Say Hey

As published in The County Times (countytimes.somd.com)

By Ronald N. Guy Jr.

Mornings land a little harder now.  The night’s sleep isn’t as restful as it once was.  Feet still hit the floor, thankfully, but the morning stretch is labored and always includes the pops of aging joints readjusting to walking upright.  The image in the mirror is surreal – lines keeping history, three days of facial hair that reveals more gray than brown and a head of hair that offers a similar split.  An older, wiser man once said, “That’s not gray hair, it’s earned silver.”  I’ll roll with that description, for sure.

Such are the struggles of middle-age, a time when the mind is still young and the body is decidedly…not.  I respect those who have embraced age-related realities.  I am in denial, fighting daily to keep the spirit young.  Acceptance is out there somewhere, a moment when even my most absurd psychological gymnastics make the reality of my date of birth simply undeniable.

But every now and then, I appreciate those gray hairs, my vintage, and the things and people I’ve been fortunate to see.  June 18 was one of those days.

I never saw Willie Mays play baseball.  He retired in 1973, not long after my birth.  But I met the man, ever so briefly, a long time ago.  As a child of the 1980s and 90s, I was enthralled with the sports memorabilia craze (autographs, trading cards, artifacts) and wore out a copy of Ken Burns’s “Baseball” documentary.  Baseball nostalgia was hot and Willie Mays was as relevant as any current player.

My amateur research focused on many familiar names across baseball’s rich history – Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Jackie Robinson, Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron, Roberto Clemente, Frank Robinson and Mays, just to name a few.  Ruth was baseball’s most famous star.  DiMaggio was perhaps its most regal.  Jackie Robinson its bravest.  Mantle its best overall prospect.  Gehrig and Clemente its tragic heroes.  Ted Williams was arguably the game’s greatest hitter.  Aaron was (still is?) its home run king.  But it was Mays who seemed, in my mind, the game’s greatest all-around player.  He didn’t hit as many home runs as Aaron or Ruth, his average was below Williams’s and he didn’t have Clemente’s arm.  But he was the ultimate five-tool star – elite hitting power and average, speed, fielding and throwing - before it was cool. 

Willie Mays, the “Say Hey Kid”, passed away last Tuesday at the age of 93, two days before MLB’s return to Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama, an ancient ballpark where Mays started his professional career with the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro Leagues.  It was a reminder of Mays’s humble professional beginnings, not dissimilar from just about every MLB star, and that America’s history is many things - amazing, inspiring, imperfect, troubling and shameful.

For ethically grounded lovers of the game, the steroid era and its damage to player legacies and cherished baseball records sows deep regret.  Is Roger Maris the single-season home run record holder?  Or Barry Bonds?  Or Aaron Judge?  Is Aaron still the all-time home run champion, or is it Bonds.  There’s no clear answer.  And that’s a damn shame.

That baseball was segregated for over half a century, not different from society, casts an even darker moral shadow.  Would the white stars of the segregated era have been as dominant with a full complement of baseball’s best players?  How would have the Negro Leagues’ stars fared in MLB?  And how much greater would Mays, Aaron and other early African American MLB stars have been had they not been burdened by the sport’s reluctant integration and the injustices of a segregated America?  These are just some of the sad consequences of racism. 

If anything lasting came of Mays’s passing, and the celebration of his life and the Negro Leagues at Rickwood Field, let it be that his journey sears into our minds that prejudice and inequality minimizes us all, and that our potential, as ballplayers, Americans and humans, can only be fully realized together.  That endeavor that remains, 73 years after Mays’s MLB debut, very much a work in progress.