Willie Mays

Willie Howard Mays Jr. was born on the sixth of May 1931 at Westfield, Alabama, the only child of Willie Howard Mays Sr. — a steel-mill worker at the Tennessee Coal Iron and Railroad Company and a Negro Industrial League outfielder for the company's baseball club — and Annie Satterwhite Mays, a homemaker. His parents separated when he was three; he was raised by aunts and his great-grandmother across the Birmingham steel-mill suburbs. His father introduced him to baseball at three and to the segregated industrial-league baseball circuit at fourteen.

He left high school in 1948 at seventeen to play for the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro American League — the same Black Barons whose 1948 squad reached the Negro League World Series. He played centerfield for the Black Barons through 1949 and signed with the New York Giants for the 1950 season at nineteen. He played in the Class B and Triple-A minor leagues across 1950 and the early 1951 season. The Giants called him up to the major-league club on the twenty-fourth of May 1951.

He won the National League Rookie of the Year in 1951 and was the principal centerfielder of the National League team that won the New York pennant on the thirteenth of October 1951 — the day of Bobby Thomson's Shot Heard Round the World. Mays was the on-deck batter when Thomson hit the home run.

He served two years of military service in 1952 and 1953 and returned to the Giants for the 1954 season. The 1954 season produced his first National League Most Valuable Player Award and the eighth-inning over-the-shoulder catch of the long fly ball from Vic Wertz at the Polo Grounds in Game One of the 1954 World Series — the Catch — that remains the most widely-reproduced single defensive play in major-league baseball history.

He played for the New York Giants through 1957, with the Giants in San Francisco from 1958 through 1972, and for the New York Mets from 1972 to 1973. He won twelve consecutive Gold Glove Awards for fielding from 1957 to 1968 and twice won the National League Most Valuable Player Award. He retired with 660 home runs — third on the all-time list behind Hank Aaron (placed in this archive) and Babe Ruth at his retirement.

He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1979 in his first year of eligibility with 94.7 percent of the vote and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in 2015.

He died at Palo Alto, California, on the eighteenth of June 2024, at ninety-three.

He is honored here as the Say Hey Kid.