Richard Goldstein, The New York Times:

Willie Mays, the spirited center fielder whose brilliance at the plate, in the field and on the basepaths for the Giants led many to call him the greatest all-around player in baseball history, died on Tuesday in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 93. […]

Mays compiled extraordinary statistics in 22 National League seasons with the Giants in New York and San Francisco and a brief return to New York with the Mets, preceded by a time in the Negro leagues, from 1948–50. He hit 660 career home runs and had 3,293 hits and a .301 career batting average.

But he did more than personify the complete ballplayer. An exuberant style of play and an effervescent personality made Mays one of the game’s, and America’s, most charismatic figures, a name that even people far afield from the baseball world recognized instantly as a national treasure.

The timing of his death was tragically ironic:

Mays’s death came as Major League Baseball was paying tribute to the Negro leagues with a series of games at the ballpark where Mays began his career, the venerable Rickwood Field in Birmingham. Mays had been invited to attend but said in a statement on Monday that he wouldn’t be able to make the trip. “I’d like to be there, but I don’t move as well as I used to,” he wrote. His death was announced to the crowd during a game.

I found this tidbit delightful:

Charles M. Schulz was such a fan that Mays often came up by name in Schulz’s “Peanuts” comic strip. (Asked to spell “maze” in a spelling bee, Charlie Brown ventured, “M … A … Y… S.”)

It neglects to mention that the reason we have “A Charlie Brown Christmas” (and all the rest) is because of Willie Mays.

Baseball and “Peanuts”—an apropos pairing for the Say Hey Kid.