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I saw the now deleted thread about Willie and just wanted to say I was glad to see him yesterday. He was seldom mentioned last season and I worried that he might be having health issues. He didn’t look as spry yesterday as he once was, but who is? My mom met him at a restaurant in Springfield Illinois baack in the 90’s, got his autograph. She told me how friendly he was.
Willie is my all-time favorite Cardinal. Humble, wonderful human who happened to be a really exiting baseball player.
I saw and talked to Willie many days during spring training on the back fields, as recently as earlier this week. I don’t have access to his medical records, but to me, he seemed the same as always. (We are all older than we used to be.)
The reason he wasn’t mentioned much last season was that he was removed from the big-league staff and put in an advisory role.
P.S. The other thread was deleted because the original poster requested it. It included information that was not true. Best to not spread misinformation.
Willie excelled in many areas of the game, but my most vivid memory of the GG CF’er was of him going 1B to HP after an extra base hit off the bat of Tommy Herr. I was seated pretty high up in what was termed the mezzanine level of Busch Memorial which afforded me a good vantage point of the entire playing field and I’ve never seen any other baseball player blaze around the basepaths as quickly as Willie McGee. It was genuinely impressive and could well be described as outright afterburners. No one got around the bases like Willie.
No one got around the bases like Willie.
You would have to go back to Bake McBride a few years before Willie. Seeing him round second to leg out a triple was amazing.
His body was at such an acute angle rounding the bases you thought he was going to tip over. Willie would get so badly fooled on a pitch he looked like he coold never hit the ball. Than the next pitch, sometimes seemingly just as unhittable, he drives it over an outfielders head. But most of all, the guy was always kind and respectful.
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