Quotes about Willie Mays

I want to establish myself as the first Eric Davis, not the next Willie Mays.

Willie Mays could throw better, and Hank Aaron could hit more home runs. But I’ve got enthusiasm. I’ve got desire. I’ve got hustle. Those are God-given talents, too.

They invented the All-Star game for Willie Mays.

Come on, when does it come to the point where your name can’t come up in trade talks? Willie Mays got traded. Pedro Martinez got traded. So what? That’s part of the game.

Willie Mays was the best ever. When I was in college I once made a catch like the one Mays made over his head. Sometimes when I’m lying in bed at night I think about it. It still makes me warm.

As much as I loved Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Junior Gilliam, and Don Newcombe, I loved watching Willie Mays play more than all of them combined, even if he played for the ‘bad guys!’

With the Giants I broadcast the debut of Hall of Famer Willie Mays.

I played with Willie Mays and against Hank Aaron. They were tremendous players, but they were no Josh Gibson.

Why the fairy tale of Willie Mays making a brilliant World Series catch, and then dashing off to play stickball in the street with his teenage pals. That’s baseball. So is the husky voice of a doomed Lou Gehrig saying, ‘I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth.’

I’ve been hearing this since I first joined the Reds organization, that I’m going to be the next this or that. It’s tough on a young player coming up. You show some positive things and everybody jumps on that and says you should be the next Willie Mays.

I think anybody who saw him will tell you that Willie Mays was the greatest player who ever lived.

There’s absolutely no comparisons to me or anyone else to Willie Mays. Willie Mays, he’s the greatest baseball player of all time.

Oscar Charleston was the Willie Mays of his day. Nobody ever played center field better than Willie Mays. Suppose they had never given Willie a chance, and we said that, would anybody believe there was a kid in Alabama who was that good? Or there was a black guy in Atlanta who might break Babe Ruth’s home run record? No.