The Chicago Defender was America’s most influential black newspaper, a staunch advocate for baseball’s integration with more than half its readers outside Chicago. It also recognized the game’s broader role in the quest for racial equality. So Mays achieved a certain milestone when the Defender, on August 27, 1949, published an article: MOVE OVER, YOU VETS, WILLIE MAYS IS COMING UP LIKE A PRAIRIE FIRE. It said that Mays, “a mild-mannered young chap,” was “probably the most promising youngster to come up to a Negro American League team in a long number of years.” Some major league scouts were already looking at him. A photograph shows Mays in his baggy uniform with his hands on his knees, a broad smile across his face, an image of confidence and joy.
The Defender ’s enthusiasm was understandable. Mays had joined the Black Barons as a rough, uncut diamond, but his brilliance soon emerged. In his second year, he raised his average to .311, and in the first nine home games of 1950, he was batting .394. But his hitting was almost secondary; over the years, the Black Barons had many fine hitters. What stood out was Willie’s glorious arm. “He is a sensation at throwing long balls that spell OUT for the surprised runner,” the Birmingham World reported on April 11, 1950. “Mays in a recent game with the Cleveland Buckeyes chocked a 295-foot-fly; threw the ball the entire distance to home and cooled a probable three-run rally.” The pap\er, which nicknamed him “the Arm,” published a photograph of Willie on May 9 beneath the headline: DEATH TO BASESTEALERS. The story noted that Mays “is believed to have the best long throwing arm in Negro baseball today.”
Mays hit fourth in the lineup, and his teammates called him “Sonny Boy”—or maybe it was “Sunny Boy.” Either name fit. At Rickwood Field, white reporters began writing about him and young ladies threw pennies his way on the outfield grass.
Willie was unfazed. “He didn’t receive accolades so that he was puffed up and proud,” Bill Powell said. “He always had that pleasing personality, always jovial, always laughing.... He was clean cut, no drinking, no smoking. All he drank were pops. No matter how many accolades he received, he was still Willie Mays.”
But he couldn’t save the Black Barons or the Negro Leagues. Once Jackie Robinson stepped onto the field with the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947, joined eleven weeks later by Larry Doby with the Cleveland Indians, the attention of black baseball fans switched to new ballparks. The Black Barons may have drawn record crowds in 1948, but elsewhere attendance plummeted. That year, African Americans preferred seeing Robinson and, by then, Roy Campanella in New York, St. Louis, Boston, and other National League cities. Larry Doby and, by July, Satchel Paige were the big attractions in American League towns. In August, for example, Paige drew 51,000 for a game at Comiskey Park in Chicago, which he won, 5–0. Several nights later, the annual East-West Negro League All-Star Game at Comiskey drew 37,099, a 30 percent decline from the previous year. By 1951, the paid attendance was down to 14,161.
Black newspapers, which had once been the Negro League’s greatest advocates, were now devoting their coverage to the major league pioneers; they were the battering ram against the country’s broader walls of segregation. When the Homestead Grays won the 1948 World Series, its hometown newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, covered the event in two paragraphs amid stories about black major leaguers. The Grays folded in 1951.
The Negro League owners were trapped in a downward spiral. To reduce their losses, they had to sell their top players, which accelerated their demise. In 1948, the owners of the Newark Eagles sold their top player, Monte Irvin, to the New York Giants for $5,000. The Kansas City Monarchs sold six players, including Paige. The Black Barons’ owner, Tom Hayes, facing his own financial crisis, had begun to auction off his superior players.
In 1949 Artie Wilson, the best shortstop in black baseball, was sold to the Oakland Oaks in the Pacific Coast League for a reported $10,000. After the 1949 season, Piper Davis was sold to the Boston Red Sox for $7,500, with the promise of another $7,500 if he made it to the major leagues. Pitcher Alonzo Perry was also dispatched to the Oakland Oaks for $5,000 (though he returned to the Black Barons the following year).
That Willie Mays would end up in the major leagues was inevitable, but the scouting and signing of him is a story of missed opportunities, colossal blunders, and blinkered racism.
Some scouts blew their chance for immortality simply because they couldn’t judge talent. In 1949, a Pittsburgh Pirate scout was following the Black Barons, and Piper Davis approached him in a hotel lobby in New Orleans.
“Give us $2,000 and you can have that kid,” he said.
“Nah,” the scout said. “Even if we got him, we’d make a pitcher out of him.”
