Willie Mays was too nervous to eat. On the train ride out of Birmingham, he fumbled with the bag of sandwiches that Aunt Sarah had made, but mostly he stared out the window. It was June 23, 1950, a beautiful spring day, and the lush green countryside looked familiar and comforting. But it was now zipping past him, and he knew he would miss it—he already did. He stood up, walked from car to car, and wondered if he’d be leaving the mill town of his youth for good. His senior prom was that night, but Willie decided to skip it so he could make his first game. He tried to make amends with his girlfriend by lining up another escort—a friend to whom Willie gave clothes, money, and a car for the evening—and now Willie wondered what songs they would be playing. “Till I Waltz Again with You,” perhaps, or “On Top of Old Smokey.” The kids would be jitterbugging or holding each other close. Willie realized he no longer had time for that. He was now a full-time professional ballplayer.
Many years later, Mays said that his biggest thrill in baseball was signing his first contract with the Giants, but on the train out of Birmingham, he mostly felt fear and disbelief, tinged with amusement. The Giants were paying him good money for a chance to get to the big leagues. He would have played for free.
His new employer wasn’t certain where to put him. The Giants’ first choice was their Class A team, which was several rungs below the majors. But that squad was part of the Southern Association, which included the Birmingham Barons, and the Giants were not about to send their prize recruit into the heart of the Old Confederacy. Another option was Sioux City, Iowa, where its Class A affiliate played in the Western League, but that too was risky. Racial tensions had been simmering there since an American Indian had been buried in a cemetery for whites, and the Giants feared the arrival of a black baseball player could plunge that town into turmoil.
So Mays was sent to the Trenton Giants in the Class B Interstate League, which he considered mildly insulting—the Black Barons were far better than any team on that circuit. But Trenton was close to New York, so Horace Stoneham and other Giant executives could watch him, and most of the teams were in small northeastern towns, such as Wilmington, Delaware, and Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
That environment was presumably less hostile, but Mays would still be the first black player in the league. His debut would be in Hagerstown, Maryland, the league’s only city south of the Mason-Dixon Line, a hub for slave traders before the Civil War and a town that still honored its antebellum past. Memorial Stadium, where Mays would play his first game, was three blocks from Rose Hill Cemetery, where two thousand Confederate soldiers were interred.
At the Hagerstown train station, Mays was picked up by the team’s radio announcer, who drove him to the stadium, and in the visitor’s clubhouse, he saw his uniform, with TRENTON inscribed across the chest and the number 12 on the back. The game had already begun, so Mays watched the rest of it from the dugout. That alone was significant. As the sports columnist Frank Colley wrote in the Daily Mail the following morning: “History was made last night as far as the color line is concerned when the Trenton Giants placed a colored player in uniform and he sat out the last two innings of the ball game on the bench.”
Mays himself was unsettled. He had played baseball his entire life, but never before had he been the only black person in the dugout or on the field, nor had he been in a stadium populated almost entirely by white people. That first night, the team’s manager, Chick Genovese, greeted Mays warmly and eased some of his concerns by saying that he would be the squad’s center fielder, but Mays’s apprehension quickly returned.
After the game, the team bus drove Mays to the colored section of Hagerstown and dropped him off at the Harmon Hotel on Jonathan Street. A fine establishment that served the heavyweight champion Jack Johnson and the jazz great Ella Fitzgerald, the Harmon still wasn’t the Alexander Hotel, where the rest of the Trenton Giants were staying.
Mays wasn’t particular about hotels, but he had never been separated from his teammates before. He knew about segregation, but his segregation had always been collective—with friends, relatives, or teammates, who derived strength and pride from their unity. Now he was segregated and alone.
Some of his teammates noticed his fears. Shortly after midnight, Mays heard a knock on his window. Three players had climbed the fire escape and were now entering his room. One of them, Bob Easterbrook, told him they wanted to check up on him.
“Hey, man, I don’t need no help here,” Mays said.
Easterbrook said they were going to spend the night.
“I can handle it,” Mays insisted.
The three players stayed and slept on the floor. At 6 A.M., they got up, climbed out the window, and returned to their hotel. Mays next saw them when the bus picked him up at 4 P.M. Nothing was said of the visit and, as far as Mays could tell, no one else knew about it. But on his first night in organized baseball, he slept soundly.
