Willie Mays, One of Baseball’s Best, Dies at 93

It's easy to make the case that Willie Mays, who died Tuesday according to an announcement from the San Francisco Giants, was the greatest all-around player in baseball history. Feared as a hitter for both power and average, blessed with a base-stealer’s speed and capable of jaw-dropping defensive plays, he was a force in the game for more than two decades.

​​Born May 6, 1931, in Westfield, Alabama, Mays joined the Birmingham Barons of the American Negro League at age 16. The formerly all-white Major League Baseball (MLB) was starting to integrate its teams at the same time, and the New York Giants bought Mays’ contract in 1950. He was in the big leagues the next year. ​

That began a long relationship between player, team and fans, even after the Giants left New York and moved to San Francisco in 1958. “If he could cook, I’d marry him,” Giants manager Leo Durocher said of Mays in 1951, when he became the National League’s rookie of the year; Mays spent 21 of his 22 big league seasons with the team.

Despite all of the accolades he received over the years, a single play may have established Mays as a legend.​

The Giants were playing the favored Cleveland Indians in the 1954 World Series. Game 1 was tied 2-2 when Vic Wertz of Cleveland came up to bat. He smashed a towering drive into the outfield of the oddly proportioned Polo Grounds, the Giants’ home field. Mays, playing center field, turned his back on home plate and took off at a dead sprint, trying to chase the ball down. ​​Most outfielders would have lost that race. In fact, in a different park, the ball would have just gone over the fence for a home run. But the deepest part of the Polo Grounds center field fence was 483 feet from home plate, and Mays made a stunning over-the-shoulder catch an estimated 450 feet from home. Almost as importantly, he somehow immediately whirled and fired the ball toward the infield, preventing a Cleveland runner from tagging up and scoring all the way from second base.

The play was so spectacular and improbable that it is still known simply as “The Catch.” The Giants went on to win the game and sweep Cleveland for the World Series title.

Willie Mays makes a leaping, one-handed catch.

Charles Hoff/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images

“Everybody said, well, it was a hard catch. ‘Naah,’ I said, ‘it was an easy catch,’ ” Mays told an interviewer.​