He’s a once in a lifetime ballplayer, and we may never see his equal again. . . . Whatever he does, he does to perfection.
—LES BIEDERMAN, sportswriter, Pittsburgh Press, 1930–69
Willie Mays is the greatest player ever to put on a uniform, greater than Ted Williams, Stan Musial or Mickey Mantle.
—ALVIN DARK, shortstop (1950–55) and manager (1960–62), San Francisco Giants
You’re the best ballplayer I ever saw. Having you on my team made everything worthwhile. . . . I’ll always be looking out for you.
—LEO DUROCHER, manager of the New York Giants, 1947–55
Mays is the greatest thing I have seen in my life. And there’s not one guy in the major leagues who thinks different.
—LEN GABRIELSON, first base, San Francisco Giants, 1965–66
The exaggeration and hyperbole surrounding Mickey Mantle seem to know few bounds, although without it Mantle would rate as one of the game’s all-time greats nonetheless. The hype about Satchel Paige as possibly “the greatest pitcher of all time, any color, any league,” is beyond the pale, for much of Paige’s fame is due to his extraordinary longevity, consisting largely of three-inning appearances against no-name players and teams.1 William Howard Mays Jr. is another story. Mays is the real deal, top to bottom, side to side, through and through, without hype or with it.
Mays hit 660 home runs in a twenty-two-year career, at one point the second highest in history, behind Ruth, and third all time at the conclusion of Mays’s career. Hank Aaron passed Mays on the all-time list when both Mays and Aaron were still active, in 1972. Seemingly, Mays’s record would have been eclipsed in the steroid era of Mark McGuire, Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds, and Alex Rodriguez. Yet Mays still ranks fifth all time (Bonds, Aaron, Ruth, Rodriguez, Mays).
After being National League Rookie of the Year in 1951, Mays played in twenty All-Star games. He batted .302 lifetime. In the outfield he made legendary circus catches. Once the Golden Glove Awards were initiated, in 1957, Mays won twelve of them consecutively. He was a daring base runner, taunting pitchers and stealing bases. His signature trademark was his baseball hat flying off as he rounded the bases pell-mell, or as he turned to make a rocket throw from center field after making yet another fantastic catch.
Movie actress Tallulah Bankhead, a Giants fan and a Mays aficionado, in an interview in Look, a popular magazine of that time, stated: “There are two geniuses, Willie Mays and Willie Shakespeare.”2 Frank Robinson, himself a star and a Hall of Fame player, thought that “Mays was the greatest player of all time, who could hit, run and field with amazing grace, while seemingly always having fun.”3 Baseball writers voted Mays into the Hall of Fame the first year he was eligible, only the eighth time in baseball history the writers did so.
Larry Doby was not so much overshadowed by Willie Mays because Mays himself and his achievements were masked from view, at least partially, by Mays’s own demons, so to speak. First was “The Catch,” Mays’s dead-run, over-the-shoulder fielding of Vic Wertz’s fly ball in the first game of the 1954 World Series (Giants versus Indians). Entire books have been written solely about the game in which “The Catch” occurred.4 For decades and even today, many baseball fans remember Mays more for his catch than his career achievements and the joy and exuberance with which he played the game. Many regard “The Catch” as celebratory of Mays’s feats and career, according to author Allen Barra, “the most famous catch in World Series and probably baseball history,” but one can contend that his great 1954 World Series catch actually had unforeseen and possibly negative consequences for Mays.5
Second, once the Giants moved to San Francisco, Mays fell more squarely under the shadow cast by the hometown hero, Joe DiMaggio, the Yankee Clipper. Once in the Bay Area, Mays met racial and other forms of discrimination one never would have expected in the city of Haight-Ashbury and the flower children. The press defamed him; Giants’ followers booed him; and the same fans voted inferior, less-deserving players MVP as well as other awards over him.6
In 1959 Mays and his wife actually sold their San Francisco house, bought a house in New Rochelle, New York, and moved back there. A racist had thrown a Coke bottle through the living-room picture window of their San Francisco house. “I didn’t know any of my neighbors,” Margherite Mays said of the upscale neighborhood where she and Mays had lived. From then on, during the season Willie would live in a rented house or apartment in San Francisco.7
Mays did not emerge from those shadows until the conclusion of the 1962 season, when the Giants beat the other West Coast Major League team, the Los Angeles Dodgers, in a playoff for the National League pennant.
