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One of the greatest players of all time, Frank Robinson, was asked once if Willie Mays was the best player he had ever seen. Robinson got that annoyed look on his face and rolled his eyes, insulted that the question was even asked. After a pause, he answered: “Of course he is. He’s good as you want him to be. You can’t exaggerate how great he was.”

Willie Mays is the greatest center fielder ever, the greatest Giant ever and still is, 73 years after his debut, the greatest combination of power, speed and defense in the history of baseball.

“When he came to us in 1951,” former Giants manager Leo Durocher said, “I’d never seen anyone quite like him.”

Major League Baseball had never seen anyone like him, and hasn’t since. Mays was Ken Griffey Jr., only better, and he preceded Griffey by 40 years. Mays won the National League Most Valuable Player in 1954 and 1965 and finished second two other times. He finished in the top six 12 times. He made the All-Star team 20 years in a row. He is, by most measures, the second-best all-around player in history behind the incomprehensibly great Babe Ruth. To those who separate the game by the breaking of the color barrier in 1947, there has never been a better player than Mays.

“I was in awe of him,” Hall of Fame catcher Johnny Bench said. “The first time I met him [at the 1968 All-Star Game], the day before the game, he whispered in my ear, ‘You should be starting the All-Star Game.’ When he left, I couldn’t even speak for a short time. It was like, ‘Oh my God, Willie Mays just talked to me.’ That’s how great Willie was.”

“With Willie, it was like Tiger Woods coming to your town, you just always expected him to win,” Giants Hall of Fame broadcaster Lon Simmons said in 2008. “The fans expected a miracle from Willie every day. And he just gave them a miracle every other day.”

“His athleticism set him apart,” Robinson said. “The athleticism of the Black player changed the game of baseball after 1947. And there was no better athlete than Willie Mays.”

Mays was born into that. His mother was a great athlete. His father was a great center fielder, too. His son, Willie Howard Mays Jr., was so advanced growing up in Westfield, Alabama, that he played against 18-year-olds when he was 10. Mays played for the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro Leagues when he was 15. In 1950, at age 18, he signed with the New York Giants for $15,000 (he bought a car but couldn’t drive it, so it became a car that his community drove). He spent two years in the minor leagues, then joined the Giants in May 1951 just after turning 20 years old. Durocher put him in the No. 3 spot in the order and, after a 1-for-25 start, he went on to win the Rookie of the Year Award and helped the Giants overcome a 13½-game deficit against the Dodgers to win the pennant. He was oblivious to the pressure. He was as natural a talent as anyone had ever seen.

“The game always came easy to me,” Mays said.

It showed. Mays was as graceful a player as there has ever been, a majestic combination of speed and tremendous strength built into a 5-foot-11, 185-pound package. He played with a certain flair, a crowd-pleaser in every way. He was the “Say Hey Kid.” There was no one like him.

Mays hit 660 home runs, fifth-most of all time; he led the league in home runs four times, had six 40-homer seasons and led the league in slugging five times, all while playing a good portion of his career in a pitchers’ ballpark and in a pitchers’ era.

“Hitting at Candlestick was like hitting in a vacuum: You hit the ball, and the ball was sucked back in,” Robinson said. “If he’d just played in a fair park for hitters, he’d have hit a lot more homers.”

Mays also might have hit even more home runs if he had played in today’s era, with its lower mound, its smaller ballparks, its smaller strike zone and almost everything designed to help the hitter. In 1968, one NL hitter drove in 100 runs. In 2000, 21 NL hitters did it.

“Willie Mays,” Hall of Famer Joe Morgan once said, “might have hit 80 in a season today.”

But what separated Mays was his speed. He stole 338 bases; he led the league in stolen bases four seasons in a row while averaging 33 homers per season. When he stole 40 bases in 1956, it was the most by any NL player since 1929.

“He could have stolen a lot more bases if he had wanted,” Robinson said. “But back then, you only stole a base to help your team win a game. He could have stolen 50 every year if he’d wanted to.”

“He was the best baserunner I’ve ever seen,” Simmons said.

