Baseball royalty sat up front on the dais. It was 2015 and John Smoltz had just been elected into the Hall of Fame and Bud Selig was about to retire after serving as commissioner. Clayton Kershaw won the National League Cy Young Award, and he sat next to the man who deemed the moment special enough that he would present the honor personally. Indeed, nobody could miss Sandy Koufax.
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But the person who stopped the room at the annual baseball writers’ dinner that night in New York was seated at a table on the floor. It might have been hard to spot him had he not worn a black baseball cap emblazoned with an orange G. He was swarmed for autographs and even obliged for a lucky few until security swept the crowd away. Soon it would be time for his introduction, though such a thing seemed unnecessary for Willie Mays.
When his name was announced, all of the chitchat and silverware clinking came to a halt. After a beat, the silence was broken by thunderous applause.
Mays, who died on Tuesday at the age of 93, was a mid-century masterpiece of a modern ballplayer. He came along at a time when baseball still reigned as the nation’s true national pastime, when its cultural standing was akin to the NFL, the NBA and Hollywood rolled into one. The most famous baseball players were also among the most famous Americans, and in his time, few were more famous than Mays.
Mays’ career as a ballplayer began as integration ushered in a golden age for a game that still reigned supreme. When it ended, baseball no longer had the same cultural cachet. By the time he found himself on his knees in the dirt at the Oakland Coliseum, arms outstretched at home plate, things had changed. It was 1973, a year after a Gallup poll revealed that football for the first time had surpassed baseball as the nation’s most popular sport. Mays was 42, and he had just played one of his final games.
It was fitting, then, that his greatness came in an era when there was just baseball and then everything else.
In his time, Mays’ presence was outsized. He was a 24-time All-Star who retired with 660 career home runs, a player whose robust resume also came with receipts. Mays’ dominance of baseball was televised, which is how his over-the-shoulder catch of Vic Wertz’s impossibly deep drive to center field in the old Polo Grounds has been seared into our collective memory. It was but another moment of his stardom, though even in this regard Mays seemed to strive for something higher.
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“I do not consider myself a superstar,” he once said. “I consider myself a complete ballplayer.”
That assessment was universal, as evidenced by the tributes that came pouring in on Tuesday night, not just from baseball but from all corners of the sports world. In the case of Mays, everyone seemed to know what they were witnessing in real time.
In 1966, Mays was at the height of his powers, coming off his second MVP award. That same year, the writer Lawrence Ritter published “The Glory of Their Times,” the result of having spent four years interviewing players from the game’s earliest days as a modern phenomenon. Aside from the warmth of nostalgia, the book contained some of the generally curmudgeonly commentary that remains a part of the game’s culture even now. But it also contained a lesson that still applies.
Though the game is ever-changing, it also remains great, which is why those men of a bygone era were wise enough to recognize what they were watching in Mays.
“Honus (Wagner) was one of those natural ballplayers, you know what I mean? Like Babe Ruth and Willie Mays,” said the Hall of Famer Wahoo Sam Crawford. “Those fellows do everything by pure instinct. Mays is one of the few modern players who are just as good as the best of the old-timers.”
“He’s a throwback to the old days,” said another Hall of Famer, Harry Hooper. “A guy who can do everything, and plays like he likes it.”
For nearly a quarter century, Mays’ skill and grace on the field transcended his sport. And then for more than half a century after that, he stood as a towering ambassador for the game, a reminder of a time that will never be again, when a nation could grind to a halt, no different than that ballroom he occupied years ago, all on account of baseball.
As Mays waved his hand to the crowd that night, he was acknowledging the people who could conjure images of his greatness because they were lucky enough to see him play. And he was acknowledging those, like myself, who knew him as one of our last connections to a time when baseball stood alone. He was playing to two crowds, and we all applauded — an expression of our admiration and awe.
(Top photo of Willie Mays: Bettman / Getty Images)
