The Giants could have eased Willie Mays into the spotlight, managed the public’s expectations, and given the youngest black player ever to reach the major leagues time to adjust. Instead, on May 24, 1951, the Giants held a press conference and distributed a news release announcing the purchase of Mays’s contract from Minneapolis. “No minor league player in a generation,” the Giants said, “has created so great a stir as Mays has in Minneapolis.” Leo Durocher regaled reporters as well as his own players with stories about this young marvel he had seen in spring training. The manager also announced that the team’s talented center fielder, Bobby Thomson, would move to left field, which displeased Thomson and surprised reporters. As the New York Daily Mirror wrote on May 25, “Amazin’ Willie Mays, who apparently does nothing short of amazing, wrote another amazing page into his short amazing career yesterday.... Today he is a Giant. Not only that, he’s the regular center fielder, shoving Bobby Thomson, the best CF in the National League, to left field for tonight’s game in Philadelphia. It’s amazin’. ”
The hype was all the more surprising in light of the Giants’ dismal track record with highly touted rookies. In 1940, the team touted Johnny Rucker as “the new Ty Cobb” (both came from Georgia), gave him a hysterical nickname (“the Crabapple Comet,” after his hometown), and saw him retire after six mediocre years. More recently there was Clint Hartung. A 6-foot-5, 220-pound greyhound, he was twenty-four years old when he joined the Giants in spring training of 1947. Reportedly, he could hit a ball 700 feet and had a bazooka for an arm, which could be deployed in the outfield or on the mound. His nickname—“the Hondo Hurricane,” in honor of his hometown in Texas—evoked a force of nature. Reporters anointed him the second coming of Babe Ruth. But Hartung fizzled, both as a pitcher (29–29 over four years, with a 5.02 ERA) and a position player. By 1951, he hung on as a utility outfielder, retiring the following year with a career batting average of .238.
Now here was Willie Mays, promoted with the same gusto that intensified the pressures on young Hartung. Skepticism was understandable. The New York Daily Mirror columnist Dan Parker, using the alliterative style favored by sportswriters of the day, asked, “Will Willie Mays rescue the Giants from the daze they’ve been in for days and days? Mays may merely lead them into the maze, as other Spring phenoms have in bygone days.”
The Giants, however, had good reason to herald their new find. The team, once part of baseball royalty, had been mediocre, or worse, for more than a decade. In New York’s baseball pantheon, they played a dull third fiddle to the implacable, regal Yankees and the boisterous, pioneering Dodgers. Those teams had flourished over the past decade while the Giants hadn’t won a Series in eighteen years or a pennant in fourteen, the worst drought in club history. The organization was also being squeezed financially by an old, poorly located ballpark and a declining fan base. The Giants needed more than a center fielder. They needed a headliner, a savior, someone who would restore the glory of a dynasty.
Despite their recent woes, the Giants were still the most successful team in the modern history of the National League. Founded in 1883, the club was first known as the New Yorks and played their games on a polo field on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 110th Street. Two years later, their manager Jim Mutrie, known for his ever-present stovepipe hat, leaped to his feet during a rally and screamed, “My big fellows! My giants!” The club’s nickname was born. In 1902, the Giants hired the man whose temper, arrogance, and savvy would define them for the next three decades. John McGraw was a stout, red-faced Irishman who fought umpires, cursed players (his and anyone else’s), and was called “Little Napoleon” for his authoritarian rule, but his judge of talent and burning desire helped him win 2,763 games, making him to this day the major league’s second winningest manager (behind Connie Mack and ahead of Tony La Russa). McGraw also cut a distinctive image off the field, his friendships with politicians, judges, and actors raising his own swaggering profile. “McGraw’s Giants,” as they were called, had the game’s most dazzling idol. Christy Mathewson was an apollonian figure who never drank or cursed, wore a cape when he entered the field at the Polo Grounds, and, beginning in 1903, won at least twenty games in twelve consecutive years.
The Giants won six pennants between 1904 and 1917, plus the World Series in 1905. They were no less powerful in the early 1920s—four consecutive pennants and two World Series championships—while fielding a trio of future Hall of Famers: Bill Terry, the dour, slick-fielding first baseman whose lifetime batting average was .341; Mel Ott, the gentle, left-handed slugger whose quirky batting style—lifting his front foot completely off the ground before swinging—helped him win the National League home run title six times; and Carl Hubbell, the wiry screwball specialist who posted five consecutive twenty-game seasons.