He was also a terrific defender — probably the greatest defensive center fielder of all time. He won 12 Gold Gloves, most of any center fielder, and they didn’t start awarding Gold Gloves until 1957, his fifth full season. In 1968, he won a Gold Glove at age 37; at the time, he was the oldest to win one as a center fielder. In the 1954 World Series, Mays’ back-to-the-plate catch in deep center against the Indians’ Vic Wertz is considered the most famous defensive play of all time. Mays could throw as well as any center fielder; he would have had an assist at all four bases in one game, but Giants second baseman Tito Fuentes dropped the ball on a tag play. In 1965, Mays became the first player to win a Gold Glove in a 50-homer season. His signature basket catch was a phenomenon that has never been duplicated. No one glided after a fly ball like Willie Mays.

He was the most complete player in baseball history, the first real five-tool player. He didn’t just hit for power; he batted .302 in his career, won a batting title and is one of five players with 3,000 hits and 500 home runs. He and teammate Willie McCovey were a destructive twosome for the Giants for most of the 1960s.

“My last two years with the Giants, I would hit a double, but I’d stop at first so they’d have to pitch to McCovey,” Mays said. “Pitchers would sometimes throw the ball to the backstop, but I would stay at first base to make sure McCovey had a chance to hit. I had to maneuver some things for our lineup.”

Mays was so good, some maneuvering was done around him — and by him, even at the All-Star Game.

“When I was playing in the All-Star Game, [Dodgers manager] Walter Alston would tell me, ‘OK, you know all these guys better than I do, you make out the lineup,”’ Mays said. “So I did. I would hit leadoff to get something going. I’d put [Roberto] Clemente second because he could hit behind the runner, and I’d be on third base. I would hit Hank [Aaron] third, he’d hit a fly ball, and before you knew it, our team was ahead.”

Mays’ Giants were always ahead in 1954, when they won the world championship in his first full season (he missed most of 1952 and all of 1953 because of military service). In 1962, Mays hit 49 homers, including one in the eighth inning of the final day of the season to beat the Astros 2-1 and pull the Giants into a regular-season tie with the Dodgers. They played a three-game playoff; the Giants beat Sandy Koufax in the first game 8-0 behind two homers by Mays. The Giants won two out of three to advance to the first World Series in San Francisco, but they lost in seven games to the Yankees. Mays’ hit in the ninth put two on with two out, but McCovey’s line out to Bobby Richardson ended the Series.

Willie Mays in his prime was simply breathtaking to watch. Sadly, some people will remember him for falling down on the warning track as a 42-year-old in the 1973 World Series. But replace that picture with these images: The game’s best athlete, streaking across the outfield, his cap flying off as he runs down a ball in right-center; that short, strong body uncoiling and hitting a ball to places only few can imagine; those legs churning on a steal of second, ending with a classic hook slide. Remember him as one of the two best players of all time, a man who changed the game, a man with talent that is unrivaled the past 75 years.

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Red Sox activate 3B Bregman from 10-day IL

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Red Sox activate 3B Bregman from 10-day IL

BOSTON — The Red Sox activated All-Star third baseman Alex Bregman from the 10-day injured list before Friday’s game against Tampa Bay.

Bregman, who has been sidelined since May 24 with a right quad strain, returned to his customary spot in the field and was slotted in the No. 2 spot of Boston’s lineup for the second of a four-game series against the Rays. He sustained the injury when he rounded first base and felt his quad tighten up.

A two-time World Series winner who spent the first nine seasons of his big league career with the Houston Astros, Bregman signed a $120 million, three-year contract in February. At the time of the injury, he was hitting .299 with 11 homers and 35 RBI. Those numbers led to him being named to the American League’s All-Star team for the third time since breaking into the majors with the Astros in 2016.

Bregman missed 43 games with the quad strain. Earlier this week, he told reporters that he was trending in a direction where he didn’t believe he would require a minor league rehab assignment. With three games left before the All-Star break, the Red Sox agreed the time was right to reinstate a player to a team that entered Friday in possession of one of the AL’s three wild-card berths.

“He’s going to do his part,” Red Sox manager Alex Cora said before Friday’s game. “Obviously, the timing, we’ll see where he’s at, but he’s been working hard on the swing … visualizing and watching video.”

