Willie Mays

Willie Mays (born May 6, 1931, Westfield, Alabama, U.S.—died June 18, 2024, Palo Alto, California) was an American professional baseball player considered by many to be the greatest all-around player in the history of the game. Mays ranks among the all-time leaders in home runs, hits, runs scored, and runs batted in (RBI). In 1954 he helped the New York (later San Francisco) Giants win the World Series. In addition to his outstanding play, Mays was known for his exuberant personality.

Both Mays’s father and his grandfather had been baseball players. Willie Mays, who batted and fielded right-handed, played semiprofessional baseball when he was 16 years old and joined the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro National League in 1948, playing only on Sunday during the school year. The National League New York Giants paid the Barons for his contract when he graduated from Fairfield Industrial High School in 1950.

After two seasons in the minor leagues, Mays went to the Giants in 1951 and was named Rookie of the Year at the end of that season—one legendary in baseball. The Giants were far behind the Brooklyn Dodgers in the pennant race. With the great play of Mays and others, the Giants tied the Dodgers in the standings on the last day of the season, and a three-game play-off for the National League championship was won with a home run, known as “the shot heard ’round the world,” hit by the Giants’ Bobby Thomson.

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Mays became known first for his spectacular leaping and diving catches before he established himself as a hitter. After a stint in the army (1952–54), he rejoined the Giants, and in 1954 he led the league in hitting (.345) and had 41 home runs. That year the team advanced to the World Series, and in game one against the Cleveland Indians (now Guardians), Mays made a legendary over-the-shoulder catch. The Giants won the series, 4–0. In 1966 his two-year contract with the Giants (who had moved to San Francisco in 1958) gave him the highest salary of any baseball player of that time.

Mays was traded to the New York Mets midseason in 1972 and retired after the 1973 season. Late in his career he played in the infield, mainly at first base. His career home run total was 660 and his batting average .301. Mays had 3,293 hits during his career, which made him one of the small group of players with more than 3,000 career hits. He led the league in home runs in 1955, 1962, and 1964–65, won 12 consecutive Gold Gloves (1957–68), and was named an All-Star in 20 of his 22 seasons.

After retiring as a player, Mays was a part-time coach and did public relations work for the Mets. In 1979 Mays took a public relations job with a company that was involved in gambling concerns, with the result that he was banned from baseball-related activities just three months after being elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. In 1985 the ban was lifted, and in 1986 Mays became a full-time special assistant to the Giants. His autobiography, Say Hey (1988), was written with Lou Sahadi. In 2015 Mays was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.