There were a number of smaller demons as well. Early in his career Mays played in the shadow of Mickey Mantle and the New York Yankees, a stone’s throw across the Harlem River from the Giants (the New York Gothams until 1895) and the Polo Grounds but a quantum leap ahead of the Giants in media coverage and in the hearts and minds of many New Yorkers. Mays also was but one of a trio of Hall of Fame center fielders, all in New York. Mickey Mantle played for the Yankees; Duke Snider played for the Brooklyn Dodgers; and Mays played for the New York Giants, all at the same time. The other two were white, lending at least a tinge of racism to the competition among the three.
After the Giants’ World Series win in 1954, management let the team age without infusing new blood. From 1956 onward Mays played on successively worse Giants teams. Attendance fell, from over 1.5 million in 1954 to 629,000 in 1957. Suburbanites, fed up with the lack of parking at Giants games and content to watch the ever-increasing number of televised baseball games, stayed at home.8 The Milwaukee Braves, with Warren Spahn, Lew Burdette, Eddie Matthews, Joe Adcock, and Hank Aaron, eclipsed the Giants and every other National League team, winning pennants in 1957 and 1958.
Mays also came under the cloud of a vocal Jackie Robinson, who had become not only the paragon of integration in professional sports but a leading civil rights activist overall. Robinson criticized Mays for his lack of involvement in the civil rights movement.9 Robinson went so far as to single Mays out in a 1968 nationally televised interview, calling Mays a “do-nothing Negro,” who should have become more active especially after the way Mays had been denied housing when he first moved to San Francisco.10
Mays had his own clouds whose shadows overlaid his achievements on the field and with which he had to deal, including the long-lasting hostility he encountered in California, the image of the young, blond superhero Mantle, a rapidly deteriorating Giants team, and Jackie Robinson labeling Mays as an “‘Uncle Tom” for refusing actively to support civil rights.”11
Willie Mays and Larry Doby were friends. They barnstormed together in the early fifties, with Mays forming Mays All-Stars following the 1955 season but barnstorming with other team leaders before then. Before Mays the organizers had been, first, Jackie Robinson and second, for a year, Roy Campanella. Mays’s 1955 team had an outfield of four black future Hall of Famers: Willie Mays, Larry Doby, Henry Aaron, and Monte Irvin.12 Think of that!
Until suddenly eclipsed by national and then local televised broadcasts of baseball games and the presence of television sets in a growing number of American homes, barnstorming was a valuable source of extra income for Major Leaguers, whose presence on a traveling team could draw fans to the ballpark. Mays and Doby were teammates for twenty-plus games following several Major League seasons, traveling together through smaller cities and into Mexico.
The Giants and the Indians were two of the first teams to relocate spring training on a permanent basis to Arizona. Bill Veeck relocated Indians spring training there because he thought Tucson attitudes and establishments would be more receptive to a black player (Doby) than would be Florida’s, an assumption that proved to be erroneous.13 For much the same reason, Branch Rickey had moved the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers and the Montreal Royals, then with Jackie Robinson on the roster, to Havana, Cuba.14 Indeed, Veeck’s calculation proved to be doubly or triply erroneous. Each spring, and not merely the initial one in 1948, Tucson’s Hotel Santa Rita insisted that Larry Doby, and later Larry Doby and his young family, seek separate accommodations.
By contrast Horace Stoneham, Leo Durocher, and the Giants would not tolerate the Hotel Adams’s initial attempts in Phoenix to segregate Mays. The Hotel Adams had previously (pre-Mays) allowed the first black players with the Giants to room there and quickly capitulated on other points as well.15
Today the Cactus League (Arizona) far outstrips the Grapefruit League (Florida) in the number of Major League teams training there but not back then. At that time the Giants and the Indians, the pioneers of spring training in Arizona, had few choices other than playing each other. So for practice the Giants (Phoenix), with Mays, and the Indians (Tucson), with Doby, played each other. They played as many as twenty or twenty-one Giants-Indians exhibition games each spring.