But for all their star power, the Giants in the 1920s and ’30s were eclipsed by the Yankees—more specifically, by Babe Ruth, whose prodigious home runs and unrestrained personality brought his team their first championships, redefined the game, and stirred the public’s imagination like no athlete in history. By 1932, McGraw had gone eight years without a pennant; exhausted and frustrated, he retired from the game and died two years later. So great was his memory, however, that twenty years after his death, his widow was still receiving requests for his autograph, which she fulfilled by sending his canceled checks.
The Giants’ next manager was Terry, who would lead the team to one more stretch of greatness—three pennants in five years and one World Series. But the decline came swiftly. Even when McGraw’s Giants didn’t win pennants, they were almost always competitive. But no more. They finished fifth in 1939 and would be in the bottom half of the National League in eight out of the next ten years. The team, according to the Giant loyalist Roger Angell, had entered the long “Valley of the Shadow.”
The troubles coincided with a change in the club’s ownership. The Giants were a family business, acquired for $1 million in 1919 by Charles Stoneham, a freewheeling financial wizard, gambler, and sportsman who had dodged various Wall Street scandals (twice indicted, never convicted) to amass his fortune. But after the stock market crash of 1929, the Giants proved to be his most valuable asset. When he died in 1936, his son, Horace, became the principal owner at the age of thirty-two.
Horace saw his first Giants game when he was six and was fifteen when his father bought the team. “Dad came home one night,” he recalled. “Mom and I were sitting there and I remember just what he said. ‘Maybe we’re gonna have a ballclub.’ It was quite a moment.” After home games, John McGraw came to their house and talked baseball for hours with the elder Stoneham. His son listened intently. A self-described poor student, Horace dabbled at three prep schools and briefly attended Fordham College, then his father sent him to California to work underground in some copper mines he owned. Horace was interested in engineering but didn’t have the grades for admission to the right colleges. So he returned home, doing the one thing he knew he loved—working for the Giants. Toiling in the front office, he had a front-row seat for McGraw’s finest teams, and when Charles Stoneham died, Horace not only assumed his father’s desk but also his favorite perch to watch the games in the Polo Grounds: from the window in the clubhouse, deep in center field, 505 feet from home plate.
It was the perfect lair for the shy, stocky owner, who was rarely seen in the clubhouse, granted few interviews, and had thin skin. “I always liked it better up there,” he said. “I don’t like having people give me hell in the stands.” Seclusion also allowed him to generously imbibe with friends, relatives, and colleagues, who would sometimes have difficulty leaving the office until the Scotch bottles were empty. Stoneham’s drinking buddies included players, such as Giant left fielder Dusty Rhodes, who described himself as “Horace Stoneham’s bartender.... We used to get loaded all the time.” Later, Stoneham’s bouts of public intoxication were a source of embarrassment, but in his early years as owner, alcohol was not a problem. What enraged fans was the Giants’ miserable play, and many blamed young Stoneham, whose most conspicuous qualification for the job was his last name.
On one point, the owner was rightfully criticized. Stoneham had a weakness for the home run, believing a team of sluggers had the best chance of winning while also creating the most excitement. He was not the only one to hold that view in an era still dominated by Ruth’s accomplishments, but Stoneham learned the limits of the long ball in 1947. Featuring mastodons like Johnny Mize, Willard Marshall, and Walker Cooper, the Giants hit a major league record 221 home runs and led the league in runs scored and slugging percentage—and finished fourth. No one stole more than seven bases. They were slow, one-dimensional, and uninspired.
The following year, the desperate Stoneham went to his bitter adversary, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and enlisted the one man whom Giant fans viewed as the antichrist of baseball. His decision shaped, and maybe even saved, Willie Mays’s career.
For many years, the rivalry between the Dodgers and the Giants was based more on proximity than parity. While the Giants racked up victories and pennants, the Brooklyn team amassed losses and name changes—from the Trolley Dodgers to the Dodgers to the Robins and back to the Dodgers. They were best known, however, as “dem bums.” They would win only two pennants between 1901 and 1940 and would not win a World Series until 1955. In the 1930s, when the Giant manager Bill Terry was asked about the Dodgers, he said, “Are they still in the league?”
