It was a sad night in Queens.
On Sept. 25, 1973, baseball icon Willie Mays stood before the crowd at New York’s Shea Stadium to bid farewell to the game he loved so dearly.
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“The game of baseball has been great to me,” Mays said to 44,000 Mets fans. “I have just about everything I need. The only thing that I’m looking for out of baseball now is that I can teach other kids to be as great athletes as I was in my day.”
That would be quite an achievement. Mays’s amazing statistics include 3,283 career hits, 660 home runs, 1,909 RBIs, and 338 stolen bases.Â
He also won two MVP awards and 12 Gold Glove awards, and he was selected to play in 24 All-Star Games.Â
Mays, who died last year at 93, holds the Major League Baseball records for most outfield assists, 7,000, and most games played in center field, 2,829.
Trader moves on Berkshire Hathaway shares
But his incredible skills were eroding and Mays knew it was time to hang up his spikes.Â
TheStreet Pro’s Stephen Guilfoyle remembers that night.
Mays was losing his edge by this time, but as an impressionable youngster, he believed that the Say Hey Kid would eventually come out of his long slump and reclaim his lofty place as a New York and baseball legend.
In addition to being a sports fan, Guilfoyle, whose career dates back to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in the 1980s, was following the financial markets, using his paper-route money to trade when he was just 13 years old.
The Wall Street veteran sees a connection between Mays’s farewell to baseball and Warren Buffett, the longtime CEO of Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A)  and (BRK.B) , who just announced that he would step down from the helm of the investment group.
Buffett is one of the most successful investors of all time, famed for evaluating prospects from a value point of view as opposed to chasing hot stocks.
Since 1965, Berkshire Hathaway has produced a staggering compounded annual return of 19.9% — nearly double that of the S&P 500.
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Both Mays and Buffett had a very basic approach to their respective professions.
“They throw the ball, I hit it,” Mays said. “They hit the ball, I catch it.
Buffett, of course, has been quoted endlessly, but one of his most popular gems is that “risk comes from not knowing what you are doing.”
“I had recently cut loose my long position in Berkshire Hathaway, the B stock,” Guilfoyle said in his recent TheStreet Pro column.Â
“No, I did not know this day was coming, at least not now,” he added. “I held on to those shares for years. I did know that doing what he loved had to be less fun for Warren Buffett in 2025 than it used to be.”
Analyst: News will pressure Berkshire shares
Guilfoyle noted that for Buffett, who is 94, holding down such a demanding job and remaining sharp had to be tough without his career-long friend and business partner, Charlie Munger, who died at 99 in 2023.
“Willie outlasted his peers, Mickey Mantle and Duke Snider,” he said. “He was traded away from his teammate Willie McCovey. He was no longer close to being at the top of his game. He said goodbye.”
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Buffett is different, Guilfoyle noted.Â
“He outlasted Munger,” he said, “but he is sharper now at 94 than most of us ever were at our best. Maybe without his teammate, without ‘his’ Willie McCovey, he felt the love for the game slip away. I don’t know.”
Berkshire Hathaway’s board voted unanimously to name Greg Abel, currently vice chairman for non-insurance operations, as the group’s president and CEO on Jan. 1, 2026. Buffett will remain chairman.
“(Buffett) tried to reassure investors that he will still ‘hang around’ to help,” Guilfoyle noted in a follow-up column. “He’ll have to, as he has not expressed a plan to eventually surrender his position as chairman of the firm’s board.”
Berkshire Hathaway shares were down 4.4% to $516.19 at last check.
Keefe Bruyette raised its price target on Berkshire Hathaway to $735,000 from $730,000 to reflect its updated earnings estimates and peer valuations.
The firm, which affirmed a market perform rating on the shares, viewed Buffett’s plan to step aside as CEO as the most important takeaway of Berkshire’s annual meeting.
While Abel has “increasingly demonstrated competence,” the firm predicted that the news would pressure the shares. Guilfoyle had. a similar viewpoint,
“I think it’s safe to say that Berkshire’s stock would react poorly to the idea that Buffett might be stepping back from his full-time stewardship of the firm,” he said. “This could be a tough time for the stock, as Buffett tries to sunset gracefully.”
“For now,” Guilfoyle said, “BRK.B is on my ‘don’t touch’ list.”
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