The incident made a lasting impression. Throughout his career, Mays often received special treatment because of his talent, but in this case he hadn’t played a single inning when his teammates arrived. To ensure his safety, they risked their careers and even their own safety. Mays had learned from the Black Barons that your baseball team was your family, but these Giants had confirmed that the family circle included white players as well. Racial considerations were secondary. The team protected its own.
Mays needed that support for the impending storm. The next day, Genovese put him in the lineup, playing center field and batting sixth. When he walked out of the dugout, he heard someone shout, “Who’s that nigger walking on the field!” A ten-year-old boy named Bob Miller later remembered hearing one fan yell, “Crapshooter!” while another one screamed, “Watermelon man!” The catcalls and epithets continued through the game. As Bob left the stadium, his father said, “They sure were tough on that young kid.”
Mays ignored the taunts, which probably hurt him less than his performance: he went 0-for-3. He also took the collar in the next day’s double-header—“I went 0-for-Maryland,” he later said—and he worried that his poor showing reinforced the bigots’ view that he was unfit for this league. He took some solace when the public address announcer asked the crowd to stop booing him.
The racial insults continued in other towns, and Mays wanted to respond. But Cat Mays kept tabs on his son by calling him on the phone, and he urged restraint. Willie recalls, “He knew I would fight very quickly. So he would always call and say, ‘You gotta turn the other cheek.’ I would say, ‘I’m not gonna turn no other damn cheek.’ And he would say, ‘Nah, the only way you’re gonna get ahead is to make sure you downplay it. We need you to play baseball. We need you to do things the right way, and the right way is to take whatever they have to dish out, and take it strong.’ ”
Mays’s struggles at the plate continued as well. He made outs in his first twenty-two at-bats, but Genovese did not let him become too dispirited. The manager recognized that Mays was pressing, so he urged him to relax, to not overswing, to not worry about home runs; just make contact. The base hits would come.
His teammates rallied to his side even before Mays started hitting. They recognized that his natural gifts seemed to spill out of him like whiskey from a shaky tumbler. He was the team’s fastest player, had the best arm, and made plays that no one had ever seen or even imagined. Against a Wilmington power hitter, he raced back to the 405-foot sign in dead center field, jumped, and caught the ball barehanded as it sailed over the fence. Regaining his balance, Mays threw the ball on a fly to home plate. As one Trenton infielder said, “I never knew a peg could come in so fast from the outfield. He could throw a ball 200 feet and make your hand sting.”
Mays’s skin color was not his only physical distinction. Without weight lifting or physical training, he appeared to have been carved from granite. First baseman Bob Myers told him that he had the largest forearms he’d ever seen. “They look like Popeye’s,” he said.
His teammates called him Junior, which his aunts had used at home, a name that easily attached to someone whose youth was matched by innocence. The high voice. The big smile. The determination to please. They all made him popular. During one game, Mays was decked by a high fastball. Thrown at many times in the Negro Leagues, he now glared at the pitcher, got to his feet, and resumed his batting stance, making it clear that he could not be intimidated. The next batter, right fielder Eric Rodin, sent a more explicit message. He bunted down the first base line with the intention of bowling over the pitcher when he tried to field the ball. It rolled foul, averting a collision, but both benches still emptied.
On another occasion, Giant catcher Len Matte told Mays that he would take care of any racial incidents on the field and that he, Willie, should not get involved. As the year wore on, the race baiting from fans and opposing players diminished until, according to Mays, “I just didn’t hear it anymore.”
Off the field, he lived alone in a boardinghouse in Trenton, but on the road, the Giants sent him a Hispanic roommate from the New York Cubans. The arrangement was contrived, and Mays disdained the newcomer as a showboat from the big city while he was just a country boy. When Mays overslept and missed the team bus, Genovese yelled at the roommate, who was gone in a month.
Mays was the first black player with whom most of the Trenton Giants had played, but if any of them had misgivings, his engaging demeanor dispelled them. On the bus, Genovese would nudge his players to sing songs, and Mays would start off with “Clarence the Clocker,” and soon everyone would join in. In Mays’s eyes, the bus rides were no different than those he had taken with the Black Barons, teeming with goodwill and camaraderie, young men who loved baseball and dreamed about making it to the big leagues. In 1950, white Americans across the country denied blacks equal treatment on buses, but on the Trenton Giant bus, Willie Mays received special treatment. In need of rest, he would pile the duffel bags in the back, lie down, and sleep.