Even when the teams weren’t competitive, some tensions were inevitable. The only two teams in the same city in the same league, they played each other twenty-two times a year, battling so often that resentments always lingered. Their respective ballparks highlighted their contrasting images. While the Polo Grounds was a quiet, stately cathedral for baseball purists who had been raised on the stratagems of John McGraw, Ebbets Field was a neighborhood gem that befit the team’s underdog image, a raucous carnival whose stands featured musicians blaring their horns, a woman ringing her cowbell, and an organist who once played “Three Blind Mice” when the umpires appeared.
The rivalry did not assume its full venomous zeal until 1939, when the Dodgers appointed Leo Durocher their player-manager. One of the most colorful and polarizing figures of the era, he was a human spear of a man who would rejuvenate the franchise and, more than anyone else, escalate hostilities between the teams.
Durocher certainly knew how to win, having played for two of the most storied teams in baseball history, the Murderers’ Row Yankees in the late 1920s and the St. Louis Cardinals’ Gashouse Gang in the 1930s. A light-hitting, 5-foot-9 shortstop, he had neither the skill nor strength to survive on ability alone. He was a scrapper who got by on good speed, an excellent glove, and sharp spikes; he claimed he’d trip his mother rounding third base if it would help him win a game. (He allowed that he would pick up poor mom and brush her off.) Durocher’s most distinctive asset may have been his brassy voice, which he used mercilessly to berate umpires, heckle opponents, and urge his pitchers to harm opposing hitters: “Stick it in his fucking ear!” he would yell from shortstop. At a time of lyrical nicknames—the Wild Horse of Osage, the Sultan of Swat—Durocher’s was simply the Lip, from which obscenities constantly roared.
He famously directed his savage tongue at Mel Ott, the beloved Giant known for his perpetual geniality. After retiring as the National League’s all-time home run hitter, Ott was hired as the Giants’ manager, and his team once hit five home runs in a game against the Dodgers. The following day during batting practice, the broadcaster Red Barber approached Durocher.
“Those were real nice home runs,” he said.
“Oh, come on!” Durocher yelled. “They were pop flies!”
“Now, Leo, be a nice guy. Be a nice guy and admit they were real nice home runs.”
“Nice guy?” Durocher sneered. “Who wants to be a nice guy? Look over there at the Giant bench. Where would you find a nicer guy than Mel Ott? And where is he? In eighth place.”
The quip, recast as “Nice guys finish last,” entered the lexicon.
Durocher could be an affable rogue and a rough-hewn charmer, but no one would ever mistake him for a nice guy. In high school in West Springfield, Massachusetts, he whacked his science teacher across the back with the metal pole used to raise the windows, effectively ending his education and costing him a baseball scholarship to Holy Cross. As a Yankee, he feuded bitterly with Babe Ruth, who accused Durocher of stealing his money. As the Dodger manager (he stopped playing in 1945), he instigated beanball wars, triggered fights on the field, launched verbal assaults, and made, according to one writer, “a science out of dirty play.” Durocher himself said his first rule was, “Don’t clutter your brain with ethics.” And: “Good sportsmanship is so much sheep dip. Good sports get that way because they have so much practice losing.”
Durocher was despised by many sportswriters, who respected his baseball acumen but loathed his ego and arrogance. Dick Young, the abrasive Daily News columnist, prepared a young reporter for his first meeting with Durocher:
“Figure, you and Durocher are shipwrecked and you both end up on this little raft with sharks swimming all around. Leo slips into the water. A shark closes in. You dive in and pull him out. But while you’re rescuing him, the shark comes up and takes your right leg. You bleed like hell, but somehow you survive. The next day, you and Durocher start even.”
Initially, Stoneham belittled Durocher’s appointment to the Dodgers. “If Durocher keeps them hustling,” he told the Brooklyn Eagle, “I feel they have a great chance for sixth place.” But the turnaround came quickly. Before 1939, the Bums had finished in the top half of the league only twice in the previous eight years. But in their third year under Durocher, they won their first pennant in twenty-one years and would finish in the league’s top half in eight of nine years. He played aggressive, daring baseball—double steals, squeezing with two strikes, pinch-hitting on a hunch; there was nothing he wouldn’t try. And the Giants hated him. During that period, the Dodgers embarrassed the hapless descendants of McGraw and Mathewson, winning 118 out of 187 games, with two ties. The Lip had the last laugh.