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How Jim Abbott changed the world

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How Jim Abbott changed the world

JIM ABBOTT IS sitting at his kitchen table, with his old friend Tim Mead. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, they were partners in an extraordinary exercise — and now, for the first time in decades, they are looking at a stack of letters and photographs from that period of their lives.

The letters are mostly handwritten, by children, from all over the United States and Canada, and beyond.

“Dear Mr. Abbott …”

“I have one hand too. … I don’t know any one with one hand. How do you feel about having one hand? Sometimes I feel sad and sometimes I feel okay about it. Most of the time I feel happy.”

“I am a seventh grader with a leg that is turned inwards. How do you feel about your arm? I would also like to know how you handle your problem? I would like to know, if you don’t mind, what have you been called?”

“I can’t use my right hand and most of my right side is paralyzed. … I want to become a doctor and seeing you makes me think I can be what I want to be.”

For 40 years, Mead worked in communications for the California Angels, eventually becoming vice president of media relations. His position in this department became a job like no other after the Angels drafted Abbott out of the University of Michigan in 1988.

There was a deluge of media requests. Reporters from around the world descended on Anaheim, most hoping to get one-on-one time with the young left-handed pitcher with the scorching fastball. Every Abbott start was a major event — “like the World Series,” Angels scout Bob Fontaine Jr. remembers. Abbott, with his impressive amateur résumé (he won the James E. Sullivan Award for the nation’s best amateur athlete in 1997 and an Olympic gold medal in 1988) and his boyish good looks, had star power.

That spring, he had become only the 16th player to go straight from the draft to the majors without appearing in a single minor league game. And then there was the factor that made him unique. His limb difference, although no one called it that back then. Abbott was born without a right hand, yet had developed into one of the most promising pitchers of his generation. He would go on to play in the majors for ten years, including a stint in the mid ’90s with the Yankees highlighted by a no-hitter in 1993.

Abbott, and Mead, too, knew the media would swarm. That was no surprise. There had been swarms in college, and at the Olympics, wherever and whenever Abbott pitched. Who could resist such an inspirational story? But what they hadn’t anticipated were the letters.

The steady stream of letters. Thousands of letters. So many from kids who, like Abbott, were different. Letters from their parents and grandparents. The kids hoping to connect with someone who reminded them of themselves, the first celebrity they knew of who could understand and appreciate what it was like to be them, someone who had experienced the bullying and the feelings of otherness. The parents and grandparents searching for hope and direction.

“I know you don’t consider yourself limited in what you can do … but you are still an inspiration to my wife and I as parents. Your success helps us when talking to Andy at those times when he’s a little frustrated. I’m able to point to you and assure him there’s no limit to what he can accomplish.”

In his six seasons with the Angels, Abbott was assisted by Mead in the process of organizing his responses to the letters, mailing them, and arranging face-to-face meetings with the families who had written to him. There were scores of such meetings. It was practically a full-time job for both of them.

“Thinking back on these meetings with families — and that’s the way I’d put it, it’s families, not just kids — there was every challenge imaginable,” Abbott, now 57, says. “Some accidents. Some birth defects. Some mental challenges that aren’t always visible to people when you first come across somebody. … They saw something in playing baseball with one hand that related to their own experience. I think the families coming to the ballparks were looking for hopefulness. I think they were looking for what it had been that my parents had told me, what it had been that my coaches had told me. … [With the kids] it was an interaction. It was catch. It was smiling. It was an autograph. It was a picture. With the parents, it ran deeper. With the parents, it was what had your parents said to you? What coaches made a difference? What can we expect? Most of all, I think, what can we expect?”

“It wasn’t asking for autographs,” Mead says of all those letters. “They weren’t asking for pictures. They were asking for his time. He and I had to have a conversation because this was going to be unique. You know, you could set up another player to come down and sign 15 autographs for this group or whatever. But it was people, parents, that had kids, maybe babies, just newborn babies, almost looking for an assurance that this is going to turn out all right, you know. ‘What did your parents do? How did your parents handle this?'”

One of the letters Abbott received came from an 8-year-old girl in Windsor, Ontario.

