What Blew My Mind About the Say Hey Kid

I like to write, but I’m certainly not good enough at it to comprehensively explain who and what Willie Mays was to baseball. Partly because of that, I’ll spare you from my meanderings and keep it simple by sticking to a few numbers that have always blown my mind (which, considering I’ve spent the better part of my life looking at baseball numbers, is pretty hard to do).

I was a Strat-O-Matic addict when I was a kid. One of the cooler things about it was that I had the 1956 season, so I got to know all the greats of that era as players when previously I was only told about them anecdotally. With players like Mantle, Musial, Williams, Snider, Aaron, Kaline, Banks, Clemente, Robinson, Minsoo all at or near their peaks, it was an incredible stretch of baseball.

My father, who remembered watching those players as a kid, told me that 1956 was an “off-year” for Willie Mays. Having played Strat-O-Matic thousands of times I could see quite clearly Mays was one of the best players in baseball in 1956 – how could that be an off year?

In ’56, a 25-year-old Mays posted a 146 OPS+ (Bryce Harper’s career OPS+ is 143), was the best baserunner in baseball and one of the best defensive center fielders in baseball. That all led to a 7.6 WAR which tied Duke Snider for the best in the NL that season. For some modern perspective, Mookie Betts (8.3) and Ronald Acuna Jr. (8.2) were the only players last season with more WAR than that.

Turns out my father was right, as he usually was. Mays’ performance in 1956 was in fact his lowest WAR total in any of the 13 seasons between age 23 and 35. Willie Mays’ “off year” made him one of the best players in baseball. That’s how great Willie Mays was.

Speaking of WAR, smart people know it’s not the end of a discussion, it’s the beginning. Here’s a great conversation starter…

Knowing what you know now with perfect 20/20 hindsight about the following players, if you were starting a team, which of the following would you choose to have for the entirety of their careers?

Would you rather have both Ken Griffey Jr. and Derek Jeter, or just Willie Mays?
Would you rather have both Johnny Bench and Reggie Jackson, or just Willie Mays?
Would you rather have both Robin Yount and Brooks Robinson, or just Willie Mays?
Would you rather have both Pete Rose and Tony Gwynn, or just Willie Mays?

If you go by WAR, the answer is Willie Mays to all the above.

More WAR:

Again, in a league that had Henry Aaron, Frank Robinson, Stan Musial, Roberto Clemente, Ernie Banks, and Duke Snider – Mays led the NL in WAR 11 times over a 13 season stretch. Then there’s this…

Since integration, number of single seasons with more than 10 WAR:

Mays 6
Bonds 3
Mantle 3
Yastrzemski 2
Trout 2

We can do this all day, but for brevity’s sake, we’ll end with this:

When Willie Mays became eligible for the Hall of Fame, 23 baseball writers who were granted the authority to decide who enters Cooperstown – TWENTY THREE – did not feel Willie Mays was worthy of Hall of Fame enshrinement. In case you thought that the baseball Hall of Fame became a joke recently, no it’s been that way for a while.

(I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention “A Day in the Bleachers” by Arnold Hano, one of my favorite baseball books. It’s written from his persepctive sitting in the belachers at Game 1 of the 1954 World Series when Willie made “the catch”, and as Hano pointed out, the throw too. Highly recommended.)

Did I miss anything? Let me know. Leave a comment below or yell at me @mybaseballpage1 on Twitter and/or the “My Baseball Page” on Facebook.