Banner photo: I shot this photo before a baseball game between the Chicago Cubs and San Francisco Giants, at Wrigley Field in Chicago, on the day after Willie Mays passed away.
June 18, 2024. My wife and I were sitting, lower box, along the third baseline in Chicago's Guaranteed Rate Stadium. The buzz started sometime in the early innings as the White Sox were playing the Houston Astros. I heard the first murmur from someone a few rows down from us and to the right. I only heard the name, "Mays."
When it comes to baseball the name Mays, isn't just a name. Willie Mays is baseball. Pick a sport, any sport and you'll find that there's an ongoing debate as to which player is that sport's greatest. In baseball, the name Willie Mays is always mentioned beside Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron as the greatest player in baseball history. It's one of those never resolved sports debates that takes place in a stadium or a bar or early morning in the office break room as people pour their morning coffee and dip into the donut box.
For me the choice is easy - it's Mays. Maybe that's because I watched him play so many times, though I did see Aaron a time or two. Ruth? I may be old but I'm not that damn old.
So in a baseball stadium, I suppose it would make sense that the name Mays would come up. Or not. Willie Mays, who spent most of his career playing for the New York/San Francisco Giants never played for or against the White Sox. Never, to my knowledge, did he set foot in Comiskey Park, the stadium that the Sox called home. So, I wondered, why the buzz? Because now it wasn't just one lone mention. The name Willie Mays was circulating around the park.
The murmurs continued throughout the game, always at a distance. And then a man stopped to chat with a woman seated behind me. That's when I heard the news that Willie Mays had passed away at the age of 93.
As the Sox and Astros, played my mind drifted from the game. Numb, hit with the now all too familiar realization that yet another precious piece of my life had been taken. As we get older the pieces just tumble away like bricks from an aging building. It might be a death, or the closing of a cherished institution, or the destruction of a building or monument. The pieces crash to earth and get bulldozed aside by time, and we find ourselves less one more fragment. When the World Series is done and the Giants have completed another season of mediocrity will June 18th even register in my failing memory?
A short time after the buzz began, rumor became official as the public address announcer shared the bad news with the stadium crowd. The crowd rose and a long standing ovation followed and every face, even those of the players on the field, turned to the picture of Willie Mays displayed on the scoreboard. I wasn't the only one who had lost another fragment. All of baseball was feeling the loss.
We hadn't planned on going to that game. The White Sox are one of the worst teams in baseball this year and the only reason to go would be to knock another stadium off the list of stadiums that we'd visited. It was a last minute decision that very afternoon to go online and buy tickets.
Irony? Destiny? Shithouse coincidence? Whatever it was, it was certainly fitting that I heard the news of the passing of baseball's greatest while I was sitting at a baseball game. I guess it was equally fitting that the next day I would be watching the Giants play the Chicago Cubs in Chicago's Wrigley Field.
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