She wrote, “Dear Jim, My name is Tracey Holgate. I am age 8. I have one hand too. My grandpa gave me a picture of you today. I saw you on TV. I don’t know anyone with one hand. How do you feel about having one hand? Sometimes I feel sad and sometimes I feel okay about it. Most of the time I feel happy. I hope to see you play in Detroit and maybe meet you. Could you please send me a picture of you in uniform? Could you write back please? Here is a picture of me. Love, Tracey.”

Holgate’s letter is one of those that has remained preserved in a folder — and now Abbott is reading it again, at his kitchen table, half a lifetime after receiving it. Time has not diminished the power of the letter, and Abbott is wiping away tears.

Today, Holgate is 44 and goes by her married name, Dupuis. She is married with four children of her own. She is a teacher. When she thinks about the meaning of Jim Abbott in her life, it is about much more than the letter he wrote back to her. Or the autographed picture he sent her. It was Abbott, all those years ago, who made it possible for Tracey to dream.

“There was such a camaraderie there,” she says, “an ability to connect with somebody so far away doing something totally different than my 8-year-old self was doing, but he really allowed me to just feel that connection, to feel that I’m not alone, there’s other people that have differences and have overcome them and been successful and we all have our own crosses, we all have our own things that we’re carrying and it’s important to continue to focus on the gifts that we have, the beauty of it.

“I think sometimes differences, disabilities, all those things can be a gift in a package we would never have wanted, because they allow us to be people that have an empathetic heart, an understanding heart, and to see the pain in the people around us.”

Now, years after Abbott’s career ended, he continues to inspire.

Among those he influenced, there are professional athletes, such as Shaquem Griffin, who in 2018 became the first NFL player with one hand. Griffin, now 29, played three seasons at linebacker for the Seattle Seahawks.

Growing up in Florida, he would watch videos of Abbott pitching and fielding, over and over, on YouTube.

“The only person I really looked up to was Jim Abbott at the time,” Griffin says, “which is crazy, because I didn’t know anybody else to look up to. I didn’t know anybody else who was kind of like me. And it’s funny, because when I was really little, I used to be like, ‘Why me? Why this happen to me?’ And I used to be in my room thinking about that. And I used to think to myself, ‘I wonder if Jim Abbott had that same thought.'”

Carson Pickett was born on Sept. 15, 1993 — 11 days after Abbott’s no-hitter. Missing most of her left arm below the elbow, she became, in 2022, the first player with a limb difference to appear for the U.S. women’s national soccer team.

She, too, says that Abbott made things that others told her were impossible seem attainable.

“I knew I wanted to be a professional soccer player,” says Pickett, who is currently playing for the NWSL’s Orlando Pride. “To be able to see him compete at the highest level it gave me hope, and I think that that kind of helped me throughout my journey. … I think ‘pioneer’ would be the best word for him.”

Longtime professional MMA fighter Nick Newell is 39, old enough to have seen Abbott pitch for the Yankees. In fact, when Newell was a child he met Abbott twice, first at a fan event at the Jacob Javits Center in Manhattan and then on a game day at Yankee Stadium. Newell was one of those kids with a limb difference — like Griffin and Pickett, due to amniotic band syndrome — who idolized Abbott.

“And I didn’t really understand the gravity of what he was doing,” Newell says now, “but for me, I saw someone out there on TV that looked like I did. And I was the only other person I knew that had one hand. And I saw this guy out here playing baseball and it was good to see somebody that looked like me, and I saw him in front of the world.

“He was out there like me and he was just living his life and I think that I owe a lot of my attitude and the success that I have to Jim just going out there and being the example of, ‘Hey, you can do this. Who’s to say you can’t be a professional athlete?’ He’s out there throwing no-hitters against the best baseball players in the world. So, as I got older, ‘Why can’t I wrestle? Why can’t I fight? Why can’t I do this?’ And then it wasn’t until the internet that I heard people tell me I can’t do these things. But by then I had already been doing those things.”

Griffin.

Pickett.

Newell.

Just three of the countless kids who were inspired by Jim Abbott.

When asked if it ever felt like too much, being a role model and a hero, all the letters and face-to-face meetings, Abbott says no — but it wasn’t always easy.