Mays experimented in the field. During batting practice, he saw how close he could play in center while still being able to track deep flies. On ground balls, he realized that if high grass or soft ground slowed the ball, he could still reach hits in the gap while also snaring low line drives that would otherwise go for singles. For years, Mays would walk on the outfield grass before a game and throw a ball down to determine if the surface was fast or slow.
Mays thought he had already mastered baseball strategy, but Genovese, along with Trenton Giant general manager Bill McKechnie, expanded his education. Sitting on the bench before games or riding on the bus, the two men fired questions at Mays.
“One-and-two, hitter’s weakness is high inside, where do you pitch him?”
“You’re on second, one out, long fly to center, center fielder’s arm is average. Do you tag up? If not, how far off do you lead?”
“Last of the ninth, score tied, your pitcher coming up, two out. Do you let him bat or do you pinch-hit for him?
Mays asked why they were asking him things that only a manager would have to worry about. McKechnie told him that someday, he could be a manager.
“Where?” Mays demanded. “Negro League someplace? Ain’t gonna be no Negro Leagues anyhow, time you get through raiding ’em.”
McKechnie said that even if he didn’t become a manager, the more he understood about the game, the better he’d play it.
Still not convinced, Mays wanted to know why he had to answer questions about pitching—he’d certainly never be a pitcher.
“Because,” McKechnie said, “the only way to be a smart hitter is to start thinking like a pitcher.”
Mays’s hitting continued to improve, more for average than home runs, as he drove balls to all parts of these small-town ballparks. His assists began to pile up as well. Each week Genovese sent the New York Giants increasingly glowing reports on Mays. One report said, “He’s a major league prospect. Possesses strong arms and wrist, runs good, has good baseball instinct. Wants to learn. Should play AAA ball next year.”
Horace Stoneham got the message. After watching the New York Giants play a day game in Philadelphia, he and several associates rented a car and drove to Trenton, where they watched Mays for the first time at Dunn Field. McKechnie tried to temper his expectations, saying, “He might be a little tight because you’re here.”
As Stoneham recalled, “Well, Willie got about two hits in the first few innings, and in the seventh he came up and hit a ball into a gas station that was across the street beyond the left field fence. That’s how tight he was.”
He played in eighty-one games for Trenton, a bit more than half a season. He had 306 at-bats and hit .353, which led the league, though he didn’t win the batting title because he had too few plate appearances. He had twenty doubles, three triples, four home runs, and fifty-five RBIs. His home run total wasn’t as high as he would have liked, but he assumed no one would complain. He also led the league in outfield assists, with seventeen.
He pushed himself every at-bat, fly ball, throw, and stolen base. He crashed into walls, covered the alleys, dove on the outfield grass. Combined with nerves and anxiety, it all wore him down. Near the end of the season, on a humid afternoon in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, he collapsed from fatigue after a stretch of doubleheaders, requiring an ambulance. Mays was fine, but it was an odd spectacle—this nineteen-year-old kid, a paragon of physical strength, drained of all energy. He didn’t know how to pace himself.
But one spell of exhaustion was a tiny cloud on an otherwise brilliant debut. He was leaving Trenton for a bigger stage.
Mays returned to Birmingham, where Piper Davis rounded up some players to compete against major leaguers on a barnstorming tour. The games allowed Mays to meet two black players with the New York Giants, Monte Irvin and Hank Thompson. More important, the major league team was managed by Jackie Robinson, who had watched Mays play with the Black Barons, but Mays had not seen Robinson before. His most significant impression on Mays had nothing to do with baseball. The barnstorming team included three white Dodgers—Ralph Branca, Gil Hodges, and Pee Wee Reese—which, Mays assumed, was the first time an integrated professional baseball team had ever taken the field in the South. That may not have been accurate, but it was certainly true in Birmingham. That Jackie Robinson led that team, in Mays’s eyes, was further testament to his character and courage.
Mays’s performance in Trenton confirmed the ecstatic scouting reports from Alabama, so the Giants figured he could bypass Class A and AA ball and go directly to the club’s AAA team, the Minneapolis Millers in the American Association, just one step from the majors. Mays believed he could reach the big leagues after two seasons in the minors, even though many top prospects required twice that long. Jobs in the majors were tight. In 1950, there were about twenty-seven minor league jobs for every major league position. Thanks to expansion, by 1990 the ratio was six to one.
