Reggie on Mays: 'You wanted to see him do everything'

Reggie Jackson talked about Willie Mays on Friday, the day before Mays’ 92nd birthday. In the late 1960s, Jackson’s career was beginning in Oakland while Mays’ Giants career was coming to an end across the bay in San Francisco. He first met Mays when he was a kid just out of Arizona State and later played in All-Star Games with him. Jackson still says that Mays was the most exciting baseball player who ever lived, the one former Cardinals manager Johnny Keane would call “the magic man.”

“Put it this way about Willie,” Jackson said. “With Babe Ruth, you only wanted to see him do one thing. It was different with Willie. You wanted to see him do everything.”

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Jackson then talked about the All-Star Games he shared with Mays when he was young, and how he was in the American League, so they were never in the same clubhouse together.

“But I didn’t care,” Jackson said. “All I cared about was being on the same field with Willie Mays.”

Mays played his last Major League game a half-century ago. It does not change the fact that he is a permanent part of the royalty in this sport. Whatever Mt. Rushmore you want to imagine for baseball, starting with Ruth, Mays is on it, right next to a contemporary of the 1950s and 60s and even into the 70s, the great Henry Aaron. But it was Mays who was the greatest all-around player of them all.

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There was a time in American sports when boxer Sugar Ray Robinson was called the greatest boxer, pound-for-pound, whenever he stepped into the ring. Mays was all of that on a baseball field, at 5-foot-11 and 180 pounds, starting his career at the Polo Grounds and finishing it back in New York with the Mets, even getting one more World Series appearance in 1973 with the club. Through it all, and through all of his glory years at Candlestick Park with the Giants, he hit 660 home runs.

If Mays hadn’t spent all those years playing through those summer nights that felt like winter in San Francisco, he may have caught and passed Ruth the way Aaron did.

“Playing in that place might’ve cost me 200 home runs,” Mays once said.

I mentioned that to Jackson on Friday (who will turn 77 on May 18), and he laughed.

“I don’t know about 200,” Jackson said. “But Candlestick cost him 50 or 60 at least.”

Mays hit his first home run in 1951, in New York for the Giants, and hit his last one for the Mets more than 20 years later. He was a shell of what he had been by the time he got to old Shea Stadium. But he had come home to finish his career. He was still Willie Mays, the Say Hey Kid.

“When I was old, too many people forgot what I was like when I was young,” Mays said to me one day in Spring Training, when he had come to Florida to do some coaching for the Mets.

I smiled at him and said, “No.”

“No what?”

“They’ll never forget,” I said.

Bob Costas grew up on Long Island as a Yankees fan. But when he was five years old, his father, John, took him to one game at Ebbets Field, and one at the Polo Grounds. Bob talked on Friday about his father putting him on his shoulders in the grandstand in right field at the Polo Grounds.

“Look over there,” John said to his son. “There. In the middle. That’s Willie Mays.”

“It was like he was pointing out a landmark like the Washington Monument,” Bob said.

Jackson was right: You wanted to watch him do everything. You wanted to watch his cap fly off as he went from first to third, or in the outfield where -- as an old Dodger executive named Fresco Thompson once said -- his glove is and triples went to die.

He was the basket catch and the sheer joy he brought to the game. He was The Catch made against Vic Wertz at the Polo Grounds in the 1954 World Series, before wheeling and throwing the ball back to the infield in a flash. He was all those wonderful old black-and-white photographs of him playing stickball on the streets of New York.

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When Mays was inducted to the Hall of Fame in 1979, we all took an old 1950s A-train with him up to where the Polo Grounds once had been. And that day, the man who had been old, at least as a ballplayer when he came back to New York, was young again.

“I believe I remember this neighborhood,” he said when he got off the train that day.

Now at 92, his vision is mostly gone. So many of his contemporaries are gone, as well. But Willie Mays is still here. One of the biggest compliments you could pay an athlete is saying they have Willie Mays in them.

“Willie Mays is something you pass on,” is the way Vin Scully put it.

Ruth and Aaron hit more home runs. But Mays did more of everything.