Willie Mays
Story Stream
A Giant of a Man October 10, 2024
The timing was uncanny, a bit charmed even, but then again—during a Hall of Fame career that spanned nearly a quarter of a century, and that led him from the Jim Crow South to New York to San Francisco and then back east—Willie Mays had nothing if no...
What Willie Mays Meant June 25, 2024
Everyone has seen it. In slightly decayed black-and-white footage, a center fielder, wearing the number 24, turns his back on a well-struck baseball and, apparently without looking and using some weirdly powerful, instinctive positional guidance, rac...
Willie Mays: A Grateful Nation Says Goodbye June 24, 2024
On an October night in 1918, one month after Babe Ruth led the Boston Red Sox to a World Series victory, a successful New York stockbroker named Charles Stoneham came home with some unusual news for his 15-year-old son Horace. “Horrie,” he said, “I b...
Willie Mays Defined Baseball’s Golden Era June 21, 2024
From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, baseball’s greatest era, Willie Mays was baseball’s greatest player. That was before football and basketball began to encroach on baseball as America’s pastime, when all the best athletes were baseball players,...
Willie Mays Was the Greatest Baseball Player Ever June 20, 2024
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...
Isn’t Willie Mays Wonderful? June 20, 2024
The sky seems a little less bright today. The music sounds just a bit bluer. The stars feel farther away. Willie Mays is gone.He stopped playing baseball more than fifty years ago, and yet you can see him, even if you never actually saw him. He’s cha...
Why There Will Never Be Another MLB Player Like Willie Mays June 19, 2024
One of the greatest players of all time, Frank Robinson, was asked once if Willie Mays was the best player he had ever seen. Robinson got that annoyed look on his face and rolled his eyes, insulted that the question was even asked. After a pause, he ...
Shohei Ohtani Is the GOAT June 03, 2024
Just over half a century ago, Major League Baseball introduced the designated hitter rule in the American League, consigning pitchers to the bench for half of each game. This year marks only the third since the National League adopted the still-contr...