But Mays understood the challenge in 1950.
“You had to be better than good to make the majors,” he said. “You had to be great.”
Stoneham also believed that Mays needed a full year in Minneapolis, which seemed minimal seasoning for a player so young. Mays could develop into a brilliant player, but he had been out of high school less than a year when the Millers’ spring training began in March 1951 in Sanford, Florida.
The city was segregated, so Mays spent much of his free time in a movie theater with a special entrance for blacks, who sat in a roped-off section in the balcony. Mays didn’t care. His only concern was his play on the field, and the theater was no different from those in Birmingham. Finding solace in the darkness, he spent hours watching movies, often double features, preferring the Westerns.
Unlike the Trenton Giants, the Millers had two veteran players from the Negro Leagues, both of whom had joined the Millers the previous year. So Mays had roommates. One was pitcher David Barnhill, a strikeout artist whose wicked curveballs elicited complaints that he doctored or nicked the ball. The other was Ray Dandridge, one of the finest players in the history of black baseball.
Raised in the cornfields of Virginia, Dandridge was twenty when he joined the Detroit Stars in 1933. Short and bow-legged, he was a master glove man at third base who perfected a sidearm toss from his knees, which he used after a diving stop. In his eleven seasons in the Negro Leagues, he hit for what is believed to be a lifetime .355 average. Some baseball experts claim that Josh Gibson was his only superior and that no white third baseman was his equal. Unhappy with his meager pay in the Negro Leagues, he played a number of seasons in Mexico, where his hitting prowess gained him national fame.
In 1949, he returned to the United States and was managing the New York Cubans when the Giants offered him a contract to play for the Minneapolis Millers. With only one goal left—to play in the major leagues—Dandridge accepted. He was thirty-six, and in his rookie season in organized baseball, he hit .362, two points shy of the batting title. The following year he came back even stronger, winning the Most Valuable Player Award and leading his team to the pennant. In his third season, it appeared he might finally receive his call to the varsity when Giant third baseman Hank Thompson was spiked in the toe and had to sit out. But at the time of the injury, July 18, Dandridge himself was in the hospital for the removal of his appendix. So in the summer of 1951, the Giants installed a slumping outfielder named Bobby Thomson at third, where he stayed for the rest of the year. And Ray Dandridge never got his call to the big leagues.
During spring training, Dandridge recognized that Mays would not suffer the same fate. They lived in the same roominghouse, and Dandridge, only two years younger than Cat Mays, formed a paternal bond with the young player.
“You’ve got a great chance,” Dandridge told him. “When I played in the black leagues, we were barnstorming most of the time. Sometimes I played three games in one day. We made about $35 a week and ate hamburger. You’re going to eat steak and you’re going to make a lot of money. You just keep it clean and be a good boy.”
To reach the majors, Mays had to impress Leo Durocher, the combative baseball lifer who had been hired by the Giants three years earlier but had so far failed to bring home a pennant. The previous year, Durocher had seen Mays play in Harrisburg; he noted Mays’s “torn shoes and worn spikes” but also remembered the raw ability. He wanted Mays to start with the Giants that spring, but Stoneham said no. The boy was too young and, besides, he would likely be drafted that year by the army. Durocher relented but had the Millers schedule an exhibition game so he could get a good look at the prospect.
The game occurred early in March, a special 9 A.M. contest in Sanford between the Millers and Ottawa, another Giant farm club. Durocher was accompanied by Stoneham and Carl Hubbell, the Hall of Fame screwball pitcher who was responsible for player personnel. (The Giants had moved their spring training to Phoenix in 1947 but held camp in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1951, then returned to Phoenix.)
“Hey, kid, what are you going to show me today?” Durocher asked Mays before the game. “I’ve got quite a report on you from Trenton, kid. This guy Chick Genovese thinks you’re the greatest he ever saw.”
“Oh, really. What’d the report say?”
“It says that your hat keeps flying off.” Durocher laughed. He took his seat in the bleachers amid a scattering of fans puzzled by the early start.
Mays didn’t know that the game had been called specifically for Durocher to watch him, but he was eager to impress. He began the game in left field but was then moved to center. Durocher wanted to see him run, and he did not disappoint.
