All the joy of Willie Mays

The happy, supremely talented slugger and his cultural impact are captured in a bio-doc.

Four years after Jackie Robinson broke major league baseball’s pernicious color barrier by taking the field with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Willie Mays joined the rival New York Giants and was immediately recognized as one of the game’s best players.

Mays is still considered an all-timer — perhaps one of MLB’s top 10, ever — but as director Nelson George’s documentary “Say Hey, Willie Mays!” notes, his narrative wasn’t as dramatic as Robinson’s or Hank Aaron’s or other all-star Black players who challenged norms and paid a social cost for it. Mays faced racist invective throughout his career as he racked up numbers that put him in the same rarefied realm as Aaron, Babe Ruth, Ted Williams and other legends. But compared to his Black peers, the Mays story was — outwardly, at least — less complicated, all about a universally beloved outfielder playing with infectious joy.

“Say Hey, Willie Mays!” isn’t a corrective to that story, necessarily. Mays really did play exuberantly and didn’t publicly stick his neck out in the way Aaron and others did when it came to civil rights. (Inside the clubhouse, it was a different story.) But this doc is a welcome reminder of how Mays’ very presence in

American popular culture was a game-changer, given that only the most virulent of racists could deny his superiority to nearly everyone on the field.

It’s also a gift to hear from Mays himself, still kicking at 91. He has long deserved a comprehensive bio-doc like this one. It’s something baseball fans will be watching long after the great man is gone.