The Life in My Years

Banner photo: I shot this photo before a baseball game between the Chicago Cubs and San Francisco Giants, at Wrigley Field in Chicago, on the day after Willie Mays passed away.

June 18, 2024. My wife and I were sitting, lower box, along the third baseline in Chicago’s Guaranteed Rate Stadium. The buzz started sometime in the early innings as the White Sox were playing the Houston Astros. I heard the first murmur from someone a few rows down from us and to the right. I only heard the name, “Mays.”

When it comes to baseball the name Mays, isn’t just a name. Willie Mays is baseball. Pick a sport, any sport and you’ll find that there’s an ongoing debate as to which player is that sport’s greatest. In baseball, the name Willie Mays is always mentioned beside Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron as the greatest player in baseball history. It’s one of those never resolved sports debates that takes place in a stadium or a bar or early morning in the office break room as people pour their morning coffee and dip into the donut box.

For me the choice is easy – it’s Mays. Maybe that’s because I watched him play so many times, though I did see Aaron a time or two. Ruth? I may be old but I’m not that damn old.

So in a baseball stadium, I suppose it would make sense that the name Mays would come up. Or not. Willie Mays, who spent most of his career playing for the New York/San Francisco Giants never played for or against the White Sox. Never, to my knowledge, did he set foot in Comiskey Park, the stadium that the Sox called home. So, I wondered, why the buzz? Because now it wasn’t just one lone mention. The name Willie Mays was circulating around the park.

The murmurs continued throughout the game, always at a distance. And then a man stopped to chat with a woman seated behind me. That’s when I heard the news that Willie Mays had passed away at the age of 93.

As the Sox and Astros, played my mind drifted from the game. Numb, hit with the now all too familiar realization that yet another precious piece of my life had been taken. As we get older the pieces just tumble away like bricks from an aging building. It might be a death, or the closing of a cherished institution, or the destruction of a building or monument. The pieces crash to earth and get bulldozed aside by time, and we find ourselves less one more fragment. When the World Series is done and the Giants have completed another season of mediocrity will June 18th even register in my failing memory?

A short time after the buzz began, rumor became official as the public address announcer shared the bad news with the stadium crowd. The crowd rose and a long standing ovation followed and every face, even those of the players on the field, turned to the picture of Willie Mays displayed on the scoreboard. I wasn’t the only one who had lost another fragment. All of baseball was feeling the loss.

We hadn’t planned on going to that game. The White Sox are one of the worst teams in baseball this year and the only reason to go would be to knock another stadium off the list of stadiums that we’d visited. It was a last minute decision that very afternoon to go online and buy tickets.

Irony? Destiny? Shithouse coincidence? Whatever it was, it was certainly fitting that I heard the news of the passing of baseball’s greatest while I was sitting at a baseball game. I guess it was equally fitting that the next day I would be watching the Giants play the Chicago Cubs in Chicago’s Wrigley Field.

I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area during Mays’ glory years and was fortunate to have been able to marvel, in person, at his greatness. Whether it was swatting a home run (he hit four in one game against the Milwaukee Braves), stealing a base, making one of his effortless trademark basket catches in the outfield or catching a baserunner dead to rights with a perfect throw from center field, Mays was the proverbial man playing with mere boys.

Willie was also the people’s player. He played before the time when an autograph had become a commodity. Mays played during a time when his autograph was a personal treasure, not something that you looked up in some magazine to check it’s value as if it were a stock. Athletes may have been deities then, but they were gods on a lower, more approachable plane. They weren’t the multi-millionaire athletes of today who, either by choice or by personal necessity, sequester themselves from the sports crazy public. It was a time when most professional athletes made ends meet by having an off season job selling insurance or working at a car dealership.

Before the Giants moved to San Francisco, they were the New York Giants. In both senses of the word, Willie Mays was the local giant who endeared himself to the fans with simple gestures such as playing stickball with the local kids on the streets of New York.

In 2011, Mays visited the area of the old Polo Grounds in New York and talked about those pre-San Francisco days. “I used to have maybe 10 kids come to my window, Every morning, they’d come at 9 o’clock. They’d knock on my window, get me up. And I had to be out at 9:30. So they’d give me a chance to go shower. They’d give me a chance to eat breakfast. But I had to be out there at 9:30, because that’s when they wanted to play. So I played with them for about maybe an hour.”

