“Even though we didn’t stay with the team, there wasn’t no fuss raised,” Mays said. “In Chicago, we had to stay at a hotel on the South Side, but we didn’t have a curfew. We got double meal money. The other guys stayed at a hotel in the north, and it wasn’t far from the ballpark, so they had a bus take them. We had a car  myself, Monte Irvin, Ruben Gomez and a kid named Ray Noble.” (Noble, a Cuban-born catcher who played for the Giants from 1951 to ’53, was actually 12 years older than Mays.)

Image Willie Mays is the subject of “Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend,” out next month. Credit... Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

“We’d go to the hotel, and they didn’t charge us,” he said. “They’d want us to go to the bar, and then all the people at the hotel would migrate to the bar, and I didn’t drink, but they gave me Cokes and things. It was no problem. I had a good time, man, a good time.”

In his early years, Mays was looked after  some said coddled  by Manager Leo Durocher, whose celebrated truculence with opponents and umpires was matched by his paternal attitude toward his star center fielder. Mays called him Mr. Leo back then; today, he acknowledges Durocher, who died in 1991, as a father figure.

“He always made sure I knew what suit to buy and how to dress,” Mays said. “He’d never holler at me. If he had something to say, he’d talk soft. When we were in California, I’d stay at his house, and when we went on the road, his kid was my roommate. Chris Durocher, he was about 7. We’d go on the road, and Leo would say, ‘You got him,’ so for two weeks, I can’t go nowhere, can’t do nothing. I think that was Leo’s way of looking after me.”

Mays giggled as he recalled that he managed to make money on this arrangement. He ate at restaurants where the black players were welcome, and took Chris with him; when Chris reported to his father he had been on a steady diet of soul food, Durocher told Mays that he wanted his son to be able to eat steak.

“And I said, ‘Well give me some steak money then,’ ” Mays said. “And Leo would whip out four or five hundred and stick it in my pocket. And we’d go somewhere, and I’d ask Chris, ‘You want a steak?’ and he’d say, ‘No, I’ll eat what you eat.’ I never told Leo.”

Mays played in four World Series, the first one in his rookie year, 1951, after the Giants beat the Brooklyn Dodgers in a three-game playoff to capture the pennant, winning the final game on Bobby Thomson’s ninth-inning home run off Ralph Branca. Mays was on deck, and he was so focused on his own possible at-bat, he said, that it did not dawn on him that Thomson’s blast had ended the game.