The passing of Willie Mays, who is widely and correctly viewed as the best post-integration player in major league history, is being marked across the baseball world. And, as Abraham Lincoln said in the Gettysburg Address, it is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
Joe Posnanski wrote a lovely piece, as usual. As did Ray Ratto, and Daniel Brown. They’re all fabulous, and I encourage you to read them and any more celebrations of Mays that you can find.
These tributes all involve a review of Willie Mays as a player, and as a person, and as a cultural icon. Ratto equated Mays to baseball itself, a notion he likely borrowed from Posnanski’s conclusion about Mays at the end of The Baseball 100, in which he named Mays the best player ever.
“What do you love most about baseball? Mays did that. To watch him play, to read the stories about how he played, to look at his glorious statistics, to hear what people say about him is to be reminded why we love this odd and ancient game in the first place.
Yes, Willie Mays has always made kids feel like grown-ups and grown-ups feel like kids.
In the end, isn’t that the whole point of baseball?”
I can’t top that, and won’t try. What I want to do is something a bit different.
I want to talk about what we missed.
When Mays was seventeen years old, baseball, like much of America, was still segregated for all practical purposes. It wasn’t formally segregated anymore, as Jackie Robinson had finally broken down the color barrier in the traditionally White major league just the year before, but in practice the sport wouldn’t be truly integrated for several more years. Young Black players weren’t being scouted much by major league teams, which is why the likes of Henry Aaron and Ernie Banks, among others, still had to get their professional starts in the Negro Leagues long after Major League Baseball was formally integrated.
That’s why Mays’ first taste of major league ball came for the Birmingham Black Barons in 1948 instead of for the Giants, or the Cardinals, or any other team in the big leagues. He played just 13 games with them while he was still in high school, and batted .233/.313/.326. His OPS+ was just 71, well below league average, but his skills were apparent to anyone who saw him.
Even that modest output was remarkable for someone his age. Since 1900, only four players played as many games at the age of seventeen as Willie Mays and managed a better OPS+ mark.
Curt Roberts had a 149 OPS+ in 19 games for the Kansas City Monarchs in 1947. He would eventually play parts of three seasons for the Pirates, but was a star at the Triple A level for many years, leaving us to wonder if he was given a fair big league shot.
Hank Thompson had a 144 OPS+, also for the Monarchs, in 40 games as a seventeen-year old in 1943. He of course had a wonderful major league career that included eight seasons with the Giants in which he had a combined 119 OPS+.
Mel Ott played 35 games and had a 120 OPS+ for the Giants in 1926, and would go on to a 22-year Hall of Fame career in which he never appeared in a single minor league game.
Jim “Junior” Gilliam had a 119 OPS+ in 21 games for the Baltimore Elite Giants in 1946, and eventually became Rookie of the Year, a four-time All-Star, and a four-time World Series winner in fourteen seasons as a multi-positional star for the Dodgers.
These numbers were all achieved in pretty small samples, and in each case the players struggled a bit in comparison the following year. (Or missed it entirely in the case of Thompson, who left for service in the Army during World War II.) That’s not really the point.
The point is not that they were immediate stars, but that all of them went on to have long, excellent careers that their debuts at seventeen made possible. You simply can’t play major league baseball that well at the age of seventeen and be anything but an excellent player. And, with the obvious exception of Thompson’s World War II service, all of them remained big leaguers at eighteen and beyond.
Given the history of other players at that age, there’s no chance that Willie Mays would have been denied a major league roster spot at the age of eighteen if he had been White or had the major leagues been truly integrated. Had he performed the way he did as a seventeen-year old for the Giants instead of for the Black Barons, or in 2018 instead of 1948, he’d have been playing in the big leagues in New York in 1949, just like Ott was still there when he was eighteen, and Roberts was still in Kansas City at eighteen, and Gilliam was still in Baltimore at eighteen.
Instead, Mays was still in Birmingham, which wasn’t a major league team in 1949, or in 1950 when Mays was still there to start the season.* Instead of getting into 82 major league games and hitting .282, like Ott did in 1927, Mays played 75 games for the Black Barons and hit .311. And the next year, instead of getting into 124 games with the Giants and hitting .322, as Ott did when he was nineteen, Mays started the year by hitting .330 for Birmingham again before finally being signed by the Giants. And instead of being put directly onto the major league roster in New York, as Ott was during his teenage years, Mays was shipped to Trenton of the Interstate League, where he preposterously dominated much older players for the rest of the season with a .353/.438/.510 batting line.
(*Note: If Major League Baseball follows the suggestion of SABR, Mays’ time with the Black Barons in 1949 and 1950 may someday be added to his official record. Birmingham was part of the Negro American League in those years, and the entire league was recently recommended for recognition as a major league.)
