Willie Mays was baseball and it made the world a better place

Willie Mays existed and the world was a better place because of it.

It is impossible to overstate Mays’ cultural legacy, his footprint on American life. Books have been written, and more will be written, about the place and importance of baseball in American history. There’s a reason why Abner Doubleday got credit for inventing the sport of baseball, even though he didn’t do that at all. He was a Civil War general and a war hero, and when the war ended, a still-intact nation fell in love with baseball. Doubleday got the honor, and you can choose from 400 pages of psychology and mythology to explain why.

It is in this context that a player like Mays could become one of the most recognizable and important Americans in the world. Baseball was the national sport, but there were villains and scoundrels on the fringes, until Babe Ruth arrived to capture the nation’s attention. It’s not that Mays followed Ruth directly on the timeline, but he was the next super-superstar of a medium that was all-American, like Louis Armstrong with jazz or Edgar Allen Poe with short stories. Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby took a disproportionate share of the abuse and attention as they made their way, but that allowed Mays to become the face of a sport that was the face of a country.

Even if you were born after the advent of color television, and even if you were born after the Internet, you’ve probably seen at least one image or video of Mays playing stickball with kids in Harlem.

If that’s somehow new to you, you’ve definitely seen a video of The Catch, where his hat falls off as he spins around and throws a rocket to prevent a Cleveland runner from scoring in the World Series, also even though he was about two billion meters away. from home plate. These aren’t just embedded in the minds of Giants fans. These are images that a lot of people recognize it, regardless of whether they can explain the infield fly rule or tell you how many balls it takes for a batter to walk.

Mays’ idea alone was enough to inspire artists around the world. Musically you can explore a legacy from The Treiners to the Wu-Tang Clan. Visually, you can talk about what it meant to Mays to appear on “The Donna Reed Show” or be the face of baseball so often that he was on the debut episode of “Home Run Derby.” He was the star of the sport, if not the country, and he understood and embraced this, even though it must have been a much heavier burden than he ever let on.

My favorite piece of May’s Americana was the Peanuts strip in which Charlie Brown loses a spelling bee because he is asked to spell the word “maze.” It does not work. But my favorite American works of art – in any medium – are the TV special ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’ and the soundtrack Vince Guaraldi created for it. The only reason it exists is because of Willie Mays. Charles Schulz wasn’t interested in a documentary about his cartooning life, but then he heard that the documentarian had been working on a Mays documentary and said, “Maybe we should at least meet.” If Willie can trust you with his life, maybe I can do the same. But I can’t promise anything.”

Willie Mays existed and the world was a better place because of it.

But it was so much better if you were also a Giants fan.

There he was, the embodiment of baseball, wearing a Giants hat from spring training and representing your team. He was an outsized part of the American story, but he was also a very tangible part of it your story. You chose to devote much of your life to Giants baseball, and so did Willie Mays. And lo and behold, he was the greatest baseball player who ever lived. You might dispute that description, well, fine, so he’s the second-best baseball player who ever lived, but also the literal godfather of the greatest baseball player who ever lived, who also happened to play for the Giants. Either way, you win. Mays was there when the Giants broke ground on Oracle Park, and he was there when the Giants signed Barry Bonds, which was appropriate when the team fully committed to San Francisco.

A photo of Grant’s home in Mays during Bonds’ signing ceremony.

There is a palm tree in the background of that shot, and there are 24 of them in front of the ballpark where the Giants now play. They don’t play in that new stadium without Willie Mays. It’s now the Toronto Blue Devils or the Tampa Manatees, and the city of San Francisco is figuring out how to co-opt the Oakland baseball team like they did with the Oakland basketball team. One of the few things that kept the Giants by a thread throughout the tumultuous 1970s was the idea that this is Willie Mays’ franchise. It meant something. It was worth saving. And so the greatest player in Giants history holds a jersey with the other greatest player in Giants history, and it doesn’t matter who gets what honor. (I’m going with Mays. You choose your own path.)

If you’re a Giants fan, you can lay claim to being the greatest all-around player in baseball history. That is almost unbelievable. Besides the historical or sociological importance Mays brought to the world – and there is plenty of it – Giants fans can lay claim to Willie Mays. The people who saw him get to explain what it was like to watch him, and the people who didn’t see him wonder what it was like.

That wasn’t always the case. He started his career pushing flaming buses to New York, and cried when he couldn’t get a hit in the majors. He was compared to Joe DiMaggio every second of the 1958 season by hyper-regional idiots who wanted San Francisco baseball to be the best. best basketball. He was booed for years without good reason, and it was a problem for him to buy a house where he wanted. When he did, he moved after having a bottle full of racist abuse thrown through his window.

So don’t mistake his career in San Francisco as a glorious romp through the green pastures of all that baseball and life has to offer. It was much more complicated. However, it is not without reason that the Giants play at 24 Willie Mays Plaza. He was the greatest to ever play. His was a perfect American story, both for good and, all too often, for bad. He existed, and the world became better because of it.

Abner Doubleday didn’t invent baseball, but here’s something you might not know: He’s the person who had one of the first patents for the San Francisco cable car. He came from New York, became an inseparable part of San Francisco history and was credited with the entire sport of baseball.

That’s all true for Mays, too, except he may have invented baseball. You cannot refute that claim. It’s true of anyone who saw him play, and it’s true of anyone who knows anything about how Willie Mays played the game. He was the greatest player in history, if not by statistical measures, then by some combination of statistics, atmosphere and cultural footprint. He was everything that made the sport and the country great, and he will be forever missed.

(File photo / Associated Press)