In later years, while living in Atherton, California, Mays became known for giving out autographed baseballs to kids on Halloween.

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In San Francisco, Willie played in the fan and hitter unfriendly confines of frigid and wind blown Candlestick Park. At Candlestick, the gales of left field pushed long fly balls from the bat of the right handed hitting Mays, balls that should’ve left the park, into the waiting gloves of opposing outfielders. Left field was a home run graveyard.

Unlike many players of today who would complain about the conditions, and refuse to adjust, Mays, the quintessential professional, changed his swing so that the balls went towards right center where the swirling winds would carry the ball over the fence.

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After games my parents let me hang out with gangs of other kids at the players’ entrance where we would wait for the players to exit. We mobbed the players as they came out, holding out baseballs, gloves, caps and programs. “Mr. Mays, can I have your autograph?” (In those days, it was always Mr. Mays or Mr. McCovey, never Willie). I was never among the select. Hell, he’d have been there till the next morning had he obliged everyone.

***

My friends and I would bike down to the local shopping center and buy baseball cards with our allowance money. The cards came packed with a stick of cheap, stale gum that might’ve been salvaged from old army stock from the First World War. We chewed the gum, sure, but the prize was in the cards. We’d thumb through them and more often than not, moan about getting cards of players whose major league days were numbered. Every now and then, we’d strike gold – a future hall of famer; Spahn, Musial, Koufax and maybe, just maybe, Willie Mays. After going through our cards we’d trade for our favorite players. “I’ll trade you a Ray Sadecki and a Harvey Haddix for that Warren Spahn.” Any player but a select few, Mays in particular, was open for trading. Nobody except a fool would trade a Willie Mays card.

***

The day after Willie passed, my wife and I took the subway to Wrigley. On the fan packed subway ride to Wrigley, much of the talk was about Mays, his passing and his career. The conversations continued at Wrigleyville, the neighborhood surrounding the stadium, and in the stadium itself.

Before the game, a standing ovation for Willie Mays was followed by a moment of silence. The players on the field stood, caps over their hearts, staring at the image of their sport’s icon on the scoreboard. Born long after Mays’ playing days were done, some of those players had at some time or another met Willie. Current players, even the greats (maybe especially the greats) reflect on those encounters with reverence. They often speak about how intimidated they felt in Mays’ presence.

***

On August 18, 1910, the entire city of Birmingham, Alabama shut down in order to celebrate the opening of Rickwood Field. The grandstands of Rickwood, a minor league field and the oldest existing baseball stadium in America, would, over the decades, play host to baseball’s greats; Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson, Honus Wagner, Rogers Hornsby, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson and Dizzy Dean.

Rickwood was also home to the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro Southern League, one of seven Negro Major leagues that would exist during a thirty year period beginning in 1920. The Negro Leagues existed because Major League baseball, which was formed in 1876, remained segregated until April 15, 1947, when the Brooklyn Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson.

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In 1948, a 16 year old, local high school kid, who could take a short walk to Rickwood from his family’s home, was the starting center fielder for the Black Barons. During the school year, the kid played on weekends. When school let out for the summer, the kid traveled with the team. After the young man graduated high school, he was offered a contract to play for the New York Giants. Willie Mays. His starting salary was $4000 dollars.

***

In June of 2023, Major League Baseball announced that the San Francisco Giants would play the St. Louis Cardinals at Rickwood Field. It was billed as a tribute to the Negro Leagues, and to Willie Mays, as well as a celebration of Juneteenth. It was hoped that Mays would be at the game but due to poor health he was unable to make the trip. As it turned out, Willie passed away two days before the game.

The day that the news broke of Willie’s death would be the first of more days to come in which Mays and baseball would take over the sports news cycle. The Boston Celtics, who had just won the NBA title had suddenly become old news everywhere but in Bean Town. Throughout the evening and into the next day, the tributes to Willie Mays poured forth.

But the story wouldn’t just be about baseball. And it wouldn’t be fluffy.

Next: An American Legacy Story Part !!: Rickwood and Reggie.