As Durocher recounted years later: “I could tell you every move Mays made that day. He made a couple of great catches in the outfield. He threw a guy out trying to go from first to third on a base hit into left center. A shot. Threw another guy out at the plate late in the game. A shot. Hit a bullet into right center for two his first time. Struck out on a sidearm curve. Popped up. The last time he came up, Red Hardy, a good veteran pitcher, tried to get him with the sidearm curve again, and Mays hit it over the clubhouse in left field, about 370 feet away. ‘Not ready, huh?’ I said. ‘I want him.’ ”
Durocher decided he had seen enough after seven innings, so he, Stoneham, and Hubbell left without acknowledging Mays. The young player was rattled by their abrupt departure. He wondered if he had done something—thrown to a wrong base, missed a cutoff man, failed to take an extra base. “When the game was over, I just sat in front of my locker, so tired I couldn’t even shake my head,” he later said. “I felt like a raw rookie who had just flunked his only chance.”
Mays did not see Durocher again that spring and soon refocused his efforts on making the Millers. They were managed by Tommy Heath, a rotund former catcher who knew he would not have Mays for long. One morning, Heath called him into his office and said, “Willie, we’re taking you with us to Minneapolis, but I kind of have the feeling that you’re not going to spend the whole summer with us. I think it’s only a matter of time before the Giants call you up.”
The words lifted Mays’s spirits, and he continued to have a terrific spring training, prompting a sportswriter from Minneapolis to write several glowing stories about him. The reporter’s editor asked him to tone down the praise, but the writer said, “I have been toning it down.” Expectations were high when Mays reached Minneapolis.
He rented a room on Fourth Avenue South, right across the street from Dandridge and Barnhill. Their presence removed the isolation he had experienced in Trenton and eased the transition on the ball field. On Opening Day, he woke up, looked outside, and saw snow. He had only seen it once before and, certain the game would be canceled, went back to sleep until the telephone rang a few hours later.
“Why aren’t you here?” Heath demanded.
“It was snowing.”
“It’s stopped now, and we’re about to start the game.”
“But I never played in snow before.”
Heath explained that a helicopter was used to blow the snow off the field. Mays scrambled to dress and, as he headed toward Nicollet Park, wondered if Piper Davis ever had to play in snow.
The conditions didn’t faze him. In the first inning of the first game, Mays, wearing number 28, made a fine running catch near the flagpole in deep center, about four hundred feet away. Batting third, he singled in his first plate appearance and later hit a home run. The next day, the Minneapolis Tribune published photographs of him and the snow. He was an instant sensation, fulfilling the preseason hype and making plays that fans would talk about for years.
There was, for example, the game on May 7 against the Louisville Colonels, in which a bruising hitter named Taft Wright drove a ball over Mays’s head. But Mays, according to game reports, “literally climbed the right-center field wall to pick off Taft Wright’s jet drive.” Mays later said it looked as though the ball was going to hit high on the fence, so he had to “improvise” a way to catch it. “I just caught my spikes in the wall, and I sort of walked up the wall. How high, I couldn’t estimate, but I caught the ball and threw it back in.”
The runner on second base thought the ball was a hit and didn’t stop until after he crossed home plate and reached the dugout. Wright, meanwhile, cruised into second base and was wiping his hands, kicking the dirt, and preparing to take his lead when the umpire told him the bad news.
“You’re out,” he said.
“No, I’m not,” Wright said. “He didn’t catch that.”
When he continued to protest, his manager had to come out and escort him off the field. He refused to believe Mays had caught the ball. Thirty years later, a Minneapolis sportswriter who’d been covering the game bumped into Wright in Orlando, Florida, and reminded him of the play. “That little son of a bitch never did catch the ball,” Wright said. “How could he catch that?”
In another game, at Columbus, the opposing team had the bases loaded and no one out in the bottom of the ninth. The Miller outfielders had to play shallow, and the hitter lined the ball over Mays’s head. He raced back, jumped, and caught the ball facing slightly away from home plate. He whirled around and fired a bullet to home. The runner barely beat the throw, but after the game the Millers’ catcher, Jake Hurley, told Mays, “Willie, you’re losing your control. That pitch was on the outside corner. If you had put it on the inside corner, we would have had him.”
