From the moment he retired—if we’re being honest, from a few years before that—and for the rest of his life, Willie Mays had a compelling case as the world’s Greatest Living Ballplayer.
Mays died Tuesday, after a life lived in full, 93 circuits around the sun. He was the last surviving member of the iconic superstar class that defined baseball’s self-proclaimed Golden Age. Mickey Mantle, Stan Musial, Ted Williams, Frank Robinson, Henry Aaron—inner-circle Hall of Famers whose careers overlapped in the late 1950s—all passed away before him. Mays’s death closes the chapter on an entire era of baseball history and rips open a void in the sport that will take time to heal.
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