CHICAGO — San Francisco Giants ace Logan Webb was walking up the steps in the visiting dugout in the sixth inning Tuesday night when the Chicago Cubs announced the passing of Willie Mays to the near-sellout crowd at Wrigley Field.
Webb’s manager, Bob Melvin, had heard the news just prior to the first pitch. There was no time to make an announcement to the team. But word had filtered through the Giants dugout. Many players knew. Most of the coaching staff knew. Webb did not. His mind had been sequestered into a pitching duel against the Cubs’ Justin Steele.
Before Webb could throw a pitch in the sixth inning, he had to process the news that the Giants had lost their icon of icons, the 93-year-old man widely regarded as the greatest all-around player in baseball history, the legendary player that Webb first met as a newly drafted 17-year-old reporting to his first instructional league, and as fate would have it, the treasured figure that the Giants have spent nearly a year planning to celebrate on Thursday, when they oppose the St. Louis Cardinals at Rickwood Field, where a teenaged Mays once played for the Birmingham Black Barons.
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In the moment, though, Webb had a game to pitch. And he could not take his eyes off the image of Mays on the Wrigley Field scoreboard.
“I took my hat off and I was looking at the scoreboard and just thinking about him,” Webb said. “I looked at the umpire and I was like, ‘I think you need to stop the clock.’ I needed to take a moment to think about it and be prideful for the jersey I was wearing, the hat I was wearing, knowing Willie did the same.”
It is with great sadness that we announce that San Francisco Giants Legend and Hall of Famer Willie Mays passed away peacefully this afternoon at the age of 93. pic.twitter.com/Qk4NySCFZQ
— SFGiants (@SFGiants) June 19, 2024
The news of Mays’ passing hit hardest for Melvin and fellow members of his staff, including pitching coach Bryan Price who grew up in the Bay Area watching No. 24 patrol center field at Candlestick Park. As reporters filed into Melvin’s office Tuesday night, the manager fielded just one question about the Giants’ 5-2 loss. It was difficult for anyone to ask about a game that got away in the eighth inning. Another loss resonated so much deeper.
Memories?
“I have so many we’d be here for a long time,” Melvin said. “I grew up watching games at Candlestick Park and loved baseball because of Willie Mays. He meant that much.”
Melvin, who grew up in Menlo Park, would park his bike on Middlefield Road with his grade-school buddies. They would wait for Mays to tootle past in his pink Cadillac and wave furiously at him. If he waved back, their day was made. Maybe their week or their month, too. So when the Giants hired Melvin to manage in October of last year, only one thing rivaled the thrill of putting on a San Francisco jersey again: connecting with Mays on the phone and knowing that the Say Hey Kid, who was never very good with names, knew exactly who he was.
“The fact he even remembers me is an honor,” Melvin said. “We talked about my career and how happy he was to have me here again. He knew I played before. It was just an honor to talk to him.”
Price, who grew up in Marin County, was a coach with the Cincinnati Reds on Dusty Baker’s staff when Mays happened to stroll into town one day. Baker knew that the Giants were the team of Price’s youth and that he idolized Mays. So he arranged a surprise meeting in the manager’s office. Price’s gaze softened into the middle distance Tuesday night as he recalled shaking Mays’ hand and taking a picture with him.
“It’s framed in our house,” Price said. “These are the moments you never forget, to be around someone you grew up admiring. He’s the type of player you could never use as a role model to say, ‘Hey, I’m going to be the next Willie Mays.’ Because you already knew that no one would ever reach that level — an unattainable level of play and ambassadorship for the game and love and spirit of baseball.
“Nobody connects the Bay Area to baseball more than Willie Mays.”
Dave Flemming was in the visitors’ radio booth at Wrigley Field the moment the report of Willie Mays’ passing was made public.
Here’s what it sounded like on our airwaves as he passed on the news to Giants fans everywhere. pic.twitter.com/pf5lK921z9
— KNBR (@KNBR) June 19, 2024
Mays became an infrequent visitor to the Giants clubhouse after the pandemic-shortened 2020 season and it had become understood around the team over the past year that he had grown too frail to make public appearances. But when Mays was in better health, he was a constant presence at the Giants’ waterfront ballpark — an edifice that has a mailing address of 24 Willie Mays Plaza. Mays would sit in emeritus clubhouse manager Mike Murphy’s office and trade stories with whoever would wander into the room.