Had baseball been truly integrated in the late 1940s, there’s little doubt that Mays would have been on the Giants’ roster in those years. And, given how they had successfully handled the teenaged Ott a couple of decades earlier, there’s every reason to believe he would have been given gradually increased playing time instead of being farmed out to Class-B ball that was clearly beneath his skills. The underestimation of his skills continued into 1951 as well, when Mays started the year in Minneapolis and humiliated pitchers in that entire league to the tune of a .477/.524/.799 batting line before the Giants finally recognized the obvious and called him up for good.
What did that latent racism cost Mays, and, by extension, cost us as baseball fans? We really have no way of knowing. Maybe he wouldn’t have played more than a handful of major league games in 1949, or 1950, or maybe he’d have injured himself, or not been mature enough to handle New York as a teenager. I’m not going to pretend to know.
But if he’d been treated in the same way Ott was, and managed to handle the pressure and stay healthy, he likely would have played another 200 to 250 major league games in those seasons, plus the early part of 1951 as well. And, given how he hit at Birmingham, and in the minors, and with New York once he finally arrived there, there’s every reason to believe he’d have been pretty successful in those games. He was still developing physically, so his power numbers likely wouldn’t have been close to prime Mays performance, but would his actual rookie-level performance from 1951 been a good approximation of what he could have done in 1949 and 1950? Yeah, probably so, but maybe with a bit less pop in his bat.
Mays hit .274/.356/.472 for the Giants in 1951. Let’s say he’d hit something like .265/.330/.430 as a developing teenager in 1949 and 1950. Spread that across, say, 200 games and about 700 plate appearances, and you’d be adding roughly 185 hits to his career totals, and 25 doubles, and 5 triples, and 20 home runs. He’d have added something like 80 RBI and 70 runs scored.
Now let’s talk about the Army.
Other people, including Rob Neyer, have noted the playing time Mays lost while serving in the Army during the Korean War. Given that he was already an established big leaguer who won the Rookie of the Year award before he left, and was a bonafide star who won the MVP in his first year back, it’s fair to say he lost something like 60-70 home runs, and 350 hits, and 175-200 RBI, as a result of missing 250 or more games in 1952 and 1953.
All of which means that if his career had begun in the big leagues at seventeen instead of in the Negro Leagues, and he’d been allowed to stay there as his talent warranted, and not been interrupted by service to his country, Willie Mays could have easily broken Babe Ruth’s home run record before Henry Aaron did. He could have approached 750 homers, and 4,000 hits, and 2,200 RBI, and 2,300 runs scored.
As it is, we already recognize that Mays was either the best player since integration or is at least on the Mount Rushmore of that era. But, in this alternate universe I’m wishcasting here, he’d have been undeniably the greatest player of all time. He would have had a remarkable 26-year Nolan-Ryanesque career in terms of durability combined with even more enhanced accolades and statistics than he already achieved. All of our conversations would be about who the second-best player ever was, because the race for Number One would have been settled on the day he retired. He’d be in the same no-debate category as Wayne Gretzky, or Secretariat.
So, please, go read everything you can about Willie Mays as the wonderful tributes to his life and playing career continue to roll in over the next few days. They will be well worth your time.
But also remember as you’re reading them, and finding yourself in awe of the breathtaking numbers he produced, that we were robbed of seeing an even more spectacular career that might have been.
I of course knew about the military years but have never given a thought to the earlier years he could have had if times had been different, thanks for bringing that to our attention. When he was mentioned as the Greatest Living Player in my mind I always said greatest living or dead. One of the advantages of my advanced age is that I got to see some of Willie’s prime years and accomplishments.
Everything laid out in your what-if makes sense. Of course if we're opening up that door for him then logically we would do the same for some others and then things get real twisty. But, still.
I've also always thought that Mays, and not Ted Williams or anyone else, is the player who over the course of his career was most mistreated by MVP Award voters. Several different seasons you look at the NL voting and then at the numbers -- whether modern numbers or the ones that the actual MVP voters at that time were looking at -- and go, how the f*** did anybody conclude that Mays wasn't most valuable player this season?? Three different seasons he led the NL in WAR but didn't even make the top _five_ in the MVP vote! He won 2; should have won several, could arguably have totaled 6 or 7.
All that said, I also share Bill James' perspective that you cannot rank player careers unless you are specifying whether it's for peak value or career value. Those two things are simply different, the way that calling someone a "big guy" could mean he's 6'9" or could mean he's 350 pounds. Mays had an awesome and lengthy peak of course, but it is career value for which he can be called the greatest post-integration player. The insane peak reached by his contemporary Mickey Mantle was even higher than Mays', and I now view Mike Trout the same, and have read decent arguments for a couple of others as well.