Wealth & Money Quote by Willie Mays

There is a quiet flex in Willie Mays saying he was "making 500 at 14", but it lands less like bragging than like a timestamp from a different America. The Birmingham Black Barons weren’t a quaint footnote to Major League Baseball; they were a parallel economy built because the main one barred Black players. So when Mays drops that number, he’s not just measuring a paycheck. He’s measuring what talent could earn when it was forced to circulate in its own lane.

The line works because it compresses three stories into one: precocious genius, the realness of Black professional sports infrastructure, and the blunt arithmetic of segregation. "At 14" is the hook - child prodigy energy - but "in those days" is the turn. It hints at scarcity, at families where money wasn’t abstract, and at a world where being paid at all for your gift felt like a victory even when the biggest stage was locked.

There’s also an implied corrective here. People love to frame Negro League players as romantic underdogs; Mays subtly restores their professionalism. He’s telling you the Black Barons were serious business, serious crowds, serious wages. The subtext is almost defiant: don’t pity us, understand us. A teenager earning real money in a rigged system is proof of both the system’s cruelty and the community’s capacity to build around it.