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Giants Broadcaster Emotionally Shares News of Willie Mays's Death While Calling Game

Kristen Wong

Robert Hanashiro / USA TODAY NETWORK
In this story:

San Francisco Giants broadcaster Dave Flemming was working the visitors’ radio booth at Wrigley Field during Tuesday's game against the Chicago Cubs when his job got a thousand times more difficult.

News of Willie Mays’s death broke Tuesday evening, sending shockwaves across the baseball community. Flemming caught wind of Mays’s death at a rather inopportune time, as he was in the middle of doing the play-by-play in the bottom of the fourth.

Somehow, Flemming still managed to continue calling the game while also delicately reporting the death of the Giants legend on-air. At one point, Flemming appeared to choke up, but he quickly gathered himself and paid a sweet tribute to Mays. 

“I’m having a hard time saying the words,” Flemming started. 

A long pause. 

“But we found out just a little while ago, and the Giants have now made an announcement—here’s a ground ball to second, Estrada throws out Pete Crow-Armstrong—the all-time greatest Giant, No. 24 Willie Mays, has passed away today at the age of 93.”

“And right as we get ready to head to his hometown in honor of the great Willie Mays, we have to say goodbye,” continued Flemming, his voice wavering. “So we’ll step aside here for a moment and come back and the ball game will continue. And obviously we’re going to talk a lot more about Willie tonight and over the next many, many days. I hate to be the one to have to pass that news along.”

Here’s Flemming’s emotional call:

Mays spent the majority of his 23-year MLB career with the Giants and finished with 660 home runs and 2,068 runs scored, good for sixth and seventh all-time respectively. He died two days before the Giants’ scheduled game against the St. Louis Cardinals to honor the Negro Leagues in Mays’s hometown in Alabama.

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Kristen Wong

KRISTEN WONG

Kristen Wong is a Staff Writer on the Breaking & Trending News Team at Sports Illustrated. She has been a sports journalist since 2020. Before joining SI, Kristen covered four NFL teams as an associate editor with the FanSided NFL Network and worked as a staff writer for the brand’s flagship site. She has written about soccer, the NFL, NBA, and MLB since 2020, and outside of work, has dreams of running her own sporty dive bar.

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