Also, along with the Dodgers, the Indians and the Giants were the first Major League teams to integrate. By the time of Mays’s elevation to the big leagues, in 1951, the two teams combined had eight black ballplayers. The presence of more than just tokens reinforced the respect for and the friendship with one another that the Indians players, including Doby, had, and the Giants, including Mays, had as well.16
Seeking to inject a bit of drama into their books, Mays’s biographers describe Mays as having been subject to the same sorts of taunts and discrimination that Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby had faced several years earlier when they began the process of integrating the major leagues. They recount Mays as having to stay in separate hotels, apart from his teammates, while he played in the minor leagues.17 None of that is true to the facts.
First, in the Minors Mays played for the Chattanooga Choo-Choos and then the Birmingham Barons. These were black teams. All the players roomed together—there was no separation. Second, the biographers lead you to believe that two evils of segregation were inferior accommodations and inedible meals. That was not true. Black ballplayers of that era recall rooming-house home-cooked food as far superior to hotel fare of the time. Instead, a real evil of segregation was isolation from the team, from someone with whom you might discuss today’s and tomorrow’s games, from someone with whom you could just hang out. Mays did not experience any of the singling out or isolation such as Doby and Robinson recalled. While Mays played in the minor leagues, by and large he was in the mainstream, with his teammates.
Once Mays signed with the Giants, the club assigned him to the Trenton, New Jersey, Giants of the Class B Interstate League. Because Mays was the first black on the team, the Giants assigned a Cuban from the New York Cubans Minor League franchise to Trenton, where he could be Mays’s roommate.18 No evidence exists that Mays and his Cuban roommate had to stay in boardinghouses or hotels separate from the team.
Trenton did have to play the Hagerstown, Maryland, team, also in the Interstate League. Maryland, of course, is below the Mason-Dixon Line. In some respects, then, Maryland is more southern than northern. On Mays’s first night on the field in Hagerstown, he was subjected to some brickbats and slurs, but the abuse did not last for long. By the third night of the series, the Hagerstown fans were cheering him and his spectacular exploits on the playing field.
Mays then played for the Giants AAA franchise, the Millers in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He became an instant celebrity. “[He] drew a round of applause seldom accorded to any player. The local media swooned as well.”19 In thirty-five games he hit .477, made acrobatic catches, and ran bases with abandon. “The fans loved him. He was everything they heard about and more.”20 Mays also was in a town where little or no racial prejudice seemed to exist. “It would have been hard to imagine a city on the United States in 1951 that had less racial tension than Minneapolis.”21 Mays had the run of the city.
After only thirty-five games in Minnesota, the Giants called Mays up to the big club. Mays did not want to leave. Leo Durocher, the Giants manager, had Mays paged in a movie theater where Mays was enjoying one of his favorite pastimes, watching motion pictures, especially cowboy movies and other westerns. “I’m not ready to go yet. I’m not coming,” Mays told his would-be boss. “What are you hitting now?” Durocher asked. Willie told him, “Four seventy seven.” “Well, do you think you can hit two-fucking-fifty for me?”22 That did not seem so bad, so Mays went to join the Giants, then playing in Philadelphia. Stoneham and the Giants felt constrained to take out a large newspaper ad in the Minneapolis newspaper, apologizing to the public for so suddenly taking their fan favorite away from them.
So, no, it is not accurate to say that Willie Mays endured segregated dining, housing, or travel, or that he was subjected to hooting, slurs, taunts, and threats in baseball, either in the minor or major leagues. There are no hints of such rough treatment. Instead, Willie Mays was pampered, coddled, and protected, from the age he was a toddler, through the Minors, and on into the Majors, probably equal to or in excess of what any other Major League baseball player ever has experienced.
As with Mickey Mantle and his father, Mutt, Mays was a project that his father, Cat, undertook almost from the day of Mays’s birth, May 6, 1931: “Make no mistake, Cat [Mays] wanted his son to play baseball and to play better than anyone else. He exposed Willie to the sport as early as possible. . . . Even before Willie could walk, Cat gave him a two-foot long stick and a rubber ball, and the future home run champion, sitting on his diapered butt, whacked the ball and crawled after it.”23
Doby, of course, had no fatherly guidance as he grew up. When he was still small, Doby was sent north to Patterson, New Jersey, to live with aunts. His father bounced between Camden, South Carolina, and Saratoga Springs, New York, never again having much contact with his gifted son. He died by drowning at the age of thirty-seven in an upstate New York lake.
