Willie Howard Mays Jr. was born on May 6, 1931 in Westfield, Alabama. His father, Cat Mays, was a talented baseball player with the black team at the local iron plant, and his mother, Annie Satterwhite, was a talented basketball and track star in high school. Willie’s father exposed him to baseball from an early age, playing catch with him at five and allowing him to sit on the bench with his Birmingham Industrial League team at the age of ten. Besides baseball, Mays played both football and basketball in high school, excelling in both sports.
Mays’s professional baseball career began in the Negro Leagues in 1948 with the Chattanooga Choo-Choos, a Negro minor league team. Later that year, he joined the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro American League. He signed with the New York Giants in 1950, going on to win NL Rookie of the Year honors in 1951. Over the course of his major league career, Mays made 24 All-Star teams, was named the National League MVP twice, in 1954 and 1965, and was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1979. He was the first NL player to hit 30 home runs and steal 30 bases in the same season, the first player in history to reach both 300 home runs and 300 stolen bases, and the second player and the first right-handed hitter to hit 600 career home runs. Mays also shined defensively, winning 12 consecutive Gold Glove Awards after their establishment in 1957.
Willie Mays died of heart failure in Palo Alto, California on June 18, 2024 at the age of 93. Rest in peace.
