Willie Mays was baseball, and the world was better because of it

Willie Mays existed, and the world was better because of it.

It’s impossible to overstate the cultural legacy of Mays, his footprint on American life. Books have been written, and will continue to be written, about the place and importance of baseball in American history. There’s a reason why Abner Doubleday got credit for inventing the sport of baseball, even though he very much didn’t. He was a Civil War general and a war hero, and when the war was over, a still-intact nation fell in love with baseball. Doubleday got the credit, and you can have your pick of 400 pages of psychology and mythology to explain why.

It’s in this context that a player like Mays could become one of the most recognizable and important Americans alive. Baseball was the national sport, but it was filled with scoundrels and ruffians, on the fringes until Babe Ruth arrived to capture the attention of the country. It’s not as if Mays directly followed Ruth on the timeline, but he was the next super-superstar of a medium that was wholly American, like Louis Armstrong with jazz or Edgar Allen Poe with short stories. Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby took a disproportionate amount of the abuse and attention when they blazed their trails, but that allowed Mays to become the face of a sport that was the face of a country.

Even if you were born after the advent of color TV, and even if you were born after the internet, you’ve probably seen at least one image or video of Mays playing stickball with kids in Harlem.

If that’s somehow new to you, you’ve absolutely seen a video of The Catch, his hat falling off as he spins and throws a missile to keep a Cleveland runner from scoring in the World Series, even though he was roughly six billion feet away from home plate. These aren’t just embedded into the minds of Giants fans. These are images that a lot of people recognize, regardless of whether they could explain the infield fly rule or tell you how many balls it takes for a batter to walk.

The very idea of Mays was enough to inspire artists everywhere. Musically, you can explore a legacy from The Treiners to the Wu-Tang Clan. Visually, you can talk about what it meant for Mays to appear on “The Donna Reed Show” or be the face of baseball so much that he was on the debut episode of “Home Run Derby.” He was the star of the sport, if not the country, and he understood and embraced this, even if it had to have been a much heavier burden than he ever let on.

My favorite piece of Mays Americana was the Peanuts strip where Charlie Brown loses a spelling bee because he’s asked to spell the word “maze.” It doesn’t work out. But my favorite pieces of American art — any medium — are the TV special “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and the soundtrack that Vince Guaraldi created for it. The only reason it exists is because of Willie Mays. Charles Schulz wasn’t interested in a documentary about his cartooning life, but then he learned the documentarian had worked on a Mays documentary and said, “Well maybe we should at least meet. If Willie can trust you with his life, maybe I can do the same. But I can’t promise anything.”

Willie Mays existed, and the world was better because of it.

But it was so, so much better if you were also a Giants fan.

There he was, the embodiment of baseball, wearing a Giants hat from spring training and representing your team. He was an outsized part of the American story, but he was also a very tangible part of your story. You chose to devote a large chunk of your life to Giants baseball, and so did Willie Mays, and look at that, he was the best ballplayer who ever lived. Maybe you argue with that description, well, fine, so he’s the second-best ballplayer to ever live, but also the literal godfather to the best ballplayer who ever lived, who also happened to be on the Giants. Either way, you win. Mays was there when the Giants broke ground on Oracle Park, and he was there when the Giants signed Barry Bonds, which was right when the team fully committed to San Francisco.

There’s a palm tree in the background of that shot, and there are 24 of them in front of the ballpark the Giants play at now. They don’t play at that new ballpark without Willie Mays. They’re the Toronto Blue Devils or the Tampa Manatees right now, and the city of San Francisco is figuring out how to co-opt the Oakland baseball team, like they did with the Oakland basketball team. One of the few things that kept the Giants hanging on by a thread throughout the tumultuous ’70s was the idea that this is the franchise of Willie Mays. It meant something. It was worth saving. And that’s how the greatest player in Giants history is holding a jersey with the other greatest player in Giants history, and it doesn’t matter who gets which honor. (I’m going with Mays. You choose your own path.)

If you’re a Giants fan, you get to claim the best all-around player in baseball history. That’s almost impossible to comprehend. In addition to whatever historical or sociological importance that Mays brought to the world — and there’s plenty — Giants fans get to claim Willie Mays. The people who saw him get to explain what it was like to watch him, and the people who didn’t watch him get to wonder what it was like.

It wasn’t always like that. He started his career pushing flaming busses to New York, and then he cried when he couldn’t get a hit in the majors. He was compared to Joe DiMaggio in every second of the 1958 season by hyper-regional wonks who wanted San Francisco baseball to be the best baseball. He was booed for years for no good reason, and it was an issue for him to buy a house where he wanted to. When he did so, he moved out after getting a bottle filled with racial epithets thrown through his window.

So don’t mistake his San Francisco career as a delightful romp through the green meadows of everything baseball and life have to offer. It was far more complicated. The Giants play at 24 Willie Mays Plaza for a reason, though. He was the greatest who ever played. He was a perfectly American story, for better and for, too often, worse. He existed, and the world was better because of it.

Abner Doubleday didn’t invent baseball, but here’s something you might not know: He’s the person who had one of the first patents for the San Francisco cable car. He came from New York, he became an inextricable part of San Francisco history and he was credited for the entire sport of baseball.

That all goes for Mays, too, except he might have actually invented baseball. You can’t disprove that claim. It’s true for everyone who watched him play, and it’s true for anyone who knows anything about how Willie Mays played the game. He was the greatest player in history, if not by statistical measures, than by a combination of stats, vibes and cultural footprint. He was everything that made the sport and the country great, and he’ll be missed forever.

(File photo / Associated Press)