(TNS) — WILLIE Mays is listed in the reference books as 5-foot-10, 170 pounds. He looms much larger in baseball history. He was a Giant in team affiliation and a giant in this sports-mad country’s athletic culture, and his death Tuesday at 93 is cause for reflection.

While Mays’ name litters the top 10 lists in numerous statistical categories, he doesn’t hold any significant records, career or single season. Yet he is clearly one of the handful of genuine candidates for the title of greatest player ever.

It’s been more than a half-century since Mays called it quits, but the grainy black-and-white film of “The Catch” — his back-to-the-plate grab of a vicious long drive in Game One of the 1954 World Series — has helped keep the memory of his talent alive. (It is worth noting that nobody could make that catch today, because that ball would be over the fence in any current major league park.)

Mays was the 17th Black to play in the National or American Leagues with the breaking of the color barrier. While the abuse heaped on trailblazer Jackie Robinson is well-documented, it would be foolish to believe that racist opposition vanished for others who followed in his path.

Mays was not the vocal activist Robinson was, but simply doing his job served the pursuit of racial equity.

And it is thus an intriguing coincidence that Mays died on the eve of Juneteenth, the holiday marking the practical end of American slavery, and on the day that Major League Baseball began a multi-day celebration of the Negro Leagues centered on Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama — the city of Mays’ childhood and the park where he began his professional career with the Black Barons.

Mays biographer and collaborator Charles Epstein, in his book “Willie’s Time,” describes Mays as emblematic of the massive shifts in postwar America — the migration of southern Blacks northward, the flow of population to the West Coast, the rise of integration. Mays didn’t drive those changes, but he was a figure of prominence living those changes.

He was also, at least in Minneapolis, emblematic of the demise of competitive minor league baseball. The 20-year-old Mays opened the 1951 season with the Minneapolis Millers of the American Association to great fanfare, and fans expected that he would spend the season there, as Ted Williams had a little more than a decade earlier.

Mays spent just 38 days with the Millers — hitting .477 — before the Giants called him up and published an apology to Minneapolis fans for doing so. The episode helped sour fans on the Triple A status of both Minneapolis and St. Paul and fueled the desire for major league status, which was achieved about a decade later.

Mays mattered. His was an American life well-lived.

— The Herald, Sharon, Pa.