Cat played on the same industrial league teams as did his son, the teenaged Willie. It is interesting to note that all three, Mays, Mantle, and Doby, began their baseball careers as shortstops and later were converted to center fielders (Doby not until he reached the major leagues). Both positions, more than others on the field, require a strong throwing arm, which all three had in abundance.24
In addition to his father, Mays was fortunate always to have had older teammates as well as managers who were in awe of his talents and protective of him. “He was the most exciting young player you have ever seen,” said a teammate and mentor on the Birmingham Black Barons, James Zapp, as early as 1948.25
Contrary to most players, for whom protection and paternalism lessen, if not disappear, when they reach the major leagues, for Mays they escalated. First, the Giants assigned him a “handler,” or chaperone, who became ubiquitous in Mays’s life. Frank Forbes was an older Harlem resident, given to wearing bow ties and spouting erudite sayings. Mays could not go anywhere—a dinner, a menswear shop, a picture show—without Forbes accompanying him. When the army discharged Mays in May 1953, the Giants sent Forbes to Fort Eustis, Virginia, to fetch their new center fielder. Mays was “coddled, even patronized, by the Giants.”26
Jackie Robinson too had a chaperone, or a companion at least, for Branch Rickey hired Wendell Smith, the Pittsburgh Courier sportswriter, and an activist in the integration of baseball, to be a chauffeur and friend to Robinson. Perhaps because he was parachuted into the major leagues, with little in the way of advance planning or preparation, Doby had none of these aids for his transition.
Second, the Giants assigned Monte Irvin, a future Hall of Famer, also black, and twelve years Mays’s senior, to be Mays’s roommate.27 Leo Durocher, the Giants manager, told Irvin, “‘Tell him what to do and how to do it.’ Irvin positioned Mays in the outfield, advised him on what pitchers threw, how well they held base runners, and which catchers had good arms.”28 “Look after him,” Durocher commanded, “watch who he talks to, make sure he gets to the ballpark on time, make sure he doesn’t have too many hangers-on, make sure he talks to the right people.”29
Third, manager Leo Durocher became a second father to Mays. “Leo made other players nervous with his style, but he made Mays feel comfortable right away. He simply buttered up the big rookie.”30 At practices Durocher played pepper games with Mays, fast-paced, short-range hitting and fielding drills, which Mays later remembered as “one of his fondest memories.”31 Mays called Durocher “Mr. Leo”; Durocher called Mays “son” or “kid.” When Durocher and Mays first met, in spring training 1951, Durocher began the dialogue with, “Hey, kid, what are you going to show me today?”32 Russ Hodges, Mays’s teammate, expressed wonder: “Mays was the only player I ever saw who could do no wrong in Durocher’s eyes. Everyone else felt the lash of Leo’s tongue, sooner or later, but Willie never did.”33 “With Willie,” Durocher openly said, “you have to just keep patting him, keep rubbing him.”34
The “paternalistic way that Durocher treated Willie Mays” never would have worked with the fiery Jackie Robinson. “The pair hated each other,” despite Durocher’s intervention on Robinson’s behalf in order to quell player dissatisfaction with integration of the Dodgers.35
Fourth, from the get-go, the fans at the Polo Grounds, where the Giants played, loved Mays and cheered for him without reservation. New York papers “heralded Mays [and Mantle as well] as pheenoms when they arrived in New York in 1951.”36 The Polo Grounds center field fence was 505 feet from home plate, “giving Mays a sprawling pasture for his skills, the quick jumps, the pell-mell running style, the rocket arm.”37 He was a “savvy showman,” fixing his Giants baseball cap so it “would fly off when he rounded the bases or chased fly balls, a pulsating flourish turned into pure theater.”38 The crowds loved it.