Mays displayed his power at Borchert Field in Milwaukee. He hit a ball so hard that it blew a hole in the outfield fence; rather than repair it, the grounds crew drew a white circle around it.
After a road trip early in the season, the Millers returned home, and in sixteen games, Mays went 38-for-63 (.603 average). He also celebrated his birthday on May 6. He was now twenty years old. His teammates chided him about his high voice, which was barely audible when he got excited. But at the plate or in the field, his nerves left him and his confidence rose.
Opposing pitchers threw at him, just as they had when he was with Trenton. Mays didn’t believe the brushbacks were racially motivated. Rather, he played in an era when intimidating hitters—by moving them off the plate, knocking them down, or drilling them—was a cornerstone of pitching, particularly against a young player racking up hits. He had confronted the same threatening tactics as a Black Baron and, even though batting helmets were not yet worn, insisted that knock-down pitches didn’t bother him. He thought he was quick enough to dodge them, and he usually was.
But in Minneapolis, as in Trenton, the tight pitches gave his teammates a chance to show their support. When a tall Louisville pitcher winged a fastball past Mays’s head, Heath sprinted out of the dugout, stopped at the foul line, and yelled, “If you come close to him again, I’ll meet you right here.”
Mays was moved by his manager’s response and believed Heath would go to any length to protect him. Heath would have protected any of his players, but he also recognized Mays’s unique value to the Giants. “He’s as good, at this stage, as any young prospect I ever saw,” Heath said. “In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and say he’s the best I ever had anything to do with.... What do you look for in a player? You look for a good eye, speed, a good arm, baseball sense. He has ’em all.”
The fans noticed, not just in Minneapolis, but also in St. Paul, which had its own team in the American Association. Before a game at Lexington Park, more than five thousand fans showed up just to watch Mays in fielding drills, and, according to the Pittsburgh Courier, “he drew a round of applause seldom accorded to any player in the circuit.... When a Minneapolis player, always regarded as a deep-rooted enemy, can draw more cheers than the most popular St. Paul player, then he’s pretty good.”
The local media swooned as well. One sportswriter wrote: “Many veteran observers feel he may well become the greatest player his race has yet produced.” The Minneapolis Tribune splashed an outsized tribute to Mays across six columns. The headline was SUCH A ONE IS WILLIE, and the newspaper used drawings from actual photographs that depicted Mays as a modern superhero. A full-body-length drawing showed him swinging a long bat, his massive forearms rippling with muscles. Another drawing depicted him holding a bat with his shirt off, his perfectly cut torso and chiseled biceps defying the human form. Read the caption: “big hands... sinewy arms... pug nose...” A picture was also drawn of Mays climbing the outfield wall, reaching up to catch the ball, saying: “Ah got high aims.”
The presentation foreshadowed Mays’s coverage in New York. Both his skills and his body were otherworldly, beyond compare with those of mortals, but both his youth and his race led to subtle condescension. Even the use of “Willie” in the headline and the story was telling. Athletes were usually referred to by their last names, and many blacks, then and now, rightfully interpret the inappropriate use of their first name as a sign of disrespect. (White masters did not give slaves last names.) It’s unlikely that anyone in Minneapolis would have seen the Tribune ’s use of “Willie” as disrespectful—Mays certainly didn’t—but it reinforced his childlike aura, which bigots could easily stereotype.
With Mays no longer on the East Coast, Stoneham couldn’t follow his development directly, so he dispatched a veteran scout, Hank DeBerry, to watch him play. A scout is cautious by nature. If he raves about a player who never pans out, his job could also be on the line, so most evaluations are tempered and qualified. But DeBerry held little in reserve when he filed his report on Mays:
Sensational. Is the outstanding player on the Minneapolis club and probably in all the minor leagues for that matter. He is now on one of the best hitting streaks imaginable. Hits all pitches and hits to all fields. Hits the ball where it is pitched as good as any player seen in many days. Everything he does is sensational. He has made the most spectacular catches. Runs and throws with the best of them. Naturally, he has some faults, some of which are: charges low-hit balls too much, runs a bit with his head down. There may have been a few times when his manager needed a rope. When he starts somewhere, he means to get there, hell bent for election. Slides hard, plays hard. He is sensational and just about as popular with local fans as he can be—a real favorite. The Louisville pitchers knocked him down plenty, but it seemed to have no effect on him at all. This player is the best prospect in America. It was a banner day for the Giants when this boy was signed!
