The great baseball player Willy Mays passed away on June 18, 2024 at 92 years young. His 7,112 putouts in the majors rank number one in the history books. He had 657 more playing first base. He won 12 Golden Glove awards beginning in 1957, the year the honors were first bestowed.His 660 home runs are sixth all time. He stole 338 bases at a time when the running game was not especially favored and he played in 150 or more games in 13 consecutive seasons. He was selected for 24 All-Star Games and was the most valuable player in 1963 and 1968.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            Willy Howard Mays Jr. was born in Westfield, Alabama near Birmingham. His parents were unmarried teenagers. A steelworker and later a Pullman porter, Willie Sr. was known as Cat, for his graceful play in semipro baseball. Willie's mother, Anne Staterwhite, a standout athlete in track and  basketball left the family when he was a baby and settled in Birmingham. She married there and had 10 children, but Mays kept in touch with her into his major league playing days.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Mays became an all-around athlete at Fairfield Industrial High School, where he was taught by Angelina Rice, the mother of Condolezza Rice, the future Secretary of State. In her memoir "Extraordinary, Ordinary People (2010), Ms. Rice wrote that Mays had remembered her mother telling him:  "You're going to be a ballplayer. If you need to leave a little bit early for practice, just let me know."                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          Mays was batting .477 for the Minneapolis Millers of the American Association when he got the call from the Giants in May 1951. It was only four years after Jackie Robinson had become a Dodger, and there were few black players in the majors, although the Giants had four when Mays joined them.  From the start manager Leo Durocher saw greatness in Mays.  "The word is called magnetism," Durocher said in his autobiography "Nice Guys Finish Last" in 1975. "A personal magnetism which infects everybody around them with the feeling that this is the man that will carry them to victory."  "When I broke into the majors, I didn't know many people by name" Mays explained, "so I would say 'Say, Hey'. and the writers picked that up and thus the name THE SAY YEY KID was born.