“Ah, shit,” Davis said under his breath. In an interview years later, Davis said: “They could have had Clemente in right and Mays in center.”
The team with the inside track on Mays was the Boston Braves, one of whose scouts, Bill Maughn, lived in Cullman, Alabama, about fifty miles north of Birmingham. On a June night in 1949, driving through Birmingham, he decided to catch a Black Barons’ game at Rickwood. In the second inning, with runners on first and third for the opposing team, the hitter drove the ball off the left field scoreboard. The left fielder picked it up, and the center fielder raced over, yelling, “Give it to me! Give it to me!” As Maughn recalled, “I’ll be dog-gone if the left fielder didn’t shovel pass it to him like a football player and the center fielder threw out the runner trying to go from first to third.” Four innings later, the center fielder “goes to right-center and he has to turn and throw and he gets another one by eight feet, trying to go from first to third.”
Maughn had never seen anything like it. He also didn’t know anyone there, so he asked a ticket seller who owned the Black Barons. The ticket seller introduced him to Tom Hayes, who told Maughn the name of the boy in center field. Hayes also said that one of Maughn’s colleagues had already been there—he showed the scout the business card of Henry Jenkins, the Boston Braves’ farm director. Hayes said that he had spoken on the telephone to the Braves’ owner, Lou Perini, as well, and the Braves had offered $7,500 for Willie.
Given Hayes’s cash crunch, he probably would have sold Mays right then. But the major leagues prohibited any team from signing a player who was still in high school; in fact, teams weren’t supposed to even make contact with those players. The Braves had asked the major league commissioner, Albert “Happy” Chandler, to waive the rule for Mays, given that he was already playing for money, but Chandler decided the rule still applied. Jenkins told Hayes that he would contact him as soon as Willie graduated the following year.
But Maughn was taking no chances. Seeking to gain his trust, the scout introduced himself to Mays, following him the rest of the season and picking up the trail in the spring of 1950. “I’d stand on the roof at Rickwood and watch him, and I knew this guy was mine,” Maughn said. On May 1, 1950, Maughn wrote to Jenkins: “In regard to Willie Mayes, well, here is the best standout prospect available in the nation. When I say he could even pitch for my money, I am not fooling, as he is the fastest human being throwing from 60 feet 6 inches that I have ever seen.” Of course, Maughn hadn’t seen Mays pitch, nor had he learned to spell his last name, but that didn’t matter. He continued: Willie “graduates the 15th of the month and I plan on being in Birmingham that date.... Harry, this boy is it, believe me.”
Jenkins, meanwhile, repeatedly assured his boss, Perini, that the Birmingham boy was going to be a great Brave.
On May 31, Willie dispelled E. J. Oliver’s worst fears and, having completed all of his classwork, graduated from Fairfield Industrial High School.[4] In his senior year, he was not absent or tardy a single day. Baseball commitments, however, did preclude him from graduation practice, so at the ceremony itself he didn’t adhere to the precision marching. “He was kind of skipping and dancing around,” Loretta Richardson says. “Mr. Oliver was gritting his teeth, getting red, but everybody got through it.”
Willie Mays received his degree in cleaning, dyeing, and pressing, which happened to overlap the interests of a baseball player to whom he would later be compared. As a youth at St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys in Baltimore, Babe Ruth excelled in the tailor shop, sewing shirts.
Unknown to Willie, while he was receiving his degree, Maughn was talking to Hayes about his baseball contract. Hayes wanted $7,500 when Willie signed and another $7,500 if Willie was still with the Braves a year later. Willie himself would receive a $4,000 bonus, according to this proposal, and would finish the year with the Black Barons. Maughn countered that the Braves would want Mays to report to one of their farm clubs immediately.
On May 21, a Sunday, the Braves sent down a second scout, Hugh Wise, to watch Willie play a doubleheader, and the youngster struggled, with only one hit in eight at-bats. Wise feared that Mays might not hit big league pitching and concluded that he wasn’t worth $7,500. Maughn argued that Wise had seen him play only one day, but Wise said he had seen enough. After a full year of scouting Mays, the Braves never made an offer.
Perini later lamented how myopic financial considerations cost him the greatest center fielder ever. But money wasn’t the primary issue when teams, including the Braves, were paying tens of thousands of dollars for prospects. The issue was race. In 1950, the Braves fielded their first black player, Sam Jethroe, who was originally signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers but then sold to the Braves for $150,000. Jethroe, a fleet-footed center fielder, was a very good player—he would be the National League’s Rookie of the Year—which might have encouraged the Braves to bring in more blacks, even those with questionable hitting skills. But bringing in two Negroes in one year could be seen as excessive. One at a time was sufficient. As Maughn ruefully noted in a 1965 interview, “They moved slower back then.”
Two years later, the Braves did pay the Indianapolis Clowns $10,000 for Hank Aaron, who reached the majors in 1954. (The club had moved to Milwaukee in 1953.) Aaron spent twenty-one years with the team in Milwaukee and Atlanta, and—but for the blunders of his organization—could have been part of the greatest one-two punch in baseball history.
While Maughn had lost his man, he was still eager to help Mays. On June 17, 1950, he bumped into New York Giant scout Eddie Montague at an all-star high school game in Atlanta. Montague said he was going to Birmingham to evaluate Black Baron Alonzo Perry, a strapping 6-foot-3 first baseman. The Giants had already signed two black players, Monte Irvin and Hank Thompson, and were looking for more. “Listen,” Maughn said, “you forget about Perry. Willie Mays is the one that you want.”
According to Montague, Maughn never referred to the wunderkind by name, just as “a young Negro ballplayer... with a great arm.” On Sunday, June 19, Montague and a fellow Giant scout, Bill Harris, reached Birmingham for a Black Baron doubleheader. As Montague later recounted, “I had no inkling of Willie Mays, but during batting and fielding practice, my eyes almost popped out of my head when I saw a young colored boy swing the bat with great speed and power, and with hands that had the quickness of a young Joe Louis throwing punches. I also saw his great arm during fielding practice, and during the games his speed and fielding ability showed up.... He lined a double off the right field wall, sent the left fielder back to the fence on a whistling drive, and then hammered a double into center. This was the greatest young ballplayer I had ever seen in my life.”
During the game, the two scouts moved around the ballpark to watch Mays from different angles but saw most of the game from the roof, where Montague clocked him running to first base. “Four seconds is about the best you can expect from a right-handed batter,” he later said. “Yet Willie was doing that and even faster. Only speedy lefties can get down to first under four seconds.” Montague also met Tom Hayes and promptly asked him how much he wanted for his center fielder. Hayes said $15,000, half now and half when he reported, though he wanted to keep Mays for the balance of the season. After the game, Montague met Mays in the locker room, and all he saw “was muscles and a magnificent pair of shoulders.” But the scout was also impressed by his “likeable attitude.” He told Mays he would see him the following night in Tuscaloosa.
Jack Schwarz, the director of the Giants’ farm system, was reading the newspaper at his home in Massapequa, New York, when the telephone rang. It was Harris from his hotel in Birmingham. “He told me he had seen enough of Perry to know he was not the man we wanted,” Schwarz recalled. “But he thought the Black Barons had one player worth having, a nineteen-year-old kid named Mays—Willie Mays. Harris reported that Mays could hit to either field, that he could run, that he had a real good arm. As I listened, it added up to a routine description of a player who happens to strike a scout favorably. Nothing more, nothing less. Then Montague got on the phone. Now it was different. Montague fairly exploded. ‘You’ve got to get this boy!’ he shouted. ‘He’ll be in the big leagues in two years. Don’t ask any questions. Just go get him.’ That was the convincer. From then on, we went after Willie.”
They had little time to waste. On June 2, the Birmingham World reported “persistent talk that scouts of the Boston Braves, Boston Red Sox, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Cleveland Indians are hot on the trail of center fielder Willie Mays.”
On the following night in Tuscaloosa, Montague arrived alone at the ballpark so early that “if it had not been for the groundskeeper, I would have been lonely.” When the Black Barons got off their bus, he quietly approached Mays and asked to speak with him in private.
“Would you like to play professional baseball, Willie?”
“Yes, sir,” Willie said.
“Would you like to play for the Giants?”
“Yes, sir.”
The scout told him he would speak to Tom Hayes about his contract.
“What contract?” Willie asked. “Mr. Hayes doesn’t own me.” While Willie did sign a contract for his first season, he had not for the remaining two.
Montague said if that was the case, he would deal directly with him, and Willie gave him his phone number and address in Fairfield. Montague assumed he had to move fast, because he saw Brooklyn Dodger scout Ray Blades at the game in Tuscaloosa, in which Mays smoked several line drives and made a fine catch and throw.
The next morning, when Montague called, Willie said he’d have to deal with his aunt Sarah. She came to the phone, and the scout asked how much it would take to sign Willie. Sarah said $5,000. Montague said he had to touch base with his home office, then he’d be at their house that afternoon. He spoke again with Schwarz.
“If he’s that good, go and get him,” Schwarz said.
At the house, Willie introduced Montague to his aunt and Loretta. At 4 P.M., Cat arrived home from the mill, the contract was drawn up, and the whole crew proceeded to a notary to have the document signed and notarized. Cat signed for his underage son. According to Montague’s later account, the bonus was actually for a thousand dollars less than what Sarah had requested—Montague talked her down to $4,000, plus a salary of $250 a month. The Giants also paid Tom Hayes $10,000, mainly to keep the team on good terms with him. That move didn’t sit well with Cat. “Why should Mr. Hayes get anything?” he asked Montague. “I ain’t signed no contract with Mr. Hayes; Willie ain’t signed no contract with Mr. Hayes.”
“Well, we don’t want no trouble later,” Montague responded. “He might come back and try to sue us.”
Horace Stoneham, the Giants owner, sent Hayes a telegram on June 21, confirming the transaction though (like Maughn) misspelling the prospect’s name: “Willie H. Mayes Jr.”
Montague recalled Cat Mays “as a proud man that day when Willie signed his first contract.” Loretta remembers that after the scout left, her mother wept. She would give Cat $250 and Willie $3,000, which he used for a new green Mercury and some clothes.
Willie felt gratitude and elation. He knew that organized baseball had accelerated the signings of top Negro players, and now, if he performed well with the Giants’ minor league affiliates, he could play in the same league as his heroes—DiMaggio, Musial, Williams, and Jackie Robinson.
On one level, Mays’s signing seemed to suggest how alert major league teams were to promising young Negro players. Mays had just turned nineteen and was barely out of high school. But the signing was actually a case study in baseball’s halting efforts to integrate. Mays was not a hidden gem—he was the most charismatic star of the very league that was funneling its best young talent to the majors, with 1950 marking the third year out of four in which a black player (Jackie Robinson, Don Newcombe, and Sam Jethroe) had won the Rookie of the Year Award.
By 1950, five years had passed since the Dodgers had signed Jackie Robinson from the Kansas City Monarchs, but only four of sixteen teams in the major leagues had blacks on their rosters (the Dodgers, Indians, Giants, and Braves; the Browns had had three but had released them). Both the Giants and the Braves had approached Mays, but where were the other fourteen teams?
At least two other organizations had reports on Mays—the Dodgers and the Chicago White Sox. In the case of the Dodgers, both Robinson and Roy Campanella recommended Mays after they played against him in 1949 during a barnstorming tour through the South, but a scout named Wid Mathews watched Mays that year and concluded, “The kid can’t hit a curveball.” Nonetheless, another Brooklyn scout was back on the trail in 1950. The Dodgers certainly knew the immense value, on the field and at the gate, of developing dynamic Negro players. But they apparently passed on Mays because they already had three established African American stars (Robinson, Newcombe, and Campanella), they had two others meriting promotion, and they feared having too many blacks. Sportswriters speculated that “the magic number” for black players on any one team was five; exceeding that threshold increased the risk of a backlash from white fans. By 1955, Dick Young of the Daily News, noting the significant financial investment of baseball owners, opined that five blacks were not excessive but eight might be. This informal quota also applied to professional football, where teams restricted the number of black players to seven or fewer.
Bill Maughn, the Braves’ scout, acknowledged that his team didn’t sign Mays because it had just acquired Sam Jethroe from the Dodgers, and Branch Rickey, in discussing that sale, conceded the unspoken quota: “Ownership thought there was a surfeit of colored boys on the Brooklyn club.”
The Boston Red Sox sent its scout, George Digby, to evaluate Mays, and Digby later said, “He was the greatest prospect I ever saw.” But the Red Sox had just signed Piper Davis and would not sign a second; the team would be the last in the major leagues to integrate, in 1959.
Mays was a free agent for three weeks, between his graduation from high school and his signing with the Giants, and virtually all of Major League Baseball missed him. Bill Maughn knew why: “It was the color line at the time,” he told Look magazine in 1955. “That explains how Willie was on the loose for a solid month.... The teams which had signed Negro players felt they had enough, for the time being, at least. Those who didn’t have any were not interested at the time. Most of the scouts I told about Willie, after the Braves turned him down, were Southerners, who would be inclined to [look the other way].”
