. And then his massive heart finally gave out.
But the timing couldn’t have been more surreal. Thursday’s game here between Mays’ San Francisco Giants and the St. Louis Cardinals was “designed to be a celebration of Mays and his [Negro League] peers,” Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred said in quickly released statement.
“With sadness in our hearts, it will now also serve as a national remembrance of an American who will forever remain on the short list of the most impactful individuals our great game has ever known,” he added.
Say it ain’t so. The Say Hey Kid is gone. His career began in this city when the civil rights movement was burgeoning and in this ballpark that was born in 1910. Mays played in the dying days of a league that faded quickly after Jackie Robinson broke MLB’s color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947.
Mays became beloved from coast to coast. From the Polo Grounds to Candlestick Park and back to Shea Stadium. From the streets of Harlem where he played stickball with New York kids to San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf.
Was he the best player of all-time? That’s a discussion for another day. His own godson, Barry Bonds, hit a record 762 homers in an era tainted by performance enhancing drugs. Mickey Mantle’s New York Yankees won seven World Series titles from 1951 to 1962. The Giants, with Mays, won only one- in 1954 with Mays making the most storied catch in postseason history at New York’s Polo Grounds.
But Mays was certainly the most exuberant. He made basket catches in center field with a big smile on his face, constantly running out from under his cap as he chased down those fly balls. He scampered around the bases like a gazelle.
The Giants moved to San Francisco and Mays led the team to the 1962 World Series, only to lose with the winning run on third base in the ninth inning of Game 7. That was the closest he’d come to winning a World Series in San Francisco.
He would go to the Fall Classic again with the New York Mets in a 1973 loss to Oakland, the last games of his stellar career. He was 42 and done as a baseball player. But the world was never done with him.
“I’m at a loss for words,” fellow Hall of Famer Ken Griffey Jr. said in a statement released by the Seattle Mariners. “I’m devastated. Heartbroken. Numb. He was someone I could call when I needed to talk who always had time for me. I consider him an uncle, and to me, he’ll always be the godfather of all center fielders.”
That was Willie: crusty on the outside, inside soft to the bone. He took Bonds under his wing as a little kid when his father, Bobby, played with Mays during the late 1960s and early 1970s with the Giants.
The elder Bonds was a kid himself at the time, trying make his way as highly talented outfielder. The youngster Barry was a presence in the clubhouse and climbed all over Willie at his locker. Mays, in his late 30s, prevailed on Bobby to let him handle his rambunctious son. Thus, the title of godfather was born.
That relationship never faltered, and Willie remained close with Barry long after Bobby died of cancer in 2003. When Barry hit his 661st homer to pass Mays on the all-time list, Mays came on to the field and handed a symbolic torch to Bonds replete with diamonds that read 660 and 661.
Bonds had felt some angst about supplanting Mays on the all-time list, but Willie told him at the time not to worry about it.
“He’s making history, and he’s doing it as a Giant. We have a lot of history here, and he’s right along with us,” he said.
Buck O’Neil, the Negro League star who finally was posthumously elected to the Hall of Fame, once said about his life that he didn’t arrive too late or too early, “but right on time.”
And so, it was the same with Mays. Had he been born 20 years earlier his career he would’ve been relegated to the Negro Leagues. He was right on time when he broke in with the Giants in 1951 as both New York National League teams led the charge to integrate.
The tears and heart felt words at Rickwood are sure to be pouring like summer rain on Thursday night. It wasn’t what MLB intended when it joined the MLB Players Association to form this event. But the baseball gods have a strange way of interjecting.
MLB can’t do anything to right the wrongs of its segregationist past, the union’s executive director Tony Clark agreed in an interview prior to Tuesday night’s game before the news broke about Willie’s death.
“But we have to tell their stories,” Clark said.
Listen, because Willie in death as in life has one heck of a story to tell.
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