BIRMINGHAM, Ala. -- It's known simply as The Catch, and it's one of the greatest plays in Major League Baseball history. Willie Mays made the remarkable over-the-shoulder grab at the massive Polo Grounds and already was a league MVP by that time, but years earlier, when he was just a teenager breaking into professional baseball, he was already preparing for such a moment.
In the HBO documentary "Say Hey, Willie Mays!", his former teammate, pitcher Bill Greason, recalled how a 17-year-old Mays immediately took over as the Birmingham Black Barons' center fielder.
"He would tell our left fielder and right fielder, 'Don't come -- no way in hell. You go from where you are to the line, and everything else I'll take care of,'" Greason recalled. "He was tremendous."
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For Mays, this is where it all started. Born just a few minutes away in Westfield, Ala., Mays began his career at Rickwood Field, the country's oldest professional ballpark and the last one to host Negro League games. Two days after Mays passed away, the Giants and St. Louis Cardinals will celebrate his life and career with a special game in Birmingham on Thursday.
The event originally was meant as a way to honor Mays, the Negro League and a beautiful ballpark that allows visitors to step back in time. Tuesday's news changed the tone a bit, but as the Giants and MLB unveiled a huge mural of Mays in a revitalized section of downtown Birmingham on Wednesday and Rickwood Field hosted a celebrity softball game, it was clear that this game also will take on a celebratory feel.
This week now is about celebrating Mays, something the Giants plan to do further with a special day at Oracle Park later this summer. At the gatherings Wednesday, endless stories flowed about Mays' passion for the game and generosity with his time. It seemed that everyone had a memory or two to share.
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"We all want Willie to live forever, but to have everybody come to Birmingham -- he always said that posthumously he wanted to contribute to Birmingham through his foundation," Giants president and CEO Larry Baer said at the mural ceremony. "For everybody to be here and see it is magical."
Mays spent most of his life in the Bay Area, but he never forgot what Birmingham meant to him, and he never stopped talking about his hometown. When the game was announced last June, Mays said in a statement that he "never thought I'd see in my lifetime a Major League Baseball game being played on the very field where I played baseball as a teenager." It has been 76 years since Mays made his debut at Rickwood, but it remains a crucial part of the story for the greatest player to ever live.
Mays started playing against older players when he was just 12, and he was a professional by high school, even if it couldn't be admitted. He would get paid under the table and would go home and give the money to his aunts, who would hand a portion back to him so he could go out with friends or see a movie.
Mays brought energy and rare athleticism to a roster filled with older players, and he helped the Black Barons reach the Negro League World Series in 1948. He was such a standout that within a short period of time he nearly ended up playing with Jackie Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers. As John Shea -- who wrote "24: Life Stories and Lessons from the Say Hey Kid" -- tells it, Robinson was impressed by Mays when he visited Rickwood Field with barnstormers, but a Dodgers scout came to see him and reported back that Mays couldn't hit a curveball.
Within three years, Mays was a New York Giant, and well on his way to the Hall of Fame. It's a career that is virtually unmatched, but Mays was far from alone when it came to greats who passed through Rickwood Field. Nearly 200 future Hall of Famers have played there, and soon that list will add a name. Former Giants manager Dusty Baker was on the Braves when they would annually play at Rickwood Field at the end of spring training in the early 1970s.
"We used to barnstom, and we always played the Orioles because we were in West Palm and they were in Miami," Baker said last week. "We would go to New Orleans, and to this day, whenever I see Jim Palmer, he goes, 'Remember when you hit that hanging slider off me in that little ballpark?'"
Birmingham has hosted professional baseball for over a century, although these days the action is mostly limited to one game a year for the Birmingham Barons, a Double-A affiliate of the Chicago Cubs. To prepare for this special game, MLB joined with Friends of Rickwood and the city of Birmingham to renovate the field.
Some of the infrastructure is new, but most of the ballpark still looks the way it did when Mays was roaming center field. Between the lines, the teams will do their best to pay tribute to Mays' era and the Negro Leagues. The Cardinals will wear St. Louis Stars uniforms, while the Giants will wear San Francisco Sea Lions uniforms, a nod to the Negro Leagues team that played in the city in 1946. Their clubhouse at Rickwood Field has a Giants logo on one door and a Sea Lions logo on the other.
Baker visited Mays on Monday to check in ahead of the historic game, and he made the trip to Birmingham this week along with Barry Bonds and dozens of members of the organization. The Giants also flew in 10 of their African-American minor leaguers, including highly touted prospects Reggie Crawford and Grant McCray, and the group visited Rickwood Field on Wednesday night.
Mays never was planning to attend, as he was no longer able to travel. But the memories of Rickwood still seemed fresh in his mind in recent months. In a statement that was put out the day before he passed, he said that playing at the ballpark was "the first big thing I ever put my mind to."
"It was my start. My first job. You never forget that," Mays said. "Rickwood Field is where I played my first home game, and playing there was IT -- everything I wanted."
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