In America’s golden age, the 1950s, when baseball was still the national pastime and New York was the unofficial centre of the world, the city had three baseball teams that were each blessed with an outstanding centre-fielder. Brooklyn’s Dodgers, for decades loveable losers until Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s apartheid, had Duke Snider. The dynastic Yankees, the team of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio, boasted Mickey Mantle. And just across the Harlem River from Yankee Stadium, the Giants had Willie Mays.
Mays, who has died aged 93, was the first black superstar of the post-Robinson era of integration, and though arguments persist as to whether he or Mantle was the greatest of the three, or indeed greater than the legendary Ty Cobb, he was inarguably baseball’s most exciting player.
