By the time I saw Willie Mays play, he was in his 40s and well past his singular prime. The speed that let him own any ball hit to center field — including his spectacular over-the shoulder grab in the 1954 World Series known simply as The Catch — was mostly a memory. That could also be said of the power and consistency that allowed him to garner 660 home runs, 3,293 hits, and a career .301 batting average.
But none of that mattered to a baseball-obsessed girl from Queens who lived a bike ride away from Shea Stadium, where Mays would play the final games of his illustrious 20-plus seasons in the majors. All I knew is that the “Say Hey Kid” was coming back to New York to play for my beloved Mets.
Mays, 93, died on Tuesday.
Willie Howard Mays Jr. was born in Alabama and played most of his career in San Francisco. But after he came to New York in 1951, he soon belonged to the city and the city belonged to him. With the Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Yankees, and New York Giants, the team that brought Mays into Major League Baseball after he spent several seasons with the Birmingham Black Barons in the Negro American League, New York was baseball’s mecca. And Mays became a hardball god.
On the back of his 1956 baseball card, there are two cartoons — one depicting opposing players standing on each other’s shoulders against the outfield wall to better defend against Mays’s home run prowess. The other shows Mays diving to make one of his impossible catches and saying, “Shucks, this is easy!”
His natural effervescence — reporters anointed him as the “Say Hey Kid,” because “Say hey!” is how he greeted everyone he met — made him a favorite son of the city. There’s a famous clip of Mays, dressed in street clothes, playing stickball in Harlem with a group of Black children. He then walked to the store to buy ice cream for all of them.
What Mays represented to those children — and a lot of adults — was no less important than what he achieved at the nearby Polo Grounds, his team’s home stadium. Of course, Mays faced racism but would not let it deter or defeat him. He personified Black excellence and grace.
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In 1947, Jackie Robinson became the first Black man in the 20th century allowed to play Major League Baseball. That’s why my family was Brooklyn Dodgers fans. But it didn’t matter that Mays wore the colors of that other National League team; their love for him was boundless. My father, who saw Mays at the Polo Grounds, always said that he was the best player he ever saw.
Now that player was returning to don the uniform of a New York team for the first time since the Giants broke millions of hearts when they moved to San Francisco after the 1957 season. (When the Dodgers also went west, my family later turned their allegiance to the new team that made its home in Queens — the Mets.)
On a summer night in 1973, I finally got to see Mays play; oddly, I don’t recall much about the game, even who the Mets played or whether they won. I do remember how I felt the first time I heard Mays’s name announced as he walked to the plate. I was shaking with excitement, almost to the point of tears.
But I clearly recall my father’s beatific expression. At 41, Dad was a year younger than Mays, but I saw a glimpse of who he might have been as a young man watching Mays’s unparalleled greatness at the peak of its powers. Like the team that played there, the Polo Grounds were long gone, but my father’s memories of his days there still lived within him like a fountain of youth.
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Mays’s only full season with the Mets was mostly a farewell tour, a chance for fans, especially in New York, to see him and for him to be with them. He hit only .211 that year, but the team won the National League pennant before losing to the Oakland A’s in the World Series.
More than 30 years later, I would see Mays on a baseball field one last time. While visiting a friend in San Francisco, we bought tickets from a scalper for the Giants’ Opening Day in 2004, hoping to see Barry Bonds hit his 660th home run. And in the 5th inning he did, tying Mays’s record. When Bonds crossed home plate, one of the first to greet him was Mays, his godfather. I was more excited to see Mays than Bonds’s achievement.
In 2017, MLB named its World Series MVP award for Mays. He remains the platinum standard of what every player who crosses those white lines on the diamond should aspire to be. As the Giants and Mets have already done, all of baseball should retire Mays’s number 24. It would be a fitting and overdue tribute to the man who, more than 70 years after he joined the majors, remains unchallenged as the best baseball player ever.
Say hey, Willie. And thank you.
This is an excerpt from Outtakes, a Globe Opinion newsletter from columnist Renée Graham. Sign up to get this in your inbox a day early.
Renée Graham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her @reneeygraham.