Sadly, DeBerry never knew how right he was. On September 10, 1951, he died of a heart attack. As Roger Kahn wrote: “I like to think that before he died, when he gazed at Willie Mays, Hank DeBerry saw his promised land.”
After thirty-five games, Mays was hitting .477, almost a hundred points higher than anyone in AAA ball. He had eight home runs, thirty RBIs, and eight stolen bases, and he was riding a sixteen-game hitting streak, in which he had a .569 average. Louisville’s efforts to intimidate him didn’t pay off—he hit .563 against the Colonels in seven games. He believed the Millers had a good shot at the pennant, and he had a girlfriend in Minneapolis as well. The Giants were struggling, he knew, but the last thing on his mind was getting a call to New York. With or without snow, Minneapolis was just fine.
But his torrid hitting was noticed in New York. As Tom Sheehan, the Giants’ chief scout, recalled: “We pick up the papers one week and say, ‘Hey, Willie’s hitting .300.’ Next week, we look and it’s .350. Another week, and it’s .400. Finally, holy mackerel, Willie’s up to .477, which has to mean he’s going at something like a .600 clip.... So he’s got to come to New York.”
The Millers traveled to Sioux City, Iowa, for an exhibition game, and on their day off Mays went to the movies. As was his custom, he went alone. Even with friends on the team, he looked forward to time by himself. Perhaps it was all the nervous energy he brought with him to the field, the high expectations he placed on himself, or the pressure to succeed that drove him from his earliest days. He tired easily, but the isolation renewed him, the movies allowing him to escape in a way that cleared his mind and relaxed his body. He always enjoyed films with surprise endings, but on this spring day in 1951, he got one like no other.
Midway through the movie, the projector stopped, the lights came on, and a man appeared onstage to make an announcement: “If Willie Mays is in the audience, would he please report immediately to his manager at the hotel.”
Mays’s first thought was that something had happened to his father or Aunt Sarah, or maybe to someone else at home. He rushed back to the hotel and headed straight for Heath’s room.
Heath had sought out Mays after receiving a call from Durocher, who told him that Stoneham had granted him his wish. The Giants were calling up Mays.
“You just broke my heart,” Heath had told Durocher, “but I don’t blame you. If this boy isn’t as good a ballplayer as there is in the country, we might as well all pack up.”
Now Mays knocked on his door and stepped inside. “What’s up, Skip?”
“Guess what?” Heath said. “I just got off the phone with New York. Let me be the first to congratulate you.”
“What for?”
“The Giants want you right away.”
“Who says so?”
“Leo himself.”
Mays was dumbstruck. Then petrified. He wasn’t ready to go.
“Call him back,” he pleaded.
“What for?”
“Tell him I don’t want to go to New York. I’m happy here, and we got a good chance to win the pennant.”
Now Heath was stunned. He tried to talk sense into him. “You have a chance to go to the big leagues. It’s something you always wanted. It’s something every kid always wanted.”
“I know,” Mays said. “It’s just something that I’m not ready for.”
Heath wasn’t about to call Durocher, who had a short fuse in the best of circumstances. “You better talk to Leo yourself,” he said, and he placed a call to New York.
“Leo, I got Willie here, and he’s got something to tell you.”
Mays heard a loud voice on the other end of the phone—“Tell me what!”—as Heath handed him the receiver.
Mays took a deep breath. “I’m not coming,” he said.
Mays braced himself for a rebuke, but he could not have anticipated the volcanic eruption that followed. “What the hell do you mean you’re not coming!” A minute-long tirade followed, with the most creative use of profanities Mays had ever heard, the gist of which was that the Giants had signed him for this purpose and he was in no position to refuse.
Mays held his ground, admitting that he was scared and insisting that he wasn’t ready for the majors. He said he couldn’t hit big league pitching.
“What are you hitting now?” Durocher asked.
“Four-seventy-seven,” Mays said.
“Well,” Durocher said, “do you think you could hit two-fucking-fifty-five for me?”
“Sure,” Mays said, “I think so.”
“Well,” Durocher said, his voice rising again, “I could tell you my troubles with the whole fucking ballclub, but the Giants don’t have enough money to pay for how long the goddamn phone call would take if I took the time. So get up here! We’re playing in Philadelphia, and I want you there.” He hung up.
