There is a word scouts use for a player who can do all five things well — hit for average, hit for power, run, throw, and field. They call him a five-tool player, and it is the highest compliment the game has. Willie Mays is the reason the phrase exists in the form it does, because he did not merely possess all five tools; he possessed each one at a level that would have made him famous on its own, and then bundled them into a single twenty-year-old from Fairfield, Alabama, who played center field like he had been doing it in a dream. He is, for a great many who saw him, simply the best all-around baseball player who ever lived.
The numbers are monumental — 660 home runs, more than 3,000 hits, twelve Gold Gloves, twenty-four All-Star selections, two MVPs spread eleven years apart, a testament to how long he stayed great. But with Mays the numbers have always felt insufficient, because so much of his genius lived in the things a box score cannot hold: the basket catches, the hat flying off as he tore around the bases, the throws from the deepest center field that froze runners in their tracks. The flair was never showmanship. It was the overflow of a man who was better at this than anyone, and glad of it.
He made the hardest game on earth look like the most fun a person could have.
And then there is The Catch — four syllables that need no further explanation to any baseball fan. In the 1954 World Series, with the game on the line, Mays ran down a tremendous drive to the far reaches of the Polo Grounds, caught it over his shoulder on the dead run with his back to the plate, and wheeled to throw before he had even fully stopped. It is perhaps the single most famous defensive play in the history of the sport, and it is fitting that Mays is remembered as much for a catch as for any of his 660 homers — because no one ever did everything the way he did.
That completeness is why his cardboard sits so near the center of the vintage world. A Mays isn't chased for one skill or one moment; it's chased for the whole impossible package — the player who could beat you five ways and tip his cap doing it. His rookie comes from the dawn of the modern era, right at the threshold of a career that kept raising the ceiling of the sport. What you're really collecting is the joy of it.
Most greats mastered a part of the game. Mays mastered every part of it, and never once made it look like work.