Willie

 The perfect baseball player breathed his last on a scorching summer's day, and now, one last time, he turns his back on us. Runs and runs, across green grass and years and all the withering indignities of years. Runs and runs, past the outfield wall and Vic Wertz's screamer and into forever, until at last all we can see of him is a number.

That number is 24.

It is huge on his back and huge in our memory, a snapshot of Willie Mays doing his Willie Mays thing.

The snapshot is 70 years old now, and every baseball fan in America has seen it. Mays is running, his back to us. His glove is raised. The baseball, Vic Wertz's screaming line drive, is a white dot above it.

In another nanosecond, his glove is going to swallow the ball, and then, in one motion, he'll turn and fire it back toward the infield, cap flying off his head the way it always did. The fans sitting above the outfield wall and to its left, not yet reacting in the photo, will gasp or howl or grab their heads in disbelief.

Willie Mays, who passed Tuesday in the fullness of 93 years, made people do that a lot. He was the Say Hey Kid who played stickball with the neighborhood kids in the streets of New York, and he was, yes, the perfect baseball player, as Johnny Bench once called him.

He broke in with the New York Giants in 1951, and no one had ever seen the like of him. Up from the Birmingham Barons in the Negro Leagues, like so many of the pioneering black players of his time, he could hit and hit with power and steal bases and steal base hits with a nonchalant dip of his glove.

The basket catch was his signature, along with the ease with which he mastered every facet of the game. It was also, one suspects, the bane of every Little League coach's existence, who no doubt suddenly had an epidemic of dropped basket catches among their young charges.

We can argue forever whether or not Willie Mays was the greatest baseball player of all time, but if he's not in your top three -- hell, if he's not in your top two -- you deserve whatever pushback you get. He was that good, and that different from anyone who had come before him.

At the plate, he had a lifetime average of .302 and clubbed 660 home runs; six times he hit 40 or more homers, and five times he led the NL in slugging. 

On the basepaths, he stole 338 bases alltime, and led the league four years in a row at one point.

And in the field?

All he did was win 12 Gold Gloves, more than any centerfielder in history.

He was a 24-time All-Star, including 20 years in a row. Became the first player in 27 years to steal 40 bases when he did it in 1956. Became, in 1965, the first player in history to hit 50 homers and win a Gold Glove in the same season.

You can find all of the above and more in Tim Kurkjian's piece on the ESPN website, which captures Mays' legacy better than perhaps anything else written about him this day. He opens it with an anecdote about Frank Robinson, who was asked once if Mays was the best player he'd ever seen.

Robinson rolled his eyes at the sheer absurdity of the question.

"Of course he was," he replied. "He's as good as you want him to be. You can't exaggerate how great he was."

And how much he saw, in his time. On top of everything else, Mays' era spanned an entire epoch in the game: He started at 17 in the Negro Leagues; came to the Giants at 20 when there were only nine other black players in the majors; saw baseball go from a largely provincial enterprise to a continent-spanning monolith with the expansion to L.A. and San Francisco; and retired when it was on the cusp of free agency.

By the time he died -- within weeks of his death, actually -- Major League Baseball finally righted an historic wrong and announced the inclusion of Negro Leagues player statistics in the MLB record book. And tomorrow, two days after he died, the Giants and Cardinals will play a game in 114-year-old Rickwood Field in Birmingham, an event designed to honor Mays specifically and the Negro Leagues in general.

The hope was that Mays would attend the game in person. He didn't quite make it.

Count it one of the rare times he couldn't do what he set out to do.

"With Willie, it was like Tiger Woods coming to your town, you just always expected him to win," Giants broadcaster Lon Simmons said in 2008, a quote Kurkjian resurrected in his Mays tribute. "The fans expected a miracle from Willie every day.

"And he just gave them a miracle every other day."

Good enough.