The “Say Hey Kid” and all-time greatest Giant Willie Mays passed away Tuesday at the age of 93, leaving a legacy of 24 All-Star appearances, countless broken racial barriers, and a statue at the SF ballpark by which he will always be remembered.

The name and memory of Willie Mays will forever be on the minds of San Francisco Giants fans, as they are greeted by his nine-foot statue when they arrive at Giants games at 24 Willie Mays Plaza. Mays revolutionized the game of baseball with his bat and quick-footed fielding prowess in a pro baseball career that spanned 25 years on the field, earning Mays 24 All-Star Game appearances, 12 Golden Glove awards, and the retired jersey No. 24.

But the statue of Willie Mays outside Oracle Park is now a shrine of flowers and remembrances, as the Chronicle reports Mays died Tuesday at an assisted living facility in Palo Alto. He was 93.

As the New York Times points out, Mays was, until Tuesday, the “oldest living member of the Baseball Hall of Fame.”

Mays is largely remembered for what is considered the greatest baseball catch of all time, in what is known (with apologies to Dwight Clark) as “The Catch.” In the 1954 World Series, when the team was still the New York Giants, Mays made an over-the-shoulder catch of a deep ball by Cleveland’s Vic Wertz, then threw an absolute rocket that assured the two runners on base would not score.

“I knew I’d get it. It was high enough where I could catch it,” Mays told the Chronicle in a 75th birthday interview. “That wasn’t the problem. The hardest thing was getting it back to the infield. I knew Larry [Doby] would score if I didn’t get the ball back quickly. I scored lots of times from second base on a deep fly that was caught.”

The Giants swept the Cleveland Indians to win the title in that series, the only championship of Mays’s career.

As KTVU reminds us, Mays’s passing came just two days before the Giants are to play Thursday at Mays’s hometown field, Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama. Mays had planned to attend, but his health issues interfered. The game is a tribute to the Negro Leagues of the 1930s and 1940s, wherein Mays played for the Birmingham Black Barons at the age of 17 on that very Rickwood Field. Once he graduated from high school, Mays was signed by the New York Mets.

Mays would continue to break barriers with the Giants, a member of the first-ever all-Black outfield ever fielded in the 1951 World Series. His career was then interrupted for two years when he was drafted into the Korean War, though he returned to win that 1954 championship, and the Giants relocated to San Francisco in 1958.


Mays was not well-liked by San Francisco at first. He played the same position in the same stadium as had Martinez native Joe DiMaggio for the minor league San Francisco Seals, and DiMaggio was the local legend of the time. Mays and his wife Marghuerite were also rejected from their bid to buy a house in the St. Francis Wood neighborhood, because both were Black. (The seller reversed that decision amidst a media uproar.)

Fans would come to love Mays. In 1963, the SF Giants signed Mays to the richest-ever baseball contract at the time. That contract paid him $105,000 per season.

KTVU details that Mays “remains the franchise leader in games played (2,857), at-bats (10,477), runs (2,011), hits (3,187), doubles (504), home runs (646), total bases (5,907) and extra-base hits (1,289).”


Mays joined the Giants’ front office in 1986, and remained a consultant to the team for the rest of his life. The World Series MVP award was named in Mays’s honor in 2017. He is survived by his godson, a fellow you may have heard of named Barry Bonds.

Related: HBO Drops Trailer for Willie Mays Documentary, Premiering November 8 [SFist]

Image: 1955- Willie Mays of the New York Giants. Waist-up photograph with hands on his hips. (Getty Images)