ALL of us of a certain age will remember with awe and infinite pleasure the opportunities we had to see the incandescent Willie Mays in the flesh--there really was no one else quite like him. Among so many other singular things about his career, no one else ever had the distance in years between 50+ home run seasons (though if Mark McGwire had hit one more homer in 1987, he'd hold the record).
Willie, who passed away earlier today just a month and a half after his 93rd birthday, remains the model for the ideal player--a slugging, superb-fielding center fielder who could hit for a high batting average and steal 25+ bases a year. That feat--hitting .300+, hitting 25+ homers, and stealing 25+ bases in a single season--has only been done 58 times in baseball history. While Barry Bonds now holds the record for achieving those numbers the most often--six times--Mr. Mays (his godfather...) did so four years in a row (from 1957 to 1960).
A long time ago at this blog we feted Mays on his eightieth birthday with a list of his OPS performances by month: you are invited to revisit that post here (but not until you finish this article). What we focus on here is Mays the slugger, and the chart we present to you to commemorate him is one that shows us all eighteen times that he hit ten or more homers in a month:
