OT: Willie Mays

[River_Dog]

I realize that this is ordinarily a topic that belongs in the OT forum but being that it's sports-related and that this section is more trafficked than OT I'd post it here.

Willie Mays passed away yesterday at the age of 93. Mays was one of my first childhood heroes. Growing up in Walla Walla in the 60's, San Francisco was the closest MLB franchise and became my favorite team. There were times in the evening where I could just barely get the Giants' radio broadcast, the AM signal fading in and out. But it was all we had. In 1965 when visiting my uncle in the bay area, my mother took us to a Giants game in SF, vs. the Cincinnati Reds, and we got to see Mays play in person, made one of his patented basket catches on a fly ball.

I found the box score of that game. It was memorable as Warren Spahn was at the end of his career and started that game, and I remembered Pete Rose hitting a home run off him in the 1st inning, so it was pretty easy to track down the box score. A check of the lineups of the two teams revealed that there was no less than 6 HOF'ers on the field that day: Mays, Spahn, Willie McCovey, and Gaylord Perry for the Giants and Tony Perez and Frank Robinson of the Reds. And that's not counting Juan Marichal, a starting pitcher for the Giants who did not play that day, and Pete Rose, the all-time leader in base hits who later received a lifetime ban and is prohibited from the HOF.

RIP Willie Mays. You gave a lot of us the thrill of our lifetimes.

[NorthHawk]

I don't remember even seeing him on TV, but his highlights (and not just 'The Catch') really show a player who could do it all at the highest level.
I heard one commentator say that even when you saw him play live and he didn't do anything special, he seemed to stand out just by the way he carried himself and made the difficult play look so easy.
That seems to be a quality the truly gifted have - making the difficult look commonplace and expected.
RIP Willie.

[River_Dog]

I don't remember even seeing him on TV, but his highlights (and not just 'The Catch') really show a player who could do it all at the highest level.
I heard one commentator say that even when you saw him play live and he didn't do anything special, he seemed to stand out just by the way he carried himself and made the difficult play look so easy.
That seems to be a quality the truly gifted have - making the difficult look commonplace and expected.
RIP Willie.

Mays excelled at all 5 attributes that make up an all-around ball player: Hit, hit with power, run, catch, and throw. One of the best documentaries on baseball that I've seen, "Baseball" by Ken Burns, an 8-part series broken out by decades and available on PBS, spent quite a bit of time on Willie Mays. If you haven't seen it, it's well worth the time for any sports fan, baseball or otherwise.

[c_hawkbob]

The Say Hey Kid was as good as they got! He and Bob Gipson anyway. RIP Willie.

[Aseahawkfan]

R.I.P. Willie Mays. Never saw him play as I was too young. He's an American icon and baseball legend.