White fans embraced him. Jackie Robinson jeered him. But Mays, baseball’s greatest living player, paved the way for the game’s Black stars.
White fans embraced him. Jackie Robinson criticized him. But Mays, baseball’s greatest living player, paved the way for the game’s Black stars.SAN FRANCISCO — They have been playing baseball on these shores for roughly 160 years, and Willie Mays has been alive for more than half of them.
What Mays did, though, was no less important. With his dazzling flair and ebullient personality, he became the first Black ballplayer to cross over into the greater public consciousness — to win over White America. “You had to have seen Mays to appreciate him,” Costas said. “You had to see how electric it was when he walked from the on-deck circle to the plate. How he made even the routine play seem so stylish and distinctive. How he loped into the dugout at the end of the inning. How his hat would fly off on the base paths. He was so magnetic. The stats support it, but they don’t tell the whole story.
“We were playing for generations of players who were held back. We had a lot to play for, not just us,” Mays told author John Shea in the memoir they co-wrote, “Mays’s Black Barons shared their stadium with the Class AA Birmingham Barons, whose play-by-play broadcaster was noted white supremacist Bull Connor. Connor doubled as the city’s public safety commissioner, occasionally enforcing segregation policies with fire hoses and police dogs.
“Their experiences and backgrounds were vastly different. That shaped who they were as men,” said Clark, the MLBPA leader. “And we needed them both.”Kendrick, the Negro Leagues museum president, argued that Mays did as much for the larger cause of the Black community by being himself and demonstrating his superiority on the field as Robinson did with his own actions and words.
There can never be another like Mays, if only because the elements for his creation no longer exist. Baseball no longer holds the imagination of the country the way it did in the 1950s and ’60s. Mays, a three-sport high school athlete who was the quarterback of the football team and a high-scoring guard on the basketball team, probably wouldn’t even choose baseball, with its longer developmental curve, if he emerged today out of Alabama.
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