The Hagerstown Flying Boxcars held a moment of silence to honor Willie Mays before their Atlantic League game this week against the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs. HAGERSTOWN, Md. — On June 23, 1950, a 19-year-old Negro Leagues standout named Willie Mays skipped his high school prom and boarded a train for Maryland. The next day, in the formerof Hagerstown, Mays would make his debut in affiliated professional baseball.
But to some, Mays’s experience in Hagerstown remains an overlooked aspect of the city’s history. The hotel in the redlined Jonathan Street neighborhood where Mays once stayed is now a church parking lot. Municipal Stadium was demolished in 2022. Meritus Park, a new downtown stadium that opened last month, does not yet feature any permanent tributes to Mays.
“It was the first time I had been off by myself somewhere, for even when I was on the road with the Barons in a segregated situation, at least all of us were segregated at the same time in the same place,” Mays wrote. On Aug. 9, 2004, a 73-year-old Mays was the guest of honor in a city that once jeered him. He filled the ballroom of a downtown hotel, where according to an account in the Hagerstown Herald-Mail, some attendees paid as much as $1,000 for an autograph and a private meet-and-greet. As Landes introduced him to thunderous applause, Mays began to cry.
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