Willie was the last of a kind

The Say Hey Kid. (Photo courtesy of AP)

By Budd Bailey

When a sports legend dies, the tributes usually pour in. Since Willie Mays seemed to be bigger than life at times, the reaction was particularly strong.

You know all about him at this point. He played from 1951 to 1973, and there was practically nothing that he couldn’t do on a baseball field. The phrase “five-tool player” was invented for him. He could hit, hit for power, run, throw and field. Do that for a couple of decades, and you are an all-time great.

It’s been argued that Mays is more than that. He has been called the greatest player of all-time. And, those people have a very good case. Mays might have broken Babe Ruth’s record for home runs in a career had he not spent almost two seasons in the armed forces.

Willie was a great player until he was 35, and a very good one until he was 40. First-ballot Hall of Famer, twice an MVP, 24 All-Star Games (they played two a year for a while), 12 Gold Gloves … well, you get the idea. If you put a gun to my head and asked if the best ever was Mays or Henry Aaron, I’d probably gulp and say Mays. There’s probably no wrong answer there.

Still, the depth of the reaction to Mays’ death has been strong and deep by any standard. Part of that comes from the idea that baseball was unquestionably the nation’s favorite sport when Willie was at his peak in the 1950s. The sport attracted the best athletes then, and integration opened the doors to everyone. For Mays, Aaron and Mickey Mantle to dominate like they did in a Golden Era says a great deal about them.

Part of the reaction comes from the idea that most people never had the chance to see Mays in person in one form or another. Television was just getting started in the 1950s, and few games outside of the World Series were available to the public. So we had to rely on others’ opinions, mostly through newspapers and magazines. That fact, as Bob Costas pointed out this week, helped give him a somewhat mythical quality.

I think there’s something else along those lines concerning Mays’ exit, and it has to do with the so-called Baby Boomers. Those born in the Fifties, and there were a lot of them, started to become attracted to baseball somewhere around the age of five to eight. A parent or some other figure usually made that initial introduction to a sport, and they were the ones who taught the kids about the game. They also pointed out the best players, who deserved to be studied up close by the kid.

For those children, someone like Willie Mays was always a superstar. It was a given. It didn’t matter when he came into the league; it was before he or she was born. The important part was that Lesson One was Mays and the others carried that “romance” between players and young fan. If a particular sport caught on with the child, he or she would carry those warm feelings around forever.

So when a Willie Mays dies, it breaks a link between two people that stretches all the way back to when the fan first gained a “baseball conscience,” if that makes any sense. You never forget your First Love, and it’s tough to say good-bye.

Let’s go back to 1960, when I turned five. Players such as Willie Mays, Aaron, Roberto Clemente, Ernie Banks, Stan Musial, Ted Williams, Brooks Robinson, Mantle, and Al Kaline played in the All-Star Game that year. They all are gone. You probably can draw similar conclusions about players in other sports. Wilt Chamberlain, Johnny Unitas, Bill Russell, Gordie Howe and Bobby Hull have left the stage. We lost Jim Brown about a year ago, and we lost Jerry West earlier this month.

The number of superstars from that era who are still around is small. Bob Cousy and Oscar Robertson probably qualify from basketball. However, pro basketball was an infant in its lifespan compared to major league baseball at that point. Baseball players like Sandy Koufax and Carl Yastrzemski were around in 1961, but they weren’t close to ranking as stars yet. Willie might have been the last baseball superstar from that era.

In other words, not only was Mays one of a kind, but he was the last of his kind.

While Mays and Company are missed, one of the best parts of following a sport is that new stars come along regularly. We see Mays leave, but we celebrate the play of someone like Mookie Betts – who has many of the personal and professional qualities that make Willie stand out.

The wheel keeps on turning … happily. While remembering the past, we can’t wait to see the future.

(Follow Budd on X.com via @WDX2BB)