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Willie Mays Defined Baseball’s Golden Era
Willie Mays in New York, in 1955. (Photo by Hy Peskin/Getty Images)
Having grown up in Jim Crow Alabama, he never thought he’d play in a major league—let alone become America’s most exciting player.
By Joe Nocera
06.20.24
11
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From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, baseball’s greatest era, Willie Mays was baseball’s greatest player. That was before football and baske…

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Joe Nocera
Joe Nocera is an editor and writer at The Free Press. During his long career in journalism, he has been a columnist at The New York Times, Bloomberg, Esquire, and GQ, the editorial director of Fortune, and a writer at Newsweek, Texas Monthly and The Washington Monthly. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2007.
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