Obituary: Willie Mays

 Baseball great Willie Mays, 93, has reportedly died. Not only was he famous on the baseball field, his fame was such that he was mentioned at length in the children's book, Maniac Magee.   The book won a Newbery Award and continues to be quite popular in schools.  The school year before this one just completed I had  reading groups with perhaps a dozen kids in two groups, and Willie Mays figured prominently in the story,  as one of the major characters befriended by "Maniac" had once played with Mays in the minor leagues.  I explained to the students about Willie Mays and the fact he was a real person, a very famous person. Knowing about the baseball great helped us figure out when the story took place. It was confusing to the reader when it did take place because of the issues of poverty, homelessness, and racism figured prominently in Jerry Spinelli's story.  (Jerry,  by the way, is still very much with us and is 83 years old.)  However, it appeared the story took place not long before the actual book was published (probably in the 1980s for the story).  Because Mays was born in 1931 and was still very much alive when I had the groups, the story HAD to take place in the late 1980s since  the character, Earl Grayson,  was already an old man.

Anyway, that is a sidebar about the life of Willie Mays.  Not everybody is so honored as to be mentioned in a famous children's book.  

Obituary of the "Say Hey Kid"   from SF Gate

AP:

Few were so blessed with each of the five essential qualities for a superstar -- hitting for average, hitting for power, speed, fielding and throwing. Fewer so joyously exerted those qualities -- whether launching home runs; dashing around the bases, loose-fitting cap flying off his head; or chasing down fly balls in center field and finishing the job with his trademark basket catch.

“When I played ball, I tried to make sure everybody enjoyed what I was doing,” Mays told NPR in 2010. “I made the clubhouse guy fit me a cap that when I ran, the wind gets up in the bottom and it flies right off. People love that kind of stuff.”

Many consider Mays to be the best player ever in major league baseball, and he was certainly one of the most famous.