Today Mays is “revered for capturing the joy and innocence of a bygone era.”39 But back then, in the early 1950s, it was evident to all that “a love of life just flowed out of him.”40 Giants first baseman Whitey Lockman saw every day that Mays “just bubbled over with excitement and enthusiasm.”41 “Willie’s exuberance was his immortality,” author Roger Kahn wrote of those early years.42
Mays’s exuberance stood out all the more because prior to his breaking into the lineup, one unnamed sportswriter had described the Giants’ pre-Mays outfield “as a trio of morticians.”43 “Mays introduced a new aesthetic, a combination of drama and athleticism that broke fresh ground on the playing field. His crowd appeal was immense.”44 Mays also met and rubbed shoulders with the celebrities of his day, at least the black ones: Joe Lewis, Duke Ellington, Billy Eckstine, and Dizzy Gillespie, to name a few.45
Fifth, “his teammates, black and white, loved him, his joy in playing the game was contagious, a quality they much appreciated during those tense late-summer weeks of the pennant race. The press loved him too.”46
In his rookie season the Giants trailed the Dodgers by thirteen and a half games in August. By season’s end the Giants had made up all of it, forcing a playoff. In the “shot heard ‘round the world,” Giants infielder Bobby Thompson hit a home run off Dodgers reliever Ralph Branca to win the NL pennant. Mays hit .270, with 20 homers, 68 RBIs, and 7 stolen bases, in 121 games that season, a showing that won him Rookie of the Year honors. In the ensuing World Series against the Yankees, the Giants folded, possibly exhausted from their regular-season herculean effort. In the Series Mays hit .247, slightly lower than the minimum .250 Durocher earlier had prescribed for him.
All was not a bed of roses, however. After Mays’s arrival in the big show, he went 1 for 25 at the plate, nearly despairing. After a game manager Leo Durocher emerged from his office. “I saw Willie crying and I put my arm around him.”
“Mister Leo.” Mays replied, “I can’t hit up here . . .”
Leo pointed to Mays’s uniform and told him, “Willie, see this across [your] uniform? It says ‘Giants.’ A long as I am manager of the Giants you’re my centerfielder.” And he was.47
Application of stereotypes to Mays, mostly by sportswriters, necessitated a larger adjustment than did a temporary inability to hit a Major League curveball. “Most of Willie’s early profiles were condescending, portraying him as an adolescent, or at least . . . with an adolescent’s mentality. [Readers] never knew of his mental problems, his anxiety over money, the desire to succeed that so often resulted in fainting spells.”48 The press labeled him the “say hey kid”; none of his teammates or friends called him that, leading a sports columnist to wonder if as Mays matured the time had come to call him William.49 The say-hey nickname continued to stick long after outliving its usefulness, adding to the Stepin Fetchit flavor and image many had of Mays.
“Journalists were using Mays to perpetuate negative stereotypes about Negroes . . . as having an ‘innate gaiety of soul’ [living] a lifetime of laughs and thrills, excitement and fun . . . unburdened by unnatural inhibitions.”50 This was the Stepin Fetchit image, “servile and simplified.”51 Manager Leo Durocher contributed to the unfavorable perceptions “with Mays calling him ‘Mr. Leo,’ and Durocher responding with ‘boy.’”52
Mays’s own behavior contradicted these images that sportswriters succeeded in promulgating about the early Willie Mays. Early in his career Mays told his father of racial epithets he encountered in Hagerstown, Maryland, when Mays played for the Trenton Giants against Hagerstown. A racist fan had hollered, “Who’s that n—r walking out on the field?” Cat Mays told the young Willie to “turn the other cheek.” “Willie told him he had no intention of turning the other cheek.”53 The attitude displayed is the opposite of the simple, servile image the press portrayed.
That substance and resolve became more apparent as Mays matured. He was not active in the civil rights movement, and Jackie Robinson went to extremes to castigate him for it, but Mays was introspective about his position: “I wasn’t much for controversy. Not then. Not now either, I guess. Never.”54 But he had a long, little-noted devotion to children’s causes, visiting hospitals and parties for needy kids throughout his career.
In those early Major League years, Willie Mays led a charmed life. “Whenever an obstacle appeared in his path, it magically seemed to vanish . . . . [He] signed with exactly the right organization in exactly the right city that could shield him from the still powerful influence of Jim Crow.”55 He was on a roll. “His teammates liked him, the fans adored him, and to the veteran New York sportswriters, he was the black son they never had.”56
Larry Doby encountered obstacles that Mays never had to think about. Without preparation or planning, Doby was parachuted into the major leagues as the first black in the American League. Growing up he had no father or other mentor to school him, advise him, or help him improve as a baseball player, as Mays and Mantle did. When he got to the big leagues, Doby had neither chaperone nor handler nor companion, as Mays and Robinson did.
