Before he was a San Francisco Giant, Willie Mays was, of course, a New York Giant. In 1951, he was called up from the team’s Minneapolis minor-league club.

“I arrived in New York City on a Friday at 4 o’clock, scared to death, with three bats in my little briefcase, my glove,” Mays said at his Hall of Fame induction speech in 1979. “I didn’t have a uniform.”

Mays quickly settled in, winning Rookie of the Year honors and launching his Hall of Fame career. The Giants played in the Polo Grounds at 157th Street just off the Harlem River Drive, where Mays made the iconic over-the-shoulder grab known simply as “The Catch,” helping the Giants win the 1954 World Series over the Cleveland Indians.

“New York was like my family,” he said in 2012. “They embraced me like my mother and dad says. And my dad says, ‘When you go to New York, and if they slap you, you turn the other cheek. Because if you don’t, they’re going to shoot you.’”   

Mays lived near the stadium in Harlem, where he was often seen playing stickball with the neighborhood kids.

“In those days, there was a such a tight relationship between Black athletes and Black entertainers and the community,” said William C. Rhoden, a longtime New York Times sports columnist who now writes for Andscape, the ESPN-owned site formerly known as The Undefeated. “It wasn’t like now, where they’re kind of out on Olympus somewhere and the kids who live in places like Harlem will never see you. The only time they’ll see you is on TV.”

Rhoden said he developed a relationship with Mays and was there when Mays visited P.S. 46, a middle school on the site of the old Polo Grounds, in 2011.

“Willie was handing out balls. Then when he got to this last kid, he realized he had run out of balls, and he said, ‘Oh well listen, I can’t let you go home empty-handed, so wait a minute.’ And he pulled out this roll of bills, pulled out this hundred dollar bill,” Rhoden said. “And this kid almost fainted.”

Mays and the Giants moved to San Francisco in 1958, but at the tail end of his career, in 1972, Mays was traded to the Mets, where he spent his final two seasons.

He was warmly embraced, again, in New York. In his Mets debut, he helped beat his old team, the Giants, with the go-ahead home run. Mays retired as a Met in 1973, his final hit coming in that year’s World Series against the Oakland A’s.

If there was any doubt as to his status as a New Yorker, Mays had a street near the old Polo Grounds named after him in 2017. And in 2022, the Mets retired his jersey number.

“When you win a championship in New York, you’re always beloved. You’re never forgotten,” Rhoden said. “Even when he was out on the coast, in San Francisco, he was never forgotten. He was always a New Yorker.”