WWTBAM Bored

Willie Mays has passed away at age 93. This saddens me, even though he led a long and (by all accounts) full life.

He was my favorite ballplayer as a kid. I learned about The Shot Heard Round the World by reading The Baseball Life of Willie Mays when I was about 10. (Mays saw Thomson's shot from the on-deck circle.) I was at the ballpark (on the day Secretariat finished winning the Triple Crown) to see Mays hit his 655th career home run (a 3-run shot that provided the margin of victory in what I believe was a 5-3 Mets win). Leaving the ballpark after the game, I walked by a pink Cadillac with the license plate SAY HEY. I'm assuming it was his.

For many years I dreamed about running into Mays with my son (also a die-hard Mets fan) and introducing him with, "Sparky, I want you to meet the best center fielder who ever lived."

RIP, Willie, and give all the ballplayers who preceded you to your eternal home a big Say Hey. --Bob

Willie was always my brother's favorite, so for a long time we were Giants fans.

I still love The Catch and got to see it a couple times today.

"Willie Mays, a national treasure." That's absolutely right.

Mays tended to inspire great language when describing his feats. In an All Star Game in the early 1960s, he scored the only run of the game when he reached on a triple and then scored on a double play. Some said of his triple, "The only man who could have caught it, hit it."

And then there was the poetic description I heard of Mays's glove: "Where triples go to die."

I remember watching a Saturday Game of the Week involving the Giants when I was pretty young. Someone hits a deep fly to right center field. Mays in center and Bobby Bonds in right field both leap for the ball, both getting gloves well above the fence before colliding in mid-air and tumbling to the ground. Both were stunned, but Bonds recovered first and looked for the ball so he could get it back to the infield. He found it. In Willie Mays's glove. I bring up that play because I've been seeing that collision in some of the memorial highlight packages. --Bob