Cleveland manager Lou Boudreau was the antithesis of Leo Durocher. Even Boudreau describes the early Doby-Boudreau relationship as “awkward.” Midway through his first full season, Doby did acquire a black roommate, Satchel Paige, but he was no Monte Irvin. The self-centered, woman-chasing, wild Paige turned out to be a liability rather than an asset to the young Indians center fielder. The question that arises is whether Doby, had he had all the pampering and coddling Mays received, would have put up numbers even greater than those he did achieve and if instead of thirteen years his career would have stretched out toward Mays’s twenty-two or Mantle’s eighteen seasons? We will never know.
In the first game of the 1954 World Series (Indians versus Giants), played in New York’s spacious Polo Grounds, the Indians jumped out to a 2–0 lead. The Giants tied the score in the third. There the score stood, 2–2, until the top of the ninth inning, when the Indians put Larry Doby and Al Rosen aboard at second and at first, respectively. Next up was the powerful Vic Wertz, the Indians’ slugging first baseman, recently acquired from Baltimore.
On defense in center field, Willie Mays was playing shallow, hopefully to prevent Doby, who was an extremely fast runner, from scoring from second on a Wertz single. Wertz crushed the first pitch from Giant relief pitcher Don Liddle. The hit was variously described as a “long low fly ball” or a “high liner . . . not terribly high.”57 Arnold Hano, who authored an entire book about the game that day, A Day at the Bleachers, describes Wertz’s hit “as hard as I have ever seen a ball hit, on a high line to centerfield.”58 “I have seen hitters such as Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Ted Williams, Jimmy Foxx, Ralph Kiner, Hack Williams [and] Johnny Mize. . . . None, that I recall, ever hit a ball harder than the one hit by Wertz.”59
Mays turned and made a dead run toward the Polo Ground’s center-field wall, at that point 483 feet from home plate. At the last second, an estimated twenty feet from the outfield wall, Mays looked over his shoulder and took the ball over his head. “He put his hands up in a cup-like fashion, over his left shoulder, and caught the ball much like a football player catching leading passes in the end zone.”60 In one motion Mays whirled and threw toward the infield.
“I saw [Larry] Doby, too, hesitating, the only man, I think, on the diamond who conceived that Mays might catch the ball. Doby is a centerfielder and a fine one, and very fast himself, so he knows what a centerfielder can do,” Hano recounts.61 Doby, who at first had run toward third base, recognized that the ball would be caught. He returned to second, tagged up, and ran to third. Al Rosen, the Indians third baseman, began to advance to second but thought better and returned to first.
Mays’s catch and throw prevented a run (Doby) from scoring. The game went into extra innings, with reserve Giants outfielder Dusty Rhodes hitting a walk-off pinch-hit home run, breaking the tie and winning the game for the Giants.
The Mays catch and throw have become legendary. The throw was, according to Hano, “the throw of a giant, the throw of a howitzer made human, arriving at second base as Doby was pulling into third and Rosen was scampering back to first.”62 “What a throw, what an astonishing throw.”63
Few remember the “stupendous hitting” by Vic Wertz in the 1954 World Series, when he hit 8 for 16. “All they remember is his out. . . . The catch made the 1954 World Series. Five decades later few people can even name the teams, say, in the 1957 World Series. But fans know that the Giants won in 54 because of Mays’s mad dash to straightaway center. The catch became Willie Mays’s brand.”64
Even at that time The Catch was accorded a great deal of hype, some deserved, some not. Sporting News appraised The Catch as “sports’ greatest thrill” for the year 1954, ranking it ahead of Roger Bannister’s breaking the four-minute barrier for the mile.65 For posterity Mays’s catch has been said to be “the greatest event that ever happened” in the long history of New York’s Polo Grounds.66 By virtue of Mays’s “incredible catch,” one hyped-up scenario goes, “the Indians became demoralized” and lost the entire World Series.67
Author Arnold Hano’s view is that “no one else could have made that catch.”68 But there are other views, coming from players and managers in baseball, rather than from sportswriters, given as the latter are to hyperbole, or from sycophantic biographers, given as they are to hero worship. For instance Bob Feller, the Indians’ Hall of Fame pitcher, remembers “a spectacular running catch to snare a long drive off Vic Wertz’s bat.” Biographer John Sickels reports: “It was a great play, etched in baseball memory forever by constant replays ever since on television and film, though some observers, [Indians manager] Al Lopez and Feller included, felt they had seen better plays, even from Willie. Feller especially pointed out a tremendous catch earlier in the year by Larry Doby as a superior play.”69
