THE GREATNESS OF WILLIE MAYS
In the eighth inning of the first game of the 1954 World Series, Vic Wertz was ready to be a hero for the best team in baseball. His team, the Cleveland Indians, mashed everything in sight, including the Yankees, the team that had won the last five World Series in a row, and now at the Polo Grounds in New York, the Indians were about to claim Game 1 of the World Series against the New York Giants.
There were two men on base in a 2–2 game with nobody out. Wertz hit a shot to deep center field. In most stadiums, the ball would have soared into the stands, but the Polo Grounds had the deepest center field in baseball history, some 485 feet to the back wall.
The ball kept going and going. The Giants’ center fielder, Willie Mays, kept running and running, 400 feet . . . 420 . . . 440. The two runners on base, Larry Doby and Al Rosen, raced for home to score the tie-breaking runs . . . Mays kept running . . . 450 feet . . . at an incredible 460 feet away, he reached out over his shoulder and caught the ball at full sprint. Over his shoulder!
Not only did Mays make that incredible catch, but he also remembered to turn around and throw the ball back into the infield as the runners realized they had to scramble back to their bases. Rosen scurried back to first, Doby to second. No tie-breaking runs.
In the box score, the ball Wertz hit was just another out. But in that one moment, the legend of Willie Mays was born.
Mays’s catch in 1954 was more than half a century ago and is still considered the greatest catch in the history of the World Series. The old black-and-white footage of Mays running as fast as he could, seemingly hopeless before catching the ball, captures quite simply one of the greatest plays ever made on a baseball diamond—but for Mays, it was the kind of play he made all the time.
Babe Ruth may have been baseball’s greatest showman at the plate. Yet Willie Mays was baseball’s version of Superman. He had the power of Ruth and the speed of Jackie Robinson. He could hit for average like the great Joe DiMaggio, for example, when he hit .345 in 1954 and won the batting title, but he also had a gift in that he made throwing and catching the ball look like the most exciting parts of the game. Similar to Ruth, Mays did it all with the kind of flair that excited fans of every age, and left them wanting to play baseball just like Willie did.
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Willie Mays was born May 6, 1931, in Westfield, Alabama, and was almost instantly a star baseball player. He played football in high school, but even as a preteen, he began playing baseball against adults. In 1949, when Mays was eighteen years old, the Boston Red Sox sent a scout to look at Mays and consider signing him. Yet the Red Sox, particularly owner Tom Yawkey, were not comfortable with having an African American player on the team. Four years earlier, the Red Sox also had chosen not to sign Jackie Robinson. Not being signed by Boston was a huge disappointment for Mays.
So Mays continued playing in all-black leagues as part of the Birmingham Black Barons. In the Negro Leagues, Mays almost immediately became the one to draw crowds to the stadium.
Eventually, the New York Giants signed Mays and assigned him to their minor league team, the Minneapolis Millers, where Mays hit .477.
Once he joined the big leagues, nothing changed—Mays set the pace. While he was a rookie in 1951, the Giants reached the World Series but lost to the Yankees. Then Mays was drafted into the US Army for two years, 1952 and 1953, spending those seasons in the military. Not coincidentally, the Giants failed to earn a shot at the pennant both seasons. But when he returned in 1954, he was spectacular—in addition to winning the batting title, he also hit 41 home runs, drove in 110 runs, led the league in triples with 13—and made that spectacular catch in the World Series. Willie won the World Series but wasn’t done, finishing off his stellar season by winning the National League Most Valuable Player Award.
For much of his 23 years in the big leagues, Willie Mays was the show, and like Ruth, everyone could tell a story about something superhuman that he’d done at one point or another. There was “The Catch,” or the time in 1961 against Milwaukee when Mays hit four home runs in a single game. Or maybe it was the flair, the way he would catch a baseball at his waist rather than over his head—known as a basket catch. Or when he flew around the bases with the same speed he used to catch up to a fly ball.
And Willie had the coolest nickname: “The Say-Hey Kid.” DiMaggio was “Jolting Joe.” Henry Aaron was “Hammerin’ Hank.” Mickey Mantle was “The Commerce Comet,” because he was from Commerce, Oklahoma, but none of those names were as easy and natural and fan-friendly as the Say Hey Kid.
When the Giants moved to San Francisco in 1958, Mays was considered the greatest player in the game—even better than Mantle or Aaron or Ernie Banks or Frank Robinson—because he did everything great and had the flair to do it with style.
Yet in California, the fans of San Francisco did not love Mays immediately, because he was still considered a New York star. The fans of San Francisco were waiting to give their collective hearts to a star who had only played in San Francisco.
That finally changed in 1962. San Francisco couldn’t help but adore Mays when he hit 49 home runs and drove in 141 runs, leading the Giants to their first-ever World Series after leaving New York. Not only had the Giants won the National League pennant, but they had beaten their rivals, the Dodgers. The Giants wound up playing the Yankees in the World Series that year and lost in seven hard-fought games, but baseball in San Francisco had finally been played on the big stage, and Mays was the center of attention.
It wasn’t just that Mays was flashy, fun and exciting, but that he also amassed the kind of statistics that challenged the all-time great players. Mays hit 52 home runs and won another MVP Award in 1965, and it began to look like he might have a chance to catch Babe Ruth’s all-time record of 714 home runs, the most celebrated record in baseball. Years of running full-speed and throwing himself into the game with everything he had caught up with him, though, and 1965 turned out to be his last great full season.
Still, there were moments when Mays would show glimmers of greatness, like in 1971 when he turned forty years old and led San Francisco to the playoffs. Then at age forty-two, after 22 seasons in a Giants uniform, Willie was traded back to New York, to the Mets, where he would wind up playing in one final World Series, this one against Oakland.
When his career ended after the 1973 season, his lifetime stats were unreal: .302 average, 3,283 hits, 338 stolen bases, 12 Gold Glove Awards, and 660 home runs. Yet none of the statistics ever properly described Mays. And it’s not simple chance that many people have called Mays “the perfect ballplayer.” To understand his greatness, you had to have seen him play. As Ted Williams once said, “They invented the All-Star Game for Willie Mays.”
That pretty much says it all.