“I had incredible people who helped me send the letters,” he says. “I got a lot more credit sometimes than I deserved for these interactions, to be honest with you. And that happened on every team, particularly with my friend Tim Mead. There was a nice balance to it. There really was. There was a heaviness to it. There’s no denying. There were times I didn’t want to go [to the meetings]. I didn’t want to walk out there. I didn’t want to separate from my teammates. I didn’t want to get up from the card game. I didn’t want to put my book down. I liked where I was at. I was in my environment. I was where I always wanted to be. In a big league clubhouse surrounded by big league teammates. In a big league stadium. And those reminders of being different, I slowly came to realize were never going to go away.”

But being different was the thing that made Abbott more than merely a baseball star. For many people, he has been more than a role model, more than an idol. He is the embodiment of hope and belonging.

“I think more people need to realize and understand the gift of a difference,” Dupuis says. “I think we have to just not box everybody in and allow everybody’s innate light to shine, and for whatever reasons we’ve been created to be here, [let] that light shine in a way that it touches everybody else. Because I think that’s what Jim did. He allowed his light to permeate and that light, in turn, lit all these little children’s lights all over the world, so you have this boom of brightness that’s happening and that’s uncontrollable, that’s beautiful.”

“Southpaw – The Life and Legacy of Jim Abbott,” a new edition of ESPN’s “E60,” debuts Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on ESPN; extended version streaming afterward on ESPN+.

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Cubs’ PCA on track for $1.1M from bonus pool

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Cubs' PCA on track for .1M from bonus pool

NEW YORK — Chicago Cubs center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong is projected to receive the largest amount from this season’s $50 million pre-arbitration bonus pool based on his regular-season statistics.

Crow-Armstrong is on track to get $1,091,102, according to WAR calculations through July 8 that Major League Baseball sent to teams, players and agents in a memo Friday that was obtained by The Associated Press.

He earned $342,128 from the pool in 2024.

“I was aware of it after last year, but I have no clue of the numbers,” he said Friday. “I haven’t looked at it one time.”

Pittsburgh pitcher Paul Skenes is second at $961,256, followed by Washington outfielder James Wood ($863,835), Arizona outfielder Corbin Carroll ($798,397), Houston pitcher Hunter Brown ($786,838), Philadelphia pitcher Cristopher Sánchez ($764,854), Cincinnati shortstop Elly De La Cruz ($717,479), Boston catcher Carlos Narváez ($703,007), Red Sox outfielder Ceddanne Rafaela ($685,366) and Detroit outfielder Riley Greene ($665,470).

Crow-Armstrong, Skenes, Wood, Carroll, Brown, De La Cruz and Greene have been picked for Tuesday’s All-Star Game.

A total of 100 players will receive the payments, established as part of the 2022 collective bargaining agreement and aimed to get more money to players without sufficient service time for salary arbitration eligibility. The cutoff for 2025 was 2 years, 132 days of major league service.

Players who signed as foreign professionals are excluded.

Most young players have salaries just above this year’s major league minimum of $760,000. Crow-Armstrong has a $771,000 salary this year, Skenes $875,000, Wood $764,400 and Brown $807,400.

Carroll is in the third season of a $111 million, eight-year contract.

As part of the labor agreement, a management-union committee was established that determined the WAR formula used to allocate the bonuses after awards. (A player may receive only one award bonus per year, the highest one he is eligible for.) The agreement calls for an interim report to be distributed the week before the All-Star Game.

Distribution for awards was $9.85 million last year, down from $11.25 million in 2022 and $9.25 million in 2023.

A player earns $2.5 million for winning an MVP or Cy Young award, $1.75 million for finishing second, $1.5 million for third, $1 million for fourth or fifth or for making the All-MLB first team. A player can get $750,000 for winning Rookie of the Year, $500,000 for second or for making the All-MLB second team, $350,000 for third in the rookie race, $250,000 for fourth or $150,000 for fifth.

Kansas City shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. topped last year’s pre-arbitration bonus pool at $3,077,595, and Skenes was second at $2,152,057 despite not making his big league debut until May 11. Baltimore shortstop Gunnar Henderson was third at $2,007,178.

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