Willie Mays‘ passing last month serves to remind baseball fans of his spectacular and singular career. Widely regarded as baseball’s most complete player, Mays excelled at all facets of the game, playing at a high level for almost the entirety of a career spanning 23 years. His passing also reduces to a very slender thread our connection with those still living who graced major league ballparks in the 1950s. More on Willie and 1950s baseball are after the jump.

In terms of star power, the 1950s very likely marks baseball’s pinnacle for everyday players. Consider that, of only 21 players in the 100 Batting WAR club, six played a significant portion of their careers in the decade of the 1950s. Here is that club, sorted by career end date, with the six stars of the 1950s highlighted.

Notably, three of those six players were African-Americans, as are five of the six players who followed them into this exclusive club. Long deprived of the opportunity to play on the game’s biggest stage, the emergence of a plethora black stars in the 1950s is the defining characteristic of the decade.

I mentioned our rapidly shrinking connection to the 1950s through players still living who played in that decade. Here is that shrinking connection visually.

That 75.5 WAR for the 1950s by players still living today is comprised of 76 WAR by the following seven players, and -0.5 WAR for the remaining 120 players.

I mentioned at the outset that Mays is widely regarded as the most complete player in the game’s history, meaning he excelled at all of the five skills most necessary for success in baseball, namely running, throwing, fielding, hitting for average and hitting for power. Let’s look at those skills as reflected in these all-time top 10 lists.

Rbat encapsulates hitting for average and for power. Rfield combines fielding and throwing (and, indirectly, running). Rbaser measures baserunning, principally through base stealing. All of the metrics are represented as Runs Above Average. Mays ranks 10th, 8th and T-10th in the three metrics and is the only player making the top 10 on all three lists. In fact, only one other player (Ozzie Smith) makes it onto two of the lists. Are there players who are lurking just below the top 10 on all of these lists? The answer is an emphatic no. In fact, if we cut Mays’s totals in half, these are the only players who reach all of those halved marks.

Just think about that for a moment: cutting Mays’s career totals in half brings only three other players into the mix, one who just creeps over the halved standard for one metric (Bonds), one who creeps over for two (Aaron), and one who creeps over for all three (Walker). Talk about a unique ballplayer.

Another basis of comparison is the similarity scores calculated by Baseball-Reference.com using Bill James’s methodology. Here are the same totals for the top 5 most similar players to Mays.

The list includes six shortstop seasons, one by a wartime second baseman and Mays’s MVP campaign for the world champion Giants. The preponderance of middle infielders is indicative of positional scarcity, a component of WAR not directly correlated with any of the 5 essential baseball skills. Positional scarcity is measured by Rpos, which typically awards 9 to 11 runs above average for a full-time shortstop season, as compared to the -1 Rpos runs that Mays received for each of his full-time CF seasons.

Mays’ prowess defensively helped him to compile 10 seasons leading his league in WAR, including 8 times leading the majors, the latter mark second only to Babe Ruth’s 9 seasons. Among those 8 seasons were a record 5 consecutive campaigns (1962-66) leading both leagues in WAR, and doing so aged 31 to 35 (Babe Ruth and Barry Bonds are the only players older than 35 to lead the majors in WAR).

Mays debuted as a 20 year-old in the 1951 season and claimed the NL RoY award for the pennant-winning Giants. In the World Series against the Yankees, Mays was matched against another 1951 rookie, Mickey Mantle. The two center-fielders would meet again in the Fall Classic eleven years later, and would be compared against one another throughout their careers and long after, as two of the best to ever play that marquee position.

Mays missed most of the 1952 season and all of the 1953 campaign to military service, but made up for it with his MVP season in 1954, leading the majors in BA, SLG and WAR, and leading the Giants to their first World Series title in 21 years. Thus began a record 13 consecutive seasons with 300 TB and 145 OPS+. The first twelve of those seasons also included 100+ runs, tied with Lou Gehrig for the most such seasons and the most consecutively.

In 1955, Mays led the majors in HR, SLG, OPS and TB, blasting a franchise record 51 long balls and also adding 24 stolen bases. That marked the majors’ first 40 HR/20 SB season, and only the eleventh 20/20 season. The next year, Mays’s 36 HR and majors-leading 40 SB marked the first ever 20 HR/40 SB season and just the second 25/25 campaign. Mays would reel off 25/25 seasons the next four years, those five consecutive seasons still a record, tied with Bobby Bonds (Mays’s godson Barry Bonds would almost certainly have recorded 7 such seasons consecutively if not for the 1994 player strike).

Mays led the majors a record 8 times in Power/Speed number (harmonic mean of season HR and SB totals), and passed Babe Ruth for the career record in 1960 when aged only 29; he would not relinquish that record until 1999, twenty-six years after his career ended. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Mays “invented” the Power/Speed game, as suggested by the chart below.

As the 1960s began, attention was focused on which (if any) of the game’s leading power hitters might reach Babe Ruth‘s record home run total of 714, at that time 180 more than Ruth’s closest pursuer Jimmie Foxx. Foxx was (now second to A-Rod) the fastest to reach 500 HR, cresting that plateau at age 32, compared to age 34 for Ruth. But, Foxx would add only 34 more HR after that point, as a messy personal life and a drinking problem (the two likely not unrelated) contributed to a premature end to his career.

Here is a visual look at Ruth’s pursuers.

The first four data series in the legend at the bottom of the chart are Mays and his contemporaries. Mays, Mantle and Mathews were all born in 1931, and Aaron in 1934, and their season-ending career HR totals are shown for each of the seasons on the horizontal axis. Thus, Mays reached his career total of 660 HR at the end of the 1973 season, the same year that Aaron almost caught Ruth, with 713 HR at the end of that season.

The last three data series, for Ruth, Foxx and Bonds, are plotted by age as shown above the horizontal axis line. For example, Foxx reached 500 HR (exactly) in his age 32 season, shown above 1963, Mays’s age 32 season.

At the end of the 1960 season, Mantle and Mathews were just shy of their 29th birthdays and running neck and neck, comfortably ahead of both Mays and Ruth’s pace, and far ahead of the 26 year-old Aaron. Mays passed Mantle and Mathews in 1964, but started falling off of Ruth’s pace in 1966, and was overtaken by Aaron five years after that. Ruth (708), Aaron (713) and Bonds (703) all reached virtually the same totals at age 39, with the latter two forging ahead with three more seasons in their careers, compared to just one for Ruth.

Mays and Aaron also tracked each other closely in other categories, as both reached 3000 hits and 1750 RBI in 1970, before finishing their careers with very similar stat lines, including almost identical rate stats.

It was also a saw-off in their 335 head-to-head matchups (a bit more than two seasons worth of games), again producing almost the same totals.