That was certainly the case with New York’s third baseball team, the Yankees, who were determined to keep the squad white. In 1949, their general manager, George Weiss, heard about a young center fielder with the Birmingham Black Barons; his bosses notwithstanding, Weiss dispatched his part-time scout Bill “Wheels” McCorry to Alabama for a report. Though born in upstate New York, McCorry—according to Roger Kahn—“has the attitudes of a Southern Klansman, which he made little effort to conceal.” He reported that Willie Mays could run and throw but was not worth signing because “the boy can’t hit a good curveball.” The Yankees did not put a black player on its roster until Elston Howard, in 1955.[5]
The New York Giants were not deterred by race. They simply needed good players. As Charles “Chub” Feeney, the vice president of the Giants and a nephew of Horace Stoneham’s, said, “Of course we knew segregation was wrong. My uncle knew it and I knew it, but pure idealists we were not. Competing in New York, against the Yankees and the Dodgers, the resource we needed most was talent.... In 1949, the Negro Leagues were the most logical place in the world to look for talent.”
Still, the Giants were guilty of more subtle bigotry. On June 22, Eddie Montague wrote a letter to Jack Schwarz, in part to celebrate his own skills in outmaneuvering their other rivals as well as to offer an evaluation of Willie: “If Mays has any flaws in his ability it is in not knowing how to run and I would like to suggest that we employ a track coach to help him.” This could be turned to the Giants’ advantage. “If Jesse Owens or some other great negro runner is around the New York area I believe it would be a great publicity angle and worth the time and money to hire him.” No track coach was ever needed for Willie Mays.
Montague also spoke highly of his ability to sign Mays for only $4,000 but noted that his true financial worth was higher. “In my opinion, Mays is a definite major league prospect and had he been a white boy I haven’t any doubts but that he would have been a bonus ball player.”
“Bonus ball players” were those who signed under the so-called bonus rule, which existed in various forms from 1947 to 1965. Its goal was to limit bidding wars that favored the wealthiest franchises. If a team signed a player above a certain threshold ($4,000 to $6,000, depending on the year), that “bonus baby” had to stay on the big league roster for the next two years. But if he wasn’t ready for the big leagues, he would be deadweight on the bench and would have his development stymied—possibilities designed to limit outrageous bonuses in the first place.
Under this rule, bonuses were still paid, but the amounts varied significantly. In 1950, the Pirates paid a $100,000 bonus to a forgotten pitcher named Paul Pettit, who won one game in the majors. In 1954, Sandy Koufax’s father, Irving, asked for a $14,000 bonus for his son, which he calculated as the cost of a four-year education. The Giants too were in the bonus game, though not profitably. In 1954, they gave $35,000 to infielder Joey Amalfitano, who spent two years on the bench before being sent to the minors for four years, and the Giants shoveled another $60,000 to pitcher Paul Giel, who after six years retired with a 5.39 ERA and an 11–9 lifetime record.
Black players were largely excluded from these quick-hit riches. The economists Anthony Pascal and Leonard Rapping found that in 1968, one out of five white major leaguers who had signed before 1959 had received bonuses greater than $20,000, but none of the thirty blacks playing in 1968 who had signed in the 1950s had received that inducement.
Mays says that Stoneham quietly gave him an extra $10,000. Stoneham never declared the amount—even his scouts didn’t know—which would have triggered the bonus rule. But even $10,000 was a pittance compared to the sums given to other highly touted prospects. The Giants treated Mays no differently from the way any major league team would have treated him, but before he ever stepped on the field in organized baseball, his skin color had cost him tens of thousands of dollars, maybe a hundred thousand dollars (which, in 2010, would be about $895,000).
Mays knew nothing about the slight and remains grateful to an organization that took a chance on a nineteen-year-old kid and soon paid him at the highest levels of his profession. Whatever was denied him long ago doesn’t bother him today. “I don’t look at race that way,” he says. “If I did, how could I have accomplished the things that I did? You can’t go back sixty years.”
Mays has another reason to feel good about his personal history: he was lucky to have absorbed the ethos of black baseball while still having a full career in the majors. He played in what was the final Negro League World Series in 1948, and he left Birmingham two years before Tom Hayes sold his team. Negro squads continued to play through the 1960s, but they were easily ignored in a decade when 23 percent of major league players were African American.
The Black Barons played until 1963, but most of the players, including Piper Davis, never made it to the majors. Still, their legacy survived. In June of 1950, their finest protégé boarded a train and headed north, taking with him his glove, some sandwiches, the wisdom of his mentors, and the dazzling spirit of the great Negro Leagues.