“‘Anything in between is mine,’” Greason said Mays told them.
Sharing this story in a telephone interview from his home last week, Greason was still holding out hope that Mays’s health would allow him to make it back Thursday to his hometown, to Rickwood Field — the place that Greason and Mays once called home as members of the Birmingham Black Barons — for an MLB game that honors the legacy of the Negro Leagues. But Mays died Tuesday at 93, leaving Greason to mourn the loss, to move forward with his past but one less friend.
As the oldest living Negro leaguer, the 99-year-old Greason resides in a special section of the seen-it-all, done-it-all department. He grew up across the street from Martin Luther King in Atlanta. He survived the war in Iwo Jima abroad and the ills of Jim Crow segregation at home. He was teammates in the Negro Leagues with Mays, became the first Black pitcher in St. Louis Cardinals history and spent his later years as a mentor in the minors for Bob Gibson. He was married to the same woman for 65 years before she died and continues to serve as a minister at his church after 53 years.
Greason wouldn’t have made it this far without acquiring some wisdom, but an early lesson from his mother resonated as a guiding principle.
“The way up is down,” Greason said. “It was a paradox. My mother told me: ‘Humble yourself, and you’ll be lifted up. But if you exalt yourself, you’ll come down.’ So I tried to keep that low profile.”
Greason has lived long enough to see the Negro Leagues, and his contributions to the game, acknowledged in ways that he never considered. Featuring the Cardinals, Greason’s former team, and the San Francisco Giants, the franchise that honored Mays in life as a deity, the Rickwood Field game will showcase a forgotten part of baseball’s rich history — in the oldest professional baseball stadium, in the throwback uniforms of the Negro Leagues’ St. Louis Stars and San Francisco Sea Lions.
Mays will be memorialized in the city that raised him, and Greason will be celebrated in the town he adopted as his own.
“A whole lot of talent was overlooked,” Greason said of the Negro Leagues. “I never thought that they would recognize me at all.”
With Mays’s death, Greason and Ron Teasley are all that remain of the 2,300 Negro leaguers who played from 1920 to 1948 and had their statistics integrated into MLB’s hallowed record book, forever changing what was once considered permanent. Greason and Mays barely made the cut, sharing a rookie season in 1948 that saw the Black Barons lose the final Negro League World Series in five games to the Homestead Grays.
Mays signed with the New York Giants in 1950 — three years after Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier — and Greason debuted with the Cardinals four years later.
Three months shy of reaching the century mark, Greason is a reminder that the past is still with us — in legendary stories and especially in those who are still alive to share them. The middle child of five, Greason joked that his family didn’t even have enough to afford the “or” in poor. (“We were po,” he said with a laugh.) He was one of the first Black Marines, serving in a segregated unit at Iwo Jima, where he was witness to his two best friends being killed in battle and the iconic American flag raising. His baseball career began when he returned to the United States. In addition to playing with Mays in Birmingham, he was part of a loaded team in Puerto Rico with Mays, Roberto Clemente and Orlando Cepeda.
“To be able to come out of the war and become a ballplayer, and to do pretty good, it was a blessing to me,” he said. “Whenever I go to that mound, I did pretty good. And I kept a low profile. I didn’t brag, just stayed humble. And everything worked out well.”
While he didn’t make much money playing baseball, Greason made memories. Of shutting down the Black Barons in an exhibition game on a Friday in Asheville, N.C., and of joining Birmingham as its new hard-throwing right-hander by Sunday. Of beating the Kansas City Monarchs to earn a trip the Negro League World Series. Of Mays, his dear friend of more than 75 years.
“There has never been a ballplayer as good as Willie Mays,” Greason said.
Greason served his country again for two years in the Korean War, reaching the Cardinals three years after he returned. The experience in the majors, he said, was “terrible.” At the time, MLB teams would reserve limited spots on their rosters for Black players, and that could lead to isolation for those who made it. Greason said he never had anyone to play catch with and didn’t make any friends. And even though his manager, Eddie Stanky, had experience as Robinson’s teammate with the Brooklyn Dodgers and Mays’s teammate with the Giants, it did nothing to warm his attitude toward coaching Greason.
The end was abrupt but unsurprising for Greason. He recalled throwing batting practice before a game and struggling to get the ball over the plate.
“Stanky was something else. He came out and he cursed me. And I cursed him back. And it surprised him because Blacks weren’t supposed to act like that toward Whites,” said Greason, who was soon sent back to the minors for good. “I knew I had to be perfect to stay.”
Greason returned to Birmingham after retirement, driving a truck for a department store before he quit when he discovered his purpose. He was a member of the 16th Street Baptist Church but happened to be in Tuscaloosa playing in a baseball game with friends the morning it was bombed by the KKK, killing four Black girls. That incident, and encouragement from his late wife, Willie, redirected his life toward the ministry, fulfilling a vow he made at Iwo Jima to serve God if he made it out in one piece.
He later became engaged in the fight for civil rights in segregated Birmingham, and since 1971 he has been pastor at Bethel Baptist Church, located two miles from Rickwood Field.
“This guy is an example for anyone, anywhere, anything,” said Mays’s son, Michael. “They sent them to Iwo Jima to be human shields. He makes it back, figures out he can throw a baseball, winds up a St. Louis Cardinal. And then 53 years pastoring his church. You go to Greason’s basement and you see Marine full dress blues, a St. Louis Cardinals uniform and his robes. You wear any one of those, you’re the man. So what do you say about a guy like that?”
While the Cardinals would bring him back in 2014 for a ceremony to honor his brief but significant time with the team, Greason assumed that would be the last time he was acknowledged by MLB in any significant way. But here he is, set to receive his figurative flowers in Birmingham, although without his former “roomie.”
Greason doesn’t follow baseball as much as he once did; he won’t turn off a game that’s on but won’t necessarily seek one out, either. He has noticed the decline in Black participation in the majors — only 57 Black players were on Opening Day rosters, down from 59 last season — but can’t offer any suggestions for how to reverse, or halt, the trend. “It’s hard for the kids today,” he said. “They have other mind-sets.”
Still, this embrace of Black baseball’s past is “a blessing” for himself and fellow Negro leaguers. Asked whether he’s excited, Greason paused to chuckle, then kept this moment in perspective.
“When you get to 99 years old, it’s not much to excite you,” he said. “You’re looking forward to getting home to God.”
Andrew Golden contributed to this report.