Mays handed the phone back to Heath, saying, “It looks like I’m going to Philadelphia.” He was on a United Airlines flight to New York that night. Heath called Tom Sheehan, the scout, and said, “Tom, you’ll think I’m crazy, but this is the only guy I ever saw who can bat .400.”
Mays was indeed scared that he couldn’t hit major league pitching, but his fears were heightened by the inflated expectations of others. “I didn’t want to go because I knew there’d be more pressure on me, joining a team that was going bad,” he later said. “The Giants were in a losing streak, and they’d be looking to me.”
Mays’s departure was a crushing blow to the Minneapolis baseball fans, many of whom had been waiting for the warm weather to see him play. They became members of the I Didn’t See Him Club. Mays’s loss hurt the entire league. An official with the Milwaukee team estimated that it cost the American Association $250,000 in gate receipts.
Stoneham recognized the disappointment in Minneapolis, so he bought a four-column ad in the Sunday Minneapolis Tribune :
We feel that the Minneapolis baseball fans, who have so enthusiastically supported the Minneapolis club, are entitled to an explanation for the player deal that on Friday transferred Outfielder Willie Mays from the Millers to the New York Giants. We appreciate his worth to the Millers, but in all fairness, Mays himself must be a factor in these considerations. On the record of performance since the American Association season started, Mays is entitled to his promotion and the chance to prove that he can play major league baseball. The New York Giants will continue in our efforts to provide Minneapolis with a winning team.
The announcement was disingenuous. Yes, Mays had had an extraordinary six weeks, but he had played in only 116 games in organized baseball, less than a full year of minor league experience. Stoneham believed that a full season in Minneapolis would have served Mays best, but he was desperate to revive his sagging franchise. The unusual nature of Stoneham’s letter—after all, who had ever heard of a baseball owner justifying a personnel move to a minor league city—won him high praise. As the Tribune said in an editorial: “That Stoneham letter quite frankly sent our imaginations reeling. We have not witnessed such a tender observance of the amenities since Alphonse first bowed to Gaston in the comic strips.”
Mays’s promotion carried some bitter irony. At the time, the Giants had four black players, and to make room for Mays they cut one of the four—Artie Wilson, the former Black Baron shortstop who had been his teammate in Birmingham. Wilson had finally made it to the majors with the Giants in 1951, but he played sparingly and was just 4-for-22 at the plate. Some saw his demotion as enforcing the unofficial quota for blacks on a single baseball team. Others believed that his skills were limited: he couldn’t pull the ball to right field, allowing opponents to stack the left side with defenders. Age was also a factor. At thirty-one, Wilson had plenty of baseball left, but his best days were behind him. In later interviews, Wilson himself said that he urged Durocher to call up Mays and maintained that he would rather play in the Pacific Coast League than sit on the bench in the majors. He played in the PCL for ten more seasons.
Ray Dandridge was not that forgiving. When he entered the Millers’ clubhouse in Sioux City, he was told that Mays had left for New York. Later he recalled: “I had to go pack his stuff and send it to him. I felt glad for him. I said, ‘Maybe I’ll be next.’ ”
But with Thomson soon to be installed at third, Dandridge was never summoned, despite tearing up the league for his third straight season, hitting .338 for the year. He played in organized baseball for three more seasons.
That some sort of racial quota kept so talented a player from reaching the Giants is clear. If the roles of Dandridge and Mays had been reversed—if Mays had been the established veteran in 1951 and Dandridge the thrilling young phenom—Dandridge would have been promoted. One was lucky, one wasn’t. Mays himself was too young to appreciate the disappointments around him, even when they involved men like Dandridge. His mind was teeming with his next challenge. Dandridge, for his part, did not resent Mays’s success. In the coming years, he spoke with pride of the boy he briefly tutored in the minors.
Dandridge earned some vindication when he was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1987, and he probably understood that Stoneham was one of the more progressive owners of his era in the signing of black players. But he never forgave him. In the early 1970s, he and Monte Irvin saw Stoneham at an event in San Francisco. Dandridge approached him.
“You know,” he said, “I really don’t like you, because if I could have played in just one game in the majors, my career would have been complete.”
Stoneham looked sheepish. “Yeah,” he said. “I made a mistake.”