Off the field was another story. Durocher’s love of pool halls, gambling joints, short skirts, and nightclubs guaranteed controversy. An altar boy who was raised in a neighborhood of poor Catholics, he seemed determined to leave behind his material deprivation and his faith. He favored fast cars, monogrammed shirts, hand-painted ties, and expensive cologne, a true dandy who bragged so readily about his sexual conquests that Roger Kahn said he was practically guilty of “public fornication.” He lost the right to receive communion and have his confession heard, but he said he didn’t give a damn. At various times, he was accused of assaulting a fan, beating his wife, impregnating a young woman, swindling players, and even throwing games for money. None of the charges stuck, but scarred by intractable debts, bounced checks, and stormy marriages, he ran afoul of creditors, ministers, and judges, leaving Branch Rickey to observe: “Leo has an infinite capacity for going into a bad situation and making it worse.”
To which Durocher responded: “Carve it on my gravestone, Branch. I have to admit it’s sometimes true.”
Durocher’s personal life took an improbable turn when he courted the actress Laraine Day, whose devout Mormonism and rectitude on the screen presented a bizarre contrast with her flamboyant suitor. His apartment, to take one example, did not impress her: it included a bar built like a dugout, trimmed with autographed baseballs, the tops of stools made of catchers’ mitts, the legs baseball bats, the floor covered with linoleum in the pattern of a baseball diamond. Day despised baseball. “I happened to be one of the heretics who had never seen a regularly scheduled baseball game,” she said, “never read a sports page, and had a good hearty disdain for the little men who made such a fuss over it.”
Her romance with Durocher had another problem. Inconveniently, she was married, and her husband publicly accused Durocher of seducing his wife. Day’s affection for the manager had some rationale. Durocher had a soft spot for kids, and he showed genuine warmth toward Day’s two young adopted children. Day divorced her husband in January of 1947 and, one day later, married Durocher in Mexico. As legal authorities tried to determine if they were man and wife, the Catholic Youth Organization censured Durocher for “undermining the moral training of Brooklyn’s Roman Catholic youth by his conduct both on and off the baseball diamond.”
Ironically, the controversy coincided with Durocher’s finest moment in professional baseball. For all his personal faults, he judged players on their merit, not on their backgrounds or reputation or their race. The color he cared about was green: if a player could help his team win and put more money in his pocket, he would embrace him. Durocher’s principles were tested during spring training of 1947, when the Dodgers were in Panama for some exhibition games. Jackie Robinson had not yet been named to the team, but the promotion was expected. With the Dodgers billeted at Fort Gulick in the Canal Zone, a number of players, mostly from the South, began circulating a petition that they would not play with Robinson.
A Dodger official woke up Durocher at 1 A.M. and told him the news. Fearing that the team could irreparably splinter, Durocher promptly got his coaches out of bed and told them to bring the players to the kitchen behind an army mess.
“Boys, I hear some of you don’t want to play with Robinson,” Durocher began, as players leaned against chopping blocks and stoves. “Some of you have drawn up a petition. Well, boys, you know what you can use that petition for. Yeah, you know. You’re not that fucking dumb. Take the petition and, you know, wipe your ass.”
Durocher told them that he’d play an elephant if it helped him win, and Robinson was no elephant. He was a great player who could run and hit and who was going to win pennants and earn money for all of them. “And there’s something else. He’s only the first, boys, only the first. There’s many more colored ball players coming right behind him, and they’re hungry, boys.... Unless you wake up, these colored ball players are gonna run you right out of the park.”
The petition died.
Unfortunately, Durocher was not able to reap the benefits of his noble stand. Before the season began, Major League Baseball’s Commissioner A. B. “Happy” Chandler suspended him for one year, the official reason being for “an accumulation of unpleasant incidents... and conduct detrimental to baseball.” No specifics were given. Durocher was forced to watch his replacement, the veteran coach Burt Shotton, win the pennant and secure a place in history as Jackie Robinson’s first manager. Durocher was reinