The Full Biography
Willie Mays. Center fielder. The Westfield, Alabama, kid they called the Say Hey Kid, who made a catch in the 1954 Series into a civic object and then spent a long life being the argument for the greatest living ballplayer — until he was no longer living.
This is his story.
The image most people still carry is a man in a Giants cap, back to home plate, over-the-shoulder, the Polo Grounds rising around him like a canyon. The date is September 29, 1954. The hitter is Vic Wertz. The ball is a World Series fact. What the still cannot show is a Negro-league teenager on the Birmingham Black Barons, two seasons lost to the Army, 660 home runs, twelve straight Gold Gloves, and a man who would die in Palo Alto at ninety-three still answering to Say Hey.
He was born Willie Howard Mays Jr. on May 6, 1931, in Westfield, Alabama, a company town near Fairfield, outside Birmingham. His father, Willie Howard Mays Sr., called Cat, played baseball in the industrial leagues and taught the boy to walk by rolling a ball at him. His mother, Annie Satterwhite, had been a sprinter and a basketball player. The household understood a body as a tool. He played for Fairfield Industrial High and, at sixteen and seventeen, for the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro American League, a kid among men on a segregated circuit that was already losing its stars to the white majors. The New York Giants signed him in 1950. He hit .477 at Minneapolis in the American Association in the spring of 1951. The parent club could not leave him there.
He debuted at the Polo Grounds on May 25, 1951, went hitless his first few games, then began to hit in a way that made the city lean forward. Leo Durocher left him in. He was National League Rookie of the Year. The Giants came from thirteen and a half games back and Bobby Thomson’s home run ended the Dodgers. Mays was on deck. The Army took most of 1952 and 1953. He served at Fort Eustis in Virginia, played service ball, and came back in 1954 as if the lost seasons had been a held breath. He won the batting title at .345, hit 41 home runs, and was the league’s Most Valuable Player. The Giants swept the Cleveland Indians in the World Series. Game 1 is the still.
The Catch is not a myth invented by a network. Wertz drove the ball into the deepest part of the Polo Grounds, 450 feet and more. Mays turned, ran, and took it over the left shoulder, then whirled and threw, the hat flying, the runner on second held. Film exists. The film does not get old. What the film cannot quite say is that the same man did versions of that play on Tuesday nights in August, in wind, in San Francisco fog, for twenty years after, and that the Gold Gloves — twelve in a row, 1957 through 1968, a record for outfielders — are the paperwork for a habit. He was not only a highlight. He was a center fielder.
The Giants moved to San Francisco for 1958. The city had to learn him. He had to learn a new park, Candlestick, a wind tunnel that stole home runs and invented slices. Seals Stadium, the first San Francisco yard, was a temporary house; Candlestick was the weather. He hit 49 in 1962, lost a three-game playoff to the Dodgers that felt like a Series, then lost a seven-game Series to the Yankees. He hit 52 in 1965 and won the MVP again, at thirty-four, a second peak the first peak had not promised. He scored from first on singles. He bunted. He stole. He played the All-Star Game as if it were a Tuesday he happened to enjoy — twenty-four selections, a record he shares with the kind of company that does not need listing. He played the basket catch, the ball dying in the glove at his belt, a flourish that was also a technique: the ball was already in the hand, the throw already started. Broadcasters called him the Say Hey Kid because he greeted the world that way when he was young and did not have every name yet. The greeting stuck after he had every name.
They throw the ball, I hit it. They hit the ball, I catch it.Willie Mays
The numbers at the end of the Giants years were already a museum. He would finish with 660 home runs, 3,293 hits, a .301 average, 338 stolen bases, 24 All-Star selections. Only a few men have ever been allowed to argue all four corners of the field at once. He is the argument. Henry Aaron passed him in the polite way of that friendship; Aaron also said Mays was the best he saw. Ted Williams, who did not waste compliments, put him in the conversation. The conversation has never closed. That is the point of it.
On May 11, 1972, the Giants traded him to the New York Mets. He was forty-one. The city that had watched him as a rookie took him back as a monument who could still, on the right afternoon, steal a game. He hit a home run in his first game as a Met. He played in the 1973 World Series against Oakland and looked, in spots, like a man the decade had finally caught. He retired after that season. The farewell at Shea was a civic apology for time. He said hello to the people and goodbye to the work in the same breath. He had already, by then, been the best player many of those people would ever see.
He married Marghuerite Wendell Chapman in 1956. They had a son, Michael. The marriage ended. In 1971 he married Mae Louise Allen, a woman who kept the private side of a public life and who died in 2013 after a long illness. He was a father, a stepfather, a man who did not tour his marriages. He worked after baseball in the Giants’ front office, in public relations, in the long American job called being Willie Mays. Gambling on golf and casinos got him into trouble with Bowie Kuhn in 1979, the same year the Hall of Fame elected him on the first ballot at 94.7 percent. Kuhn barred him from baseball jobs because he had taken a public-relations post with an Atlantic City hotel. Peter Ueberroth lifted the ban in 1985. The ban looks smaller now than the bust in Cooperstown. It did not feel small to him at the time.
I think I was the best baseball player I ever saw.Willie Mays
The turn is not The Catch. The turn is the move west and the second MVP, the decision to remain a complete player after the Polo Grounds had been demolished and the first fame had already been carved. A lot of New York monuments died when the team left. He became a San Francisco weather and then, in the Mets year, a New York weather again. He never became only a clip. He became a standard.
Six things most people never knew
- The Black Barons had him as a teenager. Birmingham, Negro American League, before the Giants’ contract. The majors got a finished center fielder, not a raw project.
- The Army took most of 1952 and 1953. Fort Eustis. Service ball. The 1954 MVP sits on a man who had already lost two summers.
- The Catch is Game 1, 1954, Vic Wertz, Polo Grounds. The throw back to the infield is the half the still sometimes crops. The Gold Gloves are the habit behind the clip.
- Candlestick did not end him. 52 home runs and a second MVP in 1965. The wind took some. He took the rest.
- The Mets brought him home in 1972. A home run in the first game. A last Series in 1973. New York got the monument and, on good days, the player.
- Cooperstown took him on the first ballot, 94.7 percent, in 1979. The same year a commissioner barred him over a casino job. The bust outlived the bar.
The later years
The decades after the last at-bat were a long ambassadorship. He kept a Giants title — special assistant, the man you brought into the clubhouse when a rookie needed to understand what the laundry meant. He stood on the field when the club opened Pacific Bell Park, then AT&T Park, then Oracle Park, a brick yard on the water that named a plaza for him and put a statue where children climb. Barry Bonds, his godson, chased the home-run records in that building while Mays watched with a face that knew the cost of a chase. He did not become a broadcaster who lived on his own film. He became a presence. You could see him in spring training, in a windbreaker, answering the same three questions as if they had not been asked since 1955. He signed, he posed, he told the truth about a pitch when a young outfielder asked. He also told the truth about money: the early Giants years had not made him rich, and the autograph tent of the 1980s and 1990s was, in part, back pay. He did not pretend otherwise.
Honors arrived as if the government had found a debt. The Presidential Medal of Freedom, from Barack Obama, in 2015. A statue. A plaza. The number 24 on a wall in San Francisco and in the Mets’ memory. He threw first pitches with a delivery that grew shorter and still drew a standing sound. Mae’s illness and death in 2013 took the companion of the long second marriage. Michael remained. Friends from the old Giants — Cepeda, McCovey, until those men too began to go — remained in the orbit. He had money enough, after the lean early contracts, from autographs and from a franchise that finally understood what it owed. He did not live as a recluse. He lived as a famous old man who still liked to talk about hitting and who would, if you were lucky, talk about something else.
He grew frail in the way ninety does. Public appearances thinned. The Giants still used the name as a blessing. When the club opened a season or a postseason, the broadcast still cut to him if he was in the building. He had outlived the Polo Grounds, Candlestick, Durocher, Sal Maglie, and most of the men who had tried to throw him out at third. He had outlived the argument about whether a man who missed two years in the Army and played in a wind tunnel could have caught Ruth or Aaron. The argument became affectionate. He remained, into his nineties, the answer a certain kind of fan gave when asked for the best they had seen with their own eyes. In 2024 the Giants and the baseball world were already preparing to honor him at the Rickwood Field game in Birmingham, a Negro-league tribute in the city where he had been a Black Baron. He died two days before that game. The tribute became a memorial. Birmingham, which had known him first, got the last public word.
He died on June 18, 2024, in Palo Alto, California. He was ninety-three. The Giants were in a season that suddenly had a funeral in it. The obituaries led with The Catch and 660 and Say Hey. The better ones remembered the Black Barons, the two lost summers, the basket catch as a craft, the 1965 MVP, the casino ban, Mae, and a plaza on the San Francisco water that children will keep climbing after the last person who saw him play is gone. The funeral was a baseball event and a Bay Area event. Twenty-four, everywhere.
Ninety-three is a long later life for a man who ran as he ran. He used the years. He did not become a bitter monument. He became a greeting. The kid who said “say hey” because he did not have the names died as the name other players used when they wanted to mean everything at once: hit, throw, run, catch, joy. That is a better ending than most monuments get. It is still an ending. The film of 1954 does not care. It keeps running.
After he was gone
The plaza kept his name. The statue kept his stride. The Hall kept the bust. Michael and the wider family kept the private house. The Giants played on, which is what he would have expected of a club. Young outfielders still get taught a route he invented by instinct. The Catch still plays on the first cool night of October, every year, whether anyone in the shot is still alive or not.
He came out of Westfield, played for the Black Barons, lost two seasons to the Army, made a World Series catch into a national object, won two MVPs twenty-two years of Gold Gloves apart, hit 660, came home to the Mets, and spent a half century being San Francisco’s living proof that the move west had been worth it. If you only remember the over-the-shoulder, you have the still. If you remember Cat Mays’s rolled ball, Birmingham, Candlestick, the second MVP, and a plaza full of children, you have him.
Portrait: New York World-Telegram and the Sun staff photographer · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons