San Francisco received the Giants in 1958, making the City by the Bay a big-league town.

But the real win for the city wasn’t taking the team.

It was acquiring the player.

By the time Willie Howard Mays arrived in California, he was already one of baseball’s finest — Rookie of the Year at 20 years old, MVP at 23, and a perennial All-Star.

He made all that seem quaint in his 2,095 games in San Francisco.

And in the process, he helped turn San Francisco — and the Bay Area as a whole — into an epicenter of professional sports for decades to come.

Mays not only played the game at the highest level, but he played with an effervescent charisma. He was impossible not to root for, and while the Giants weren’t the first pro team in town — the 49ers were founded in 1946 — it did make him San Francisco’s first true professional sports superstar.

It’s a debt the city and region would never be able to fully repay.

Mays might have been the single greatest baseball player — perhaps even the single greatest American-born athlete — who ever lived.

His gaudy statistics — he’s the only player in baseball history with a career .300-batting average, at least 3,000 hits, 300 stolen bases and 300 home runs — make a strong case for that superlative.

...continued

©2024 MediaNews Group, Inc. Visit at mercurynews.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.