Make no mistake: Willie Mays is the best of all time

While it’s considered perhaps the best defensive play of all time, for Mays, it was rather routine. Mays made a lot of things look routine in his 23-year career. He won 12 Gold Gloves, the most any center fielder has ever had. Plus, the award didn’t exist until 1957, his fifth full season.

Outstanding defense was just one part of Mays’ game. His career numbers look like something out of a video game. He led the league in home runs four times, had six 40-homer seasons and hit 660 total, which is fifth-most all time. He’s just one of four players who accumulated over 600 home runs and 3,000 hits.

Mays played the majority of games in Candlestick Park, which Frank Robinson, another Hall of Famer who knew a thing or two about hitting home runs, described as a vacuum that would suck the ball back in. “If [Mays] just played in a fair park for hitters, he'd have hit a lot more homers,” Robinson said, via ESPN's Tim Kurkjian.

Mays won the National League MVP award twice and finished in the top six 10 other times. He made the All-Star team 20 years in a row. He has the 12th-most hits all time, with a lifetime batting average of .301. He also stole 338 bases, and Robinson believes that if he’d wanted to, he could’ve stolen many more — perhaps as many as 50 every year.

Wrote Kurkjian, who did get to see him play live:

“Major League Baseball had never seen anyone like him, and hasn't since. Mays was Ken Griffey Jr., only better, and he preceded Griffey by 40 years…He is, by most measures, the second-best all-around player in history behind the incomprehensibly great Babe Ruth. To those who separate the game by the breaking of the color barrier in 1947, there has never been a better player than Mays.”

For Robinson, there is no qualifying Mays’ status as the best of all time. “Of course he is,” he said. “He's good as you want him to be. You can't exaggerate how great he was.”