Baseball’s greatest all-around player, Willie Mays, died yesterday at age 93. He retired 50 years ago, so unless you’re a Boomer you never saw him play, and it might be difficult to understand what all the fuss was about.
Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier in 1947, but when Mays won the Rookie of the Year Award in 1951 only six of the 16 teams had Black players. He lost most of 1952 and all of ’53 to military service, so his return in 1954 generated a lot of excitement among New York baseball fans, and heralded a new generation of Black players whose speed and power revolutionized the game. But it wasn’t just his star-level performance that made him stand out – his effervescent personality, typified by his appearance in Harlem to play stickball with some neighborhood kids, captivated the media.
Mays gained the nickname “The Say Hey Kid” when the New York Journal American’s Barney Kremenko noticed he often greeted teammates with the phrase. It stuck immediately. Popular music was still in an era when an overnight sensation spawned overnight novelty records, and several of them were released during Mays’ 1954 MVP season. “Say hey” figured prominently in all of them.
The best-known is “Say Hey (The Willie Mays Song)” by the Treniers, a Las Vegas lounge act named for their founding brothers. It wasn’t a hit, but it’s the song that often accompanies highlight reels of Mays in action.
The Singing Travelers, doo-wop group that recorded throughout the ’50s and into the early ’60s, came out with “Say Hey, Willie Mays.”
A group called the Nite Riders went with a simpler name, just “Say Hey.”
The King Odom Quartette chimed in with “Amazin’ Willie Mays,” foreshadowing Mays’ swan song in 1972 and ’73 with the expansion New York Mets. Their first manager, Casey Stengel, declared his motley collection of has-beens “amazin’,” another nickname that stuck.
What can I say, kids. You shoulda been there.