This is an opinion column.

All Michael Mays wanted was to buy his father’s childhood home — the house in Fairfield, Alabama, where Willie Mays grew up.

Buy the now dilapidated and neglected house that, until recently, was covered by overgrown foliage such that you could not see the once-proud middle-class home from the street.

The son of the greatest baseball player to ever live wanted to buy the house so long forgotten that Fairfield’s city leaders did not realize who once lived there. Did not value its royal roots.

It was just another run-down property in a city that’s, sadly, long experienced its own run-down.

Run-down finances. Run-down hope.

The home was bought by Willie Howard Mays — Willie’s father, Michael’s grandfather.

“Granddad used to take me down there every summer,” Michael shared last year, three months after his father died, at the age of 93. Died a day before Major League Baseball was to honor him and former Negro League Players with a game between the St. Louis Cardinals and San Francisco Giants, the team whose cap adorns Mays’ plaque in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Michael wants to buy the house and transform it into a magnet for Fairfield youth, a community resource center with a historical designation. A place just blocks from the also-decaying baseball field named for his father. A “safe space,” Mays says, where kids would connect with mentors and explore new paths.

That’s all he wants. All he wanted, rather.

All he wanted because Fairfield won’t let him, it seems. Won’t sell his father’s home to him. Nope.

That’s third-strike clear now — after last Thursday night in Fairfield, just a few miles west of Birmingham. That night, four of five members of the city’s Land Bank Authority convened. (Something they rarely do.) They gathered at city hall in the ghost of the city’s downtown and all but told Michael Mays they have no intention of selling his father’s home to him.

To be fair, Michael Mays was late.

The meeting was scheduled to start at 5:30 p.m. There wasn’t much of an agenda on paper, but Michael Mays was told the disposition of the house, which he’s been interested in acquiring since January of last year, was on it.

Mays lives in South Carolina. He never travels on “game days,” he says, days when meetings or events are scheduled. Circumstances, though, caused him to be on a flight slated to land at Birmingham-Shuttleworth Airport Thursday at 5:05 p.m. So, it was always going to be close — Fairfield is a good 20 minutes from the airport. Longer at rush hour.

Weather happened, too. Mays landed at 5:30 p.m.

En route, he texted Land Bank chair Ron Underwood, who says he wants to sell Mays the house. Mays asked Underwood to FaceTime him into the meeting if needed. At one juncture, before the meeting began, Underwood said, “We’re waiting for Michael Mays.”

During the wait, authority members variously shuttled in and out of council chambers for private conversations — mostly Adrian Mooney and Fairfield Mayor Eddie Penny (yeah, that the mayor’s an authority member seems odd to me, too).

The meeting was finally called to order at 5:56 p.m.

They couldn’t approve the minutes from the last meeting, in January, because of a “computer glitch,” it was said.

Next, Penny asked the authority to pay for the demolition of a blighted house the city had leveled. The authority has no budget, only revenue from abandoned homes it sells, usually for a pittance.

Underwood asked about the cost of the demolition. “About $6,000,” the mayor said. The authority agreed.

That was it for the printed agenda. Still, they waited on Michael Mays, though not all were pleased about it.

There was much muttering. A mic on the table left there by local TV station CBS42 heard Mooney say she didn’t want the meeting’s business to be a “spectacle, and that’s what it’s going to be.”

Presumably, the spectacle she was referring to was the presence of CBS42 news anchor Sherri Jackson and me. We were the only people in the audience.

At 6:03, Mooney motioned for the meeting to be adjourned. Penny seconded. Underwood and authority member Sid Brewer abstained, curiously. “The motion passes,” Underwood said.

As members stood and began to disperse, Michael Mays walked into the room, maybe 90 seconds after adjournment. Penny and Mooney departed without acknowledging Mays. Brewer left soon thereafter.

Penny would not comment before getting into his car in front of city hall and driving away.

Only Underwood remained and greeted Mays, whose face, whose expression shouted a chorus of emotions: Shock and dismay being the most obvious.

“Everybody was gone, I don’t know what happened,” he said. “I was texting everybody my status, where I was…no one gave me an indication it was an issue … I’m disappointed, a little frustrated, confused and very bewildered at the resistance.

“I thought we would be close,” he added. “It would be a done deal. I heard they had a couple of questions they wanted answered. They would vote, ratify, and we’d set a date to exchange funds and titles.”

That didn’t happen, and may never happen, because Fairfield officials appear to be holding out for Major League Baseball to roll through town with a dugout full of cash to restore the field, the Mays house and its surrounding neighborhood. Yet beyond publicly committing to help restore the field — the league held an auction last year that raised more than $250,000 for the project — MLB has expressed no interest in being involved with the house.

“I’m a real estate developer,” Underwood said. “I feel like if you start with that house and you get the right resources, then you can develop the other houses around it. Willie Mays is probably Fairfield’s greatest son, maybe the state of Alabama’s greatest son as far as his sport is concerned. If we brought in the right resources in Major League Baseball we can do something positive for the city of Fairfield.”

Mays is flummoxed at the suggestion that MLB would participate in the acquisition and restoration of his father’s childhood home.

“I’m taken aback hearing that comment again about MLB having some involvement in this house,” he said. “They just don’t. There is none. I’ve had no conversations or indications from MLB that they’re involved with anything but that field.”

Underwood called the restoration of the Mays house a “worthy project.”

“I think something should be done for this house and for him,” Underwood said. “I think the state should come together as a collective with Major League Baseball and do something to honor this man.”

He said he’s willing to reschedule a meeting with Michael Mays to address it — though Mays is weary of the reticence of city officials to sell him the home and “confused” about their actions.

Or inaction.

“For Fairfield, if the house is a good thing and the field is a good thing, then all those resources can come together,” Mays said. “But this idea that the house project and the field project is going to grow into a Fairfield project, somehow sponsored and supported by MLB, I’ve heard nothing. I don’t want to be anywhere I’m not wanted.”

Let’s be better tomorrow than we are today. My column appears on AL.com, and digital editions of The Birmingham News, Huntsville Times, and Mobile Press-Register. Tell me what you think at [email protected], and follow me at twitter.com/roysj, Instagram @roysj and BlueSky.