We celebrated Juneteenth this morning. This afternoon, a special edition of The Ewellogy. My baseball hero, Willie Mays, passed away yesterday at the age of 93.

If you walk into my downstairs office, you’ll see a framed baseball jersey signed by Willie Mays, and on the mantle next to it, a baseball signed by Willie Mays, both courtesy of my sons. Here he is making “The Catch” in Game 1 of the 1954 World Series. I was only 7 years old at the time, and we didn’t have a television, so I didn’t see it live. Only hundreds of times after.

This ESPN article has a 6:30 video tribute, both the article and the video are worth the time. Here’s the Wall Street Journal tribute. I was a center fielder with pretty good range, but I was not a good hitter like Willie was. He was what they call a 5-tool player: hit for power, hit for average, run, throw, field, except he was at or near the top in all five categories.

Most of the kids I grew up with were Yankee fans and cheered for the great Mickey Mantle. But my dad had been a minor league pitcher in the Giants system so we were always National League fans and Giants fans, and, therefore, Willie Mays fans. I modeled my game after his, right down to the basket catch. In my grandmother’s small town in West Virginia, everyone called me Willie.

Here are some snippets from the Wall Street Journal tribute by Jared Diamond and Lindsey Adler:

Willie Mays, whose powerful bat and dazzling defense made him arguably the greatest all-around player in baseball history, has died at age 93…

Many believe his broad array of talents was unmatched.

Leo Durocher, Mays’s former manager and a fellow member of the Hall of Fame, wrote in his autobiography, “Nice Guys Finish Last,” that even “if somebody came up and hit .450, stole 100 bases and performed a miracle in the field every day I’d still look you right in the eye and tell you that Willie was better.”

…He played 21 of his 22 MLB seasons with the New York and San Francisco Giants. He finished his career with 660 home runs, the third-most ever at the time of his retirement in 1973 and a total surpassed by just two others since. He won 12 Gold Glove awards for fielding, tied for the most ever for an outfielder, even though the prize didn’t exist until six years after his debut. He shares a record by appearing in 24 All-Star Games, a feat that once prompted the Hall-of-Fame outfielder Ted Williams to say, “They invented the All-Star Game for Willie Mays.” Mays accomplished all of this despite missing most of 1952 and all of 1953 to serve in the U.S. Army during the Korean War...

In 1979, Mays was quoted by Newsweek summing up what so many who saw him play believed:

I think I was the best baseball player I ever saw.

My favorite sportswriter, Jason Gay, concludes his tribute with this vignette from his 2009 interview with Willie:

When I told Mays that many people thought of him as the greatest ever, he said: “You don’t see that on TV. You don’t hear somebody saying ‘He’s the best.’ You hear it every now and then. They’ll go to basketball and say Michael is the best in basketball. And they’ve got Ali in boxing. Tiger is the best in golf. But what happened to baseball? You understand what I’m saying?”

“If I’m the best, go and tell them,” Willie Mays said. 

Consider it done. – Jason Gay, Willie Mays Will Be Forever, Wall Street Journal, June 19, 2024

I applaud excellence wherever I see it, but this one is personal.

Finally…whatever is true, whatever is noble, …whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. (Philippians 4.8, NIV)