Throughout his career Doby made a number of highlight-reel catches. In one, earlier in 1954, Doby climbed the outfield fence at Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium, made the catch high in the air over the fence, fell to the awning over the bullpen bench, and rolled off the awning onto the ground, where he lay unconscious. Right fielder Al Smith pried the baseball from Doby’s glove hand and threw it into the infield.70
Mays describes his catch in more prosaic terms than do the sportswriters or the biographers:
Wertz hit the first pitch. I saw it clearly. As soon as I picked it out of the sky, I knew I had to get to [deep] center field. I turned and ran full speed toward center with my back to the plate. [I] knew I had to be in full stride to catch it, so about 450 feet from the plate, I looked over my left shoulder and could see the ball. I timed it perfectly and it dropped into my glove maybe 10 to 15 feet from the bleacher wall. At the same moment, I wheeled and threw in one motion and fell to the ground. I must have looked like a corkscrew. I could feel my hat flying off, but I saw the ball heading straight for Davy Williams on second. Davy grabbed the relay and threw home. Doby had tagged up at second after the catch. That held Doby to third base.71
Willie Mays, though, is famous for another type of catch besides his 1954 catch made famous by being in the World Series and on nationwide television. While he was in the army, a teammate, whose name Mays did not recall, taught Willie the basket catch, which Mays used forever after and which also became a Mays trademark.
An outfielder catching a fly ball holds his glove hand next to his face. With his eyes he tracks the flight of the ball, arcing downward and into his glove. In a Mays basket catch, the outfielder holds his gloved hand flat, palm up at the waist, making a basket like receptacle for the ball. The maneuver is only for those possessing superb hand-eye coordination. Willie Mays equaled the best hand-eye coordination ever, so the basket catch was easy for him, augmenting the showman image he cultivated, flying hat and all.
A Willie Mays biographer contends that “the [1954] catch became Willie Mays’s brand. . . . To this day, when a kid on a sandlot, or a big leaguer under the lights, reaches over his shoulder for a ball on the fly, the cry is heard, ‘A Willie Mays catch!’”72 Undoubtedly that is true, but it tells only half the story. The basket catch also is a “Willie Mays catch,” as probably are many other spectacular plays in the outfield.
The question, though, has to be asked: did The Catch,” the 1954 one, mask from view the durability, longevity, exuberance, and even more spectacular events and statistics of Mays’s baseball career? Mays was one of the greatest if not the greatest player of baseball’s golden years. One senses, though, that Mays’s achievements, upstaged to a degree by The Catch, do not loom as large as they should. Many baseball history buffs remember Mays more for the 1954 catch than his career-long achievements.
The other side of the coin is that Mays’s achievements also do not cast the shadow over what Larry Doby achieved and the hardships he endured in integrating the American League, at least not as much as do the auras surrounding Jackie Robinson, Mickey Mantle, or Satchel Paige.
“To the chauvinistic residents of the Bay Area [where the Giants moved in 1958] Mays was the embodiment of New York. He had the temerity to play centerfield at Seals Stadium where the native born DiMaggio had played . . . . Also Mays was black.”73 For the first time in his professional career, in San Francisco Mays heard boos from the stands. “For whatever reasons, San Francisco fans went out of their way to show Willie Mays how little he was appreciated.”74
One principal reason was that, as Mickey Mantle had felt with the Yankees in New York, where DiMaggio had preceded him, in San Francisco Mays felt the backlash of not being Joe DiMaggio. “Proud and provincial [San Francisco] didn’t need East Coast writers to designate their heroes, and the only player in San Francisco history who’d ever post the kind of numbers . . . projected [for Mays] was Joe DiMaggio, playing for the Seals. . . . The town wasn’t big enough for two baseball legends.”75
As well as the boos and the hostility of the sportswriters, Mays was troubled by the racism that he and his wife encountered in finding a house in supposedly enlightened San Francisco; the racism inherent in the Coke bottle flying through their picture window; and the beginning deterioration of the marriage to his glamorous wife, Margherite.
The San Francisco sportswriters were especially vicious. One wrote, “As we figure it, Mays has to play about $50,000 more baseball to earn his [$70,000] salary.”76 And racist: “Willie’s trouble is that he needs to be driven. Anybody got a whip?”77 Fan mail referred to “Rig’s jigs” (after manager Bill Rigney, who had followed Leo Durocher) and “Sheehan’s Shines” (after successor manager Bill Sheehan). In 1960 a Sports Illustrated baseball columnist actually wrote, “There are several dozen players, coaches, managers, writers and executives who will tell you that what is really wrong with the Giants: too many Negroes. . . . ‘That’s’ the real reason the Giants are losing.’”78 Mays, of course, was the most prominent of the African Americans on the San Francisco roster.
There was and is no excuse for racism. Mays never should have had to endure a single iota of it. Some of the other clouds over Mays’s head, though, especially including the prolongation of the DiMaggio cloud, Mays brought on himself. Mays always was a reluctant interview, opening up only to journalists he knew and trusted. So even though he was now in San Francisco, Mays let down his guard only with East Coast journalists visiting San Francisco with other National League teams. This very much irritated West Coast journalists, who had a chip on their shoulder anyway, located as they were far out of the East Coast mainstream.
Friends advised Mays about possible reasons for press hostility. Mays still did not “get it,” at least completely: “Do they [sportswriters] want me to talk to them like I would to old friends? Well, first they have to become friends.”79
Broadcasters, sportswriters and columnists criticized Mays for his high salary, the Giant’s losses, and—most of all—for not being Joe DiMaggio. These often-harsh critiques continued until the Giants beat their in-state rivals, the Los Angeles Dodgers, in a playoff for the 1962 National League pennant. Mays was the hero of that encounter and only thereafter received his due from San Francisco and its baseball fans, who finally embraced him as one of the greatest players of all time, the equal at least of the Yankee Clipper.
In the meantime it must have been galling to Willie Mays, in sharp contrast to the reception he received upon his return to the Polo Grounds for the 1960 All-Star game. As Mays came out of the National League dugout, “an unbroken, throat-swelling peal of adulation sprang from the hearts of the Giants-starved New Yorkers. It rolled and volleyed off the giant tiering of this triple-decked palace and against the vague outline of the Bronx County Courthouse. . . . They rocked and shouted and stamped and sang. It was joy and love and welcome, and you never heard a cascade of sound quite like it.”80
Willie Mays was “the greatest centerfielder of all time.”81 At his prime Mays had “the distinction of easily being the best player in baseball.”82 He was better fielder and hitter than was Larry Doby.
Former Major Leaguer Jim Bouton writes that “there are several kinds of athletes. First, there’s the guy who does everything instinctively and does it right in the first place,” Bouton begins. “I think Willie Mays is that kind of guy, and so was Mickey Mantle.” But so too was Larry Doby. “They just know what to do and how to do it.”83
Willie Mays, however, was not “the first black five tool player to reach the major leagues,” as his biographer maintains.84 Larry Doby was. Doby could hit for average, hit with power, run the bases, patrol center field, and had a throwing arm, to quote Arnold Hano, “like a howitzer made human.”85 Doby did those things instinctively.
Doby began his career in 1947, four years and fifteen other black players before Mays (Robinson was the first, Doby the second, and Mays the seventeenth), and brought those skills to bear over a thirteen-year, war-shortened career. Doby’s achievements, on the playing field and in integrating the American League, should neither be forgotten nor overshadowed by Willie Mays’s outsized achievements.
And, to a certain degree, they are not. By the time Willie Mays began being universally recognized for his skills and joie de vivre, Larry Doby had retired, although he continued in baseball as a coach and, for a short time, as manager of the Chicago White Sox. While both men were active players, in the 1950s, and for a time after Doby had retired as a player, Mays’s achievements were themselves to an extent overshadowed—by The Catch, by the rough landing a few years later in San Francisco, and by other demons that plagued him. Perhaps the best that may be said is that Mays and Doby were different men, with different achievements, but they both were “the real deal.”