HAGERSTOWN, Md. — On June 23, 1950, a 19-year-old Negro Leagues standout named Willie Mays skipped his highschool promenade and boarded a prepare for Maryland. The following day, within the former slave-trading stronghold of Hagerstown, Mays would make his debut in affiliated skilled baseball. He batted sixth and performed heart subject for the visiting Trenton Giants, the primary of almost 3,000 instances he would patrol heart subject in a Giants uniform.
Three years after Jackie Robinson built-in Main League Baseball, Mays grew to become the primary Black participant to look within the Class B Interstate League, four levels below the majors. However a lot of the nation remained entrenched in Jim Crow legal guidelines and mentalities. All through the Giants’ weekend collection at Municipal Stadium towards the Hagerstown Braves, Mays stayed in a separate hotel away from his White teammates and endured racial epithets from followers.
“It didn’t take me lengthy to comprehend that Hagerstown was the one metropolis in our league beneath the Mason-Dixon Line,” Mays wrote in his 1988 autobiography, “Say Hey.” “After I walked onto the sphere for the primary time, I heard somebody shout, ‘Who’s that n—– strolling on the sphere?’ However I didn’t let it hassle me.”
Seventy-four years in the past this month, an everlasting connection was cast between arguably the best baseball participant of all time and a small metropolis 70 miles northwest of D.C. Mays, who died last week at 93, by no means forgot Hagerstown, each for its position in launching his Giants profession and for the best way it handled him. Over subsequent a long time, he recounted his experiences there in books, documentaries, interviews and even his 1979 Corridor of Fame induction speech.
Town didn’t neglect Mays, both. Although he by no means performed for a neighborhood crew, a number of iterations of Hagerstown’s baseball franchises have had Mays’s No. 24 jersey retired since 2004.
The newest of these franchises is the Hagerstown Flying Boxcars, an enlargement crew within the unbiased Atlantic League that performs in a ballpark a mile from the place Mays took the sphere. On Tuesday, of their first residence recreation since Mays died, the Flying Boxcars introduced a video tribute and held a second of silence in his honor.
“He’s most likely one of many high 5 best gamers of all time, so it’s all the time been a supply of pleasure in our group that Willie Mays performed his first recreation in Hagerstown Municipal Stadium,” Flying Boxcars Common Supervisor David Blenckstone mentioned. “He’s all the time held a particular historic place within the historical past of minor league baseball in Hagerstown.”
However to some, Mays’s expertise in Hagerstown stays an ignored side of the town’s historical past. The resort within the redlined Jonathan Avenue neighborhood the place Mays as soon as stayed is now a church parking zone. Municipal Stadium was demolished in 2022. Meritus Park, a brand new downtown stadium that opened final month, doesn’t but characteristic any everlasting tributes to Mays.
Tekesha Martinez, who’s serving as Hagerstown’s first Black mayor, mentioned Mays’s historical past with the town is “not effectively celebrated, informed [or] identified inside Hagerstown or our county.”
“All I do know is bits and items of the story,” Martinez mentioned. “Had I identified there was somebody like Willie Mays that walked on Jonathan Avenue, that performed in our metropolis … I’d have felt extra proud about being from Hagerstown as a Black girl.”
Mays grew up in Jim Crow Alabama, but the racism and segregation he encountered in Hagerstown left a long-lasting impression. When he performed in close by D.C. and Baltimore, there have been no restrictions on the place he was allowed to remain. “However right here in Hagerstown, situated halfway between these cities, I couldn’t stick with the remainder of the crew,” he wrote in his autobiography.
The Giants made makes an attempt to help Mays. A bunch of White teammates sneaked into his room at the Harmon Hotel and slept on the ground to maintain him firm. His supervisor, Chick Genovese, ate with him on the metropolis’s segregated eating places.
Nonetheless, his stint with the Giants was Mays’s first expertise as the one Black participant on his crew. When Mays performed within the Negro Leagues with the Birmingham Black Barons, he and his teammates confronted racism collectively. In Hagerstown, he went by way of it alone.
“It was the primary time I had been off on my own someplace, for even after I was on the street with the Barons in a segregated scenario, at the least all of us have been segregated on the similar time in the identical place,” Mays wrote.
The legacy of Mays’s expertise in Hagerstown lingered not only for the baseball star however for the town. In 2004, the Hagerstown Suns, the town’s since-defunct minor league franchise, invited Mays to return. When he accepted, it grew to become a chance — 54 years later — for Hagerstown to make amends.
“I believed it was necessary for the group to have that second — a second likelihood with Willie Mays, because it have been,” mentioned Kurt Landes, the previous Suns normal supervisor who organized Mays’s go to. “Actually everybody was conscious that his first time in the neighborhood wasn’t acquired positively. … So this was an opportunity for the group to be excited to host him once more [and] excited to have a chance to redeem themselves. Everybody felt it was a little bit little bit of a homecoming.”
On Aug. 9, 2004, a 73-year-old Mays was the visitor of honor in a metropolis that after jeered him. He stuffed the ballroom of a downtown resort, the place in accordance with an account within the Hagerstown Herald-Mail, some attendees paid as a lot as $1,000 for an autograph and a non-public meet-and-greet. As Landes launched him to thunderous applause, Mays started to cry.
Later that day, Mays returned to Municipal Stadium, forward of a recreation between the Suns and the Asheville Vacationers. He met with gamers, threw out the ceremonial first pitch and acquired a standing ovation.
“He returned below a lot totally different circumstances than when he was right here in 1950,” mentioned Dan Spedden, a longtime Hagerstown baseball fan who attended the ceremonies. “He was very gracious about it. … He coated it effectively in his e book, the best way he was handled right here in 1950, however when he got here again in ’04, I didn’t see any of that animosity or something. He was simply glad to be right here and glad that he was so effectively acquired.”
Whereas many followers left that day with autographed memorabilia, Landes held on to a singular memento. After studying that Mays beloved home made chili, Landes and his spouse stuffed a sluggish cooker with the household’s recipe and introduced it to the ballpark. Mays loved three heaping bowls, and Landes saved Mays’s spoon as a memento.
“I put it in a body, and it was in my basement,” mentioned Landes, the president and normal supervisor of the Class AAA Lehigh Valley IronPigs. “After which my spouse and I, each time we made chili from there on, we known as it Willie Chili.”
Shortly earlier than Mays’s go to, then-mayor William Breichner introduced that the town would rededicate a road that ran alongside Municipal Stadium in Mays’s honor. However 9 months later, the town council voted to protect the previous identify, East Memorial Boulevard, after a bunch of veterans argued the road ought to stand as a commemoration of their service.
Some noticed the incident as a reemergence of Hagerstown’s previous.
“Willie Mays is a veteran,” mentioned Spedden, who’s president of the Hagerstown/Washington County Conference and Guests Bureau. “Perhaps the stain of that segregation has not precisely pale away. There’s nonetheless a few of it lingering in lots of people, and it got here out in a manner that I used to be appalled by and embarrassed by.”
A number of years earlier than he died, Mays mentioned he had reconciled his historical past with Hagerstown.
“They needed to strive making up for the unhappiness I felt all these years earlier,” Mays wrote in a 2020 follow-up memoir, “24.” “The best way I figured it, I couldn’t maintain it towards the entire city. I wasn’t damage by the city in 1950. I used to be damage by the folks. It was good that I went again.”
