Willie Mays

There's a reason old Giants fans don't argue about this one. You can fight all day about Bonds and McCovey and Marichal and who goes second. First is settled. Willie Mays came west with the team in 1958, played 15 seasons in San Francisco, and for most of them he was the best baseball player on the planet. Our team. Our center fielder. We got to watch him every day.

He was born Willie Howard Mays Jr. on May 6, 1931, in Westfield, Alabama, outside Birmingham. His father, Cat, played ball for the steel mill team, and his mother, Annie, was a high school basketball and track star. At 16 he was already playing for the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro American League, the youngest man on the club, and as a 17 year old he played in the 1948 Negro League World Series against the Homestead Grays. Buck Leonard said the kid could run and throw but couldn't hit a curveball yet. That part didn't last.

The New York Giants signed him in 1950 for a $4,000 bonus and sent him to Trenton, where he was the first Black player in the Interstate League. By May 1951 he was hitting .477 for Minneapolis and Leo Durocher wanted him badly enough to call the kid at a movie theater. Mays told him he didn't think he could hit big league pitching. Durocher asked if he could hit .250. He went 0 for 12 to start, then got his first big league hit, a homer onto the Polo Grounds roof off Warren Spahn, slumped again, and cried at his locker until Leo told him he was his center fielder no matter what. He won Rookie of the Year and was kneeling on deck when Bobby Thomson hit the Shot Heard Round the World.

The Army took most of 1952 and all of 1953. He came back in 1954 and won the batting title at .345 on the final day of the season, hit 41 homers, led the league in triples and slugging, and won the MVP at 23. Then in Game 1 of the World Series at the Polo Grounds he ran down Vic Wertz's drive to the deepest part of center with his back to the plate, spun and fired it back in. The Giants swept Cleveland, a team that had won 111 games. It's still the most famous catch in the history of the sport.

He hit 51 homers in 1955, led the league in steals four straight years starting in 1956, and won the very first Gold Glove in 1957. Then the Giants packed up and moved to San Francisco, and I'll be honest about what happened next because it's part of the story. The city didn't hug him right away. A home sale fell through because neighbors objected, somebody threw a brick through his window, and one New York writer cracked that San Francisco cheered Khrushchev and booed Mays. Fans voted rookie Orlando Cepeda the team MVP in 1958. All Mays did that year was hit a career best .347.

The Giants played their first two seasons at Seals Stadium and moved into Candlestick Park in 1960. The wind there was brutal on a right handed power hitter, and he hit only 12 homers at home that first year. In center field he learned to count to five before chasing a fly ball so he could see what the wind was doing with it. Then on April 30, 1961, feeling sick after a late night plate of spare ribs, he borrowed Joey Amalfitano's bat and hit four home runs in one game at Milwaukee.

In 1962 he hit 49 homers with a career high 141 RBIs, homered on the last day of the season to force a tie with the Dodgers, homered twice in the first playoff game, and singled in a run in the ninth inning rally that won the pennant in Los Angeles. He lost the MVP to Maury Wills by seven points. In Game 7 of the World Series he doubled with two outs in the ninth and was standing on second when McCovey's line drive found Bobby Richardson's glove.

In 1963 he hit the homer that ended Marichal and Spahn's 16 inning duel and won the All Star Game MVP. In 1964 Alvin Dark named him the first Black captain in major league history, and he spent that summer keeping a clubhouse together while his manager said things he shouldn't have. In 1965, at 34, he hit a career high 52 home runs, led the league in on base and slugging, hit his 500th homer in the Astrodome, and won his second MVP, eleven years after his first. That August, when Marichal clubbed John Roseboro, it was Mays who ran out to help Roseboro off the field, with blood on his uniform.

The milestones kept coming. He passed Ted Williams and Jimmie Foxx on the home run list in 1966 and won his 10th straight Gold Glove. On September 22, 1969, he became the second man ever to hit 600 home runs, as a pinch hitter in San Diego. On July 18, 1970, at Candlestick, he singled off Montreal's Mike Wegener for hit number 3,000. And in 1971, at 40, he homered in each of the first four games of the season, led the league with 112 walks and a .425 on base percentage, and helped the Giants win the NL West. He hit his only postseason home run that October against the Pirates.

In May 1972 the Giants traded him to the Mets for minor league pitcher Charlie Williams. It hurt then and it hurts now, even knowing Horace Stoneham was trying to set him up for life. In his first game as a Met he homered against us. He retired after the 1973 World Series, and on Willie Mays Night at Shea he told the crowd, "Willie, say goodbye to America."

He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1979, his first year on the ballot, with 94.7 percent of the vote. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn cut his ties to baseball over a casino public relations job, and Peter Ueberroth reinstated him in 1985. The Giants brought him back as a special assistant in 1986 and signed him to a lifetime contract in 1993. Their ballpark sits at 24 Willie Mays Plaza with his statue out front. President Obama gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015, and in 2017 the World Series MVP award was renamed for him.

He died of heart failure in Palo Alto on June 18, 2024, at 93. Two days later the Giants played the Cardinals at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, the ballpark where he'd started as a teenager with the Black Barons, wearing a 24 patch on their sleeves. Back in San Francisco, fans were leaving tributes at his statue outside the ballpark.

The postseason line doesn't flatter him, I'll say that up front: 25 career playoff games, one homer, a .247 average. But clutch with Mays was never about October. It was about September, when the Giants were in a race and the other team was pitching around McCovey to get to anybody but him.

Look at the end of 1962. Last day of the regular season, tied 1 to 1 in the eighth against Houston, he homers off Turk Farrell and the Giants win 2 to 1 to force a playoff with the Dodgers. Game 1 of that playoff he homers off Sandy Koufax in the first inning and again off Larry Sherry, 8 to 0. Game 3, down 4 to 2 in the ninth at Dodger Stadium, he lines a single off Ed Roebuck to drive in a run in the four run rally that sent us to the World Series, then catches the last out himself.

Or 1965. The day of the Marichal and Roseboro brawl, after he'd helped carry a bleeding Roseboro off the field, he hit a three run homer off Koufax that won the game 4 to 3. Three weeks later in Houston, down two runs with two outs in the ninth, he swung through Claude Raymond's first two pitches, took three balls, fouled off three more, and homered on the ninth pitch. The Giants won in ten. He said it was the most dramatic home run he ever hit.

The All Star Game was his other stage. He played in 24 of them, holds the career records for hits, runs and stolen bases in the game, and won the MVP twice. In 1968 he led off with a single, moved up on an error and a wild pitch, and scored on a double play for the only run of a 1 to 0 game.