COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — When a ballplayer is inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, we often write that he has become an immortal.
When it comes to Willie Mays, this almost seems inadequate. Whether you’re talking about his statistical record, his joy on the field, the impact he had off the field and the young people he influenced, or simply the immense scope of his long, celebrated life, there is no one adjective that can capture it all.
“You’re talking about one of the best players that ever played the game,” fellow Hall of Famer David Ortiz said Sunday. “And he did it in some really tough times.”
As to that scope and how it relates to the Hall of Fame, think of it like this: The Hall’s first class was selected in 1936, and the museum opened at its current location three years later. Willie Mays was born on May 6, 1931, and died just over a month ago on June 18.
Sunday marked the first time in the Hall of Fame’s history that an induction ceremony was held without Willie Mays out there someplace, walking among us. Mays would talk about first picking up the game of baseball from his father when he was 5 years old, charting a path that led him to becoming perhaps the best player who ever lived. That would have been 1936, the year of the Hall’s inception.
Mays arguably became the greatest living Hall of Famer on the day he was inducted in 1979, giving him a reign of around 45 years. That’s a lifetime, fitting for someone whose lifespan overlapped with 250 of the 273 players so far enshrined.
The lineage of this honorary title makes for a short list. One version might start with Babe Ruth, with the title passing to Ty Cobb when Ruth died, then to someone like Lefty Grove until Ted Williams was inducted and, finally, Mays, who held it until last month.
Now, there is no clear-cut answer to that question. The throne is empty. The only thing we know for sure is that whoever ends up with the title will be no Willie Mays, because there simply cannot be another one.
“Willie Mays, man,” Ortiz said. “He was one of those guys that every single baseball player knows about.”
INDUCTION WEEKEND IN Cooperstown is about saying hello, not goodbye. The Hall of Famers who have died in the past year are recognized each year in a memorial video during the ceremony, but the occasion is still all about the Hall’s newest members. So this year was about Joe Mauer, Adrian Beltre, Jim Leyland and Todd Helton.
Pretty much every new Hall of Famer describes the experience as a whirlwind. That’s the period of a few months when you go from the initial phone call that informs you you’ve received the game’s highest honor to the day you stand on the stage at the Clark Sports Center to deliver a once-in-a-lifetime speech. It can be overwhelming.
One thing inductees all look forward to is connecting to their new Hall of Fame friends, members of a community of which less than 1% of players ever get to join. These connections are the theme of the “Generations of the Game” movie they show in the theater at the Hall. Mays talks about wanting to follow Jackie Robinson. Ken Griffey Jr. talks about wanting to play like Mays.
Those connections cover the long expanse of baseball history, the very thing the Hall exists to commemorate. Helton talked of worshiping Mike Schmidt as a kid. As of Saturday afternoon in Cooperstown, he had never met him. After Sunday, they are on the same team. During his speech on Sunday, Helton described watching a tape of Rod Carew dispensing hitting advice on “The Baseball Bunch” over and over as a child. Carew was sitting behind him, listening.
Mauer, at 40, is now the Hall’s youngest member and the first Hall of Famer born in the 1980s, entering the world about 10 years after Mays’ playing days ended. Mays had been the oldest living member, a torch now passed to Luis Aparicio.
“I was a huge Kirby Puckett fan, Kent Hrbek,” said Mauer, who was born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota. “Then the Orioles came to town with Cal Ripken Jr. and those types of guys. You get excited playing the game and try to emulate them at home and in the backyard.”
Adrian Beltre said that one of his first orders of business the first time he visited the Hall was to seek out the plaque of Juan Marichal, the first Dominican Hall of Famer, a group that has grown to five with Beltre’s election. Behind him on the stage were Marichal and fellow countrymen Ortiz and Vladimir Guerrero Jr.
The last Dominican selected before Beltre was Ortiz, his teammate for one year in Boston and now his teammate forever in Cooperstown. Around the time that baseball celebrated Mays’ life during June’s historic game between the San Francisco Giants and St. Louis Cardinals at Rickwood Field in Mays’ hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, Ortiz floated the idea of renaming the All-Star Game after No. 24.
“I made that up,” Ortiz said, shrugging. “And it sounds really good. I guess some people saw the idea about ‘The Willie Mays Show.’ Why not?”
OK, maybe Ortiz didn’t give a lot of forethought to the proposal, and even the most ardent Mays booster would have to admit that since he has the World Series MVP trophy named after him, that perhaps adding the Midsummer Classic would be a bit of overkill. But you get where Ortiz is coming from.
Everyone in the Hall has a connection to Mays, whether they knew him in person or as a legend. The continuum is what makes baseball so unique, if only because its tentacles stretch so far back in time and into virtually every corner of the hemisphere.
“Baseball is America’s game,” Mauer said. “It’s part of our history — those guys paved the way. It’s kind of how when you get to the big leagues, you have those big brothers and they pass things along to you.”
IN MAY, THE Hall of Fame held a reprise of the old East-West All-Star Game from the Negro Leagues in a contest held at Doubleday Field. The event coincided with the unveiling of the museum’s new exhibit on the history of Black baseball: “The Souls of the Game: Voices of Black Baseball.”
“It tells the stories of those who lived it,” Ozzie Smith said at the time. Smith has long been involved with the museum’s educational outreach initiatives, especially as they relate to telling the too-long-ignored history of Black baseball.
When you enter the exhibit, you encounter a placard that makes one of its essential points: Black Americans were playing baseball all along. Mays very much came out of that tradition.
Mays’ father, Catt, was a Pullman porter and steel mill worker, but he was also a fine ballplayer who played in competitive industrial leagues. Willie played in some of those games.
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In addition to playing high school baseball, Mays played pro ball as a high schooler, getting his start for the Birmingham Black Barons in 1948. He was in the minors in Trenton, New Jersey, and Minneapolis. He played winter ball in Puerto Rico and, for a time, shared an outfield with Roberto Clemente on the Santurce Crabbers. (A bat boy for that team was a very young Orlando Cepeda.)
Mays also played lots of baseball while he was serving in the Army during the early 1950s and played in the Polo Grounds — both as a Negro Leaguer and, of course, during his first years in the National League for the Giants.
He barnstormed after the season, traipsing around the country and beyond, and did so into the 1960s, when he was one of the most famous athletes in the world. He played in Japan on an exhibition tour, for the Giants on both coasts. He did all of this from the time big league baseball was segregated all the way to the dawn of the designated hitter.
“I don’t think I would survive in an era like that,” Ortiz said. “Because I’m the type of guy, I like to be friendly to everybody. I like to connect with people. But I also don’t know how to handle somebody being mean to me, you know? He did handle it.”
The scope of it all is dizzying. Mays played and starred everywhere, influenced and thrilled legions. All of those travels and all of those events led him to Cooperstown.
During the first years after Mays was elected, he was an infrequent returnee for inductions. Around 1999, he became a fixture, showing up nearly every year until the last time, which according to the roll call on the Hall’s web site was in 2012. All told, he attended Cooperstown inductions 16 times, including his own.
When Mays was introduced in 2012, he received the raucous cheers you’d expect, and waved his hat in appreciation. By that time, Mays was 81 years old, but still, you could not know it would be the last time fans were able to shower him with such adulation in Cooperstown.
Inside the museum, there are many Mays relics to be found, the most prominent being the glove he was wearing when he made The Catch in the 1954 World Series. The glove is on loan from the family of the child to whom Mays gave it decades ago. He was always doing things like that, little personal acts of generosity out of the public eye.
There’s a montage of Giants photos, one depicting Mays with fellow Hall of Famer and former roommate Monte Irvin. There’s another of him horsing around with Leo Durocher, who he always cited as a father figure. There’s the ball Mays hit for career homer No. 535, lifting him past Jimmie Foxx on the all-time list.
“The one thing I always remembered about Willie Mays, you could see the passion that he had and the fun that he had playing the game,” Leyland said. “Now, it was a little more fun for Willie Mays to play the game than it was for me, you know? But Willie played the game like a kid.”
WITH MAYS’ DEATH so recent, it was easy to think that perhaps his shadow would hang over the weekend. Not in a sorrowful way, but more in a celebratory way, as everyone realized afresh everything he was on and off the field. A joyous shadow, if there can be such a thing.
The reality is that the induction is about the new, not the old. The fans who invade Cooperstown each July for the occasion are, in large part, a product of those being enshrined. This week, the heaviest presence was from the Twin Cities, as those supporting Joe Mauer were out in force.
It was a banner weekend for the solid contingent of Rangers fans. Not only were they there to honor Beltre, who opted for a Texas hat on his plaque, but the display in the museum recognizing the most recent World Series champions is still on display. Even better: The championship trophy itself was on display for Hall visitors.
Colorado fans were on hand for Helton. Detroit Tigers and Pittsburgh Pirates fans cheered for Jim Leyland. (His Colorado days weren’t his best.) And there were more than a few fans from the Dominican, relishing in the growing population of their heroes in the Hall.
It simply was not Willie Mays’ weekend, though there were a handful of fans spotted wearing Mays jerseys. A couple of the bookstores featured Mays-related literature in their windows.
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Before the speeches started on Sunday, the Hall’s chairman of the board, Jane Forbes Clark, recognized the four Hall of Famers who have died since the previous year’s ceremony: Mays, Brooks Robinson, Cepeda and Whitey Herzog. One by one, she summarized the amazing lives of these legends. Robinson, who for years served the Hall’s board of directors, was saved for last, right after Mays.
When Clark finished, there was a polite round of applause for Mays, nothing particularly distinct from the similar ovations given to the others. Perhaps that’s the way it had to be, no time to single out anyone.
That left it to each person on hand, if they chose, to think about and remember Mays on their own. You’d like to think he’d appreciate the displays of private gratitude over any kind of a public furor. It was his way.
Still, you can imagine Mays somehow being around, perhaps stealing some alone time on one of the benches overlooking Otsego Lake, its waters glimmering on a pleasant summer afternoon, surrounded by tree-clotted hills of forest green that form that distinctive pristine and undisturbed setting.
Maybe in that moment, away from the hubbub, he would have thought back through it all, from the early days at Rickwood Field to the cold nights at Candlestick Park to the final playing days at Shea Stadium. But more than anything, maybe he would remember the splendors of his youth, those years that lit up an entire sport and helped open so many doors.
Perhaps that’s the best way to honor Mays: for each person who visits Cooperstown to take a moment to venture down to those waters upon which Mays once looked when he visited.
Instead of a lake, imagine a field, the vast expanses of the horseshoe-shaped center field of the old Polo Grounds, and a young Willie Mays covering every acre in a way no one had done before and might never do again.