His eyesight went years ago but his tongue remained as sharp as ever.
Mays’ annual visits to spring training in Scottsdale, Ariz., were celebrated events each year. He’d sit at the same round card table every day in the clubhouse, telling stories and signing autographs. (He’d even sign the table.) He had a special fondness for the young outfielders in camp. And the Giants made sure every new crop of prospects and draftees got to listen to the man who epitomized what it meant to put on their uniform.
“It’s like being a little kid listening to these guys and their stories,” Webb said. “And I can tell you, Willie had the best stories.”
If you were a young player or even a young reporter, you only needed to approach Mays to engage him. But I never took a picture with him or tried to insert myself into his conversations. I wasn’t his contemporary. It never seemed appropriate for me to crowd into his space. However, I do have fond memories of engaging with him whenever he’d call out to us in the clubhouse. “Hey writer!” he’d shout out (which was his name for all of us). He was endlessly curious about our per diem on the road (“What? You can’t buy a hamburger with that!”) or what kind of rental car we were driving that spring (“Mazda? They gave you a Mazda? That won’t take you across the street!”).
I always got the sense that Mays never forgot how others had profited off his name when he was younger. So he was guarded whenever someone wanted something. Yet when he sensed that someone’s intentions were pure, he was unfailingly generous. The ultimate example might have been part of a retrospective that Grant Brisbee wrote on Mays’ 90th birthday: One time, after throwing out a ceremonial first pitch, former Giants left-hander Kirk Rueter expressed his fondness for Mays’ black boots. So Mays took them off, insisted that Rueter take them, and walked to his car in shower shoes. He gave Rueter the shirt he was wearing, too.
It wasn’t the last time that Mays literally gave someone the shirt off his back. At the 2007 All-Star Game in San Francisco, the Giants paid tribute to Mays and had him walk from center field escorted by Barry Bonds, Derek Jeter and Ken Griffey Jr. Mays threw a first pitch (tossing it to José Reyes from center field) and started peeling off layers of clothing. He gave his All-Star jacket to Griffey. He gave his jersey to Jeter. He signed the ball for Reyes. The greatest living ballplayer, the man who represented baseball royalty in San Francisco and beyond, thought nothing of stripping down to his undershirt in front of 40,000 fans as he climbed into a Cadillac and started flipping signed baseballs into the stands.
I did get to interview Mays for a couple of magazine articles over the years, including one story about the Giants’ 500-home run club. I informed him that he hit No. 500 off a Houston pitcher named Don Nottebart. In his high-pitched voice, Mays protested.
“Nottebart?” he said. “Nah, I couldn’t hit him.”
Mays was remembering his 512th home run, which he hit off the Dodgers’ Claude Osteen on May 4, 1966, and was a much bigger deal at the time. It broke the National League record previously held by another franchise icon, New York Giants Hall of Famer Mel Ott. Mays was mobbed by his teammates at Candlestick Park that night and received a standing ovation — something that did not come easily in the early days of the franchise’s West Coast era, when San Francisco fans were quicker to gravitate to players like Orlando Cepeda and Willie McCovey who did not have a connection to the team’s New York past.
In his later years, Mays shrewdly bridged the gap between the two eras and coasts by wearing a black hat with the Giants’ orange script G logo. But he also made the Bay Area his home for the rest of his life.
“I’ll always be part of San Francisco,” Mays said the night he broke Ott’s record. “And San Francisco will always be part of me.”
Mays’ No. 24 might be retired but not his position. Someone has to play center field for the Giants and it was Heliot Ramos who drew the assignment Tuesday night. Ramos is having a breakout season and might even become the first homegrown outfielder in a generation to represent the team in the All-Star Game next month.
Since 2021, Ramos hadn’t played much center field before the Giants tried him there to replace injured Opening Day starter Jung Hoo Lee. On the day Melvin wrote Ramos’ name into the lineup as the center fielder for the first time, the manager made a playful comment.
“Bob told me, ‘OK, today you’re Willie Mays,’” Ramos said. “I never expected him to say that. I’m not even close to Willie Mays. He’s playing around, you know? But the fact he said that was insane to me. Willie Mays is amazing. I never imagined I could meet him. It was a blessing and a privilege. You just don’t expect people like that to pass away.”
Mays had a special relationship with outfielder Mike Yastrzemski, whose Hall of Fame grandfather, Carl, only crossed paths with the Giants’ legend in All-Star Games (Mays appeared in 24 of them, Captain Carl appeared in 18) but were contemporaries over a wide and especially rich span of the game’s history.
“He lived a great life and I was fortunate enough to meet him and have some great conversations with him,” Mike Yastrzemski said. “I’m just praying for his family and everybody that had a relationship with him. It’s a tough pill to swallow but it’s a life to be celebrated, that’s for sure.”
Mike Yastrzemski said he most cherishes a comment that Mays made to him shortly after he debuted in the major leagues in 2019: “Him telling me that I had no business being in right field, that I should have been playing center field when I first got called up. It was pretty funny. He told me he couldn’t see much of the game but he could see that. It’s pretty cool. It’s about as good a compliment as you can get.
“The things he did we’ll never see again,” Yastrzemski said. “I truly believe that. He was such a talented player and he played the game as purely as anybody could. I’m glad it’s on film because it’s something that will be watched and studied for the rest of time.”
As dramatic as the timing of Mays’ passing was Tuesday night, coming just two days before the Giants play on the 114-year-old field where Mays started his professional career, there was a certain poetry to the Giants receiving the news during the middle of a game at Wrigley Field — one of just two current major-league venues, along with Dodger Stadium, where Mays electrified crowds and dashed around the bases during the regular season (he played at the Oakland Coliseum in the 1973 World Series and at Fenway Park for the 1961 All-Star Game).
Mays played 179 games at Wrigley Field, more than any venue other than Candlestick Park and New York’s Polo Grounds. A peek at those 179 games is a study in Mays’ all-around greatness. He hit .342 with a .413 on-base percentage here. His 54 home runs at Wrigley Field still stand, post-steroid era and all, as the record for the most by a visiting player.
Exactly 73 years ago on Saturday, Mays played his first game at Wrigley Field. He was a 20-year-old rookie batting seventh (can you imagine?) in the Giants lineup that day. Fellow future Hall of Famer Monte Irvin batted eighth. The game went to the 10th inning when Mays hit a three-run home run off aging knuckleballer Dutch Leonard and led the Giants to a 9-6 victory.
It was the fifth home run out of 660 that Mays would hit in his MLB career. It was also the first of a major-league record 22 extra-inning home runs — Jack Clark is closest to Mays with 18 — that he would hit in a professional life that spanned a quarter-century and more than 3,000 games. Mays is the only player in major-league history who has homered in every inning from the first through the 16th.
Many legends tap into greatness when it matters most. Nobody ever said that about Mays. He was merely great all the time.
And if Mays hadn’t hit that extra-inning home run 74 years ago on Saturday? Well, perhaps Bobby Thomson never gets an opportunity to hit the “Shot Heard ‘Round the World.” The Giants needed every victory in that 1951 season to force a playoff with the Dodgers for the pennant.
Now the Giants will wrap up a rubber game at Wrigley Field on Wednesday and fly to Alabama for a game that will matter in the standings — and mean so much more than that. The organization had known for some time that Mays would not be able to attend the game. But Melvin knew what it would mean to Mays to be able to watch the broadcast from home.
“Going to Birmingham to play on a field where he played, I think everyone was incentivized (knowing) he’d watch and be a part of that as much as he can,” Melvin said. “Heavy hearts not only for the Bay Area and New York where he started, but for the baseball world. This is one of the true icons of the game.”
Perhaps the best measure of Mays’ greatness is that a 93-year-old man who hasn’t made a public appearance in more than a year can pass away and the news still comes as a shock — not only to those who watched him play but who came a generation or two later. Up in the Wrigley Field press box, a club official born a decade after Mays played his last major-league game prepared the news release that would go out to the world. His eyes were swollen as he held back tears.
“He couldn’t be there for the Rickwood game,” the club official said. “Now he can.”
(Photo of the Wrigley Field announcement of Mays’ passing: Nuccio DiNuzzo / Getty Images)
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