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 not exquisite timing. Mays passed away in mid-June, age 93, two days before the San Francisco Giants faced the St. Louis Cardinals in a game organized to honor both him and the Negro Leagues. The venue was Rickwood Field in Alabama, the oldest ballpark in the country, where a 17-year-old Mays got his start with the Birmingham Black Barons. And it was at Rickwood where word spread that Mays, too ill to attend the ceremonies, had died, turning the event into a memorial as much as a celebration.
Mays played baseball with a style and grace that seemed practically mythical: his astonishing athleticism prompted the actress Tallulah Bankhead to declare him the only genius besides Shakespeare. Never before had the game produced a player with his combination of power, speed, and arm strength. He’s best remembered for The Catch: the over-the-shoulder grab in Game 1 of the 1954 World Series, in the cavernous depths of New York’s Polo Grounds. But Mays often said he had made better catches, ones that weren’t captured for posterity. It was a reminder that he straddled two distinct worlds during his playing career: one in the Negro Leagues and one in the majors. In the former, he plied his trade in relative obscurity; in the latter, his exploits were broadcast to the nation. In the gulf between the two resides a legacy that resounded far beyond the confines of center field.
A high school star born in Westfield, Alabama, Mays signed with the Black Barons on July 4, 1948. His pay: $250 a month. “He thinks he’s Joe DiMaggio, but he can’t hit a curveball none”—that was the scouting report that Mays’s father, who had played semiprofessional baseball, gave to Piper Davis, one of his former teammates and the Black Barons manager. A year earlier, Jackie Robinson had broken the color barrier in the majors, and scouts were flocking to the Negro Leagues, searching for undiscovered talent. Not that the playing field had, in one pioneering moment, been leveled. Some major league teams had unofficial quotas for Black players; some wanted to sign stars only to bury them in the minor leagues, preventing rival teams from employing their services; some, like the Boston Red Sox, resisted integration altogether. So Mays’s preternatural talent wasn’t enough—making the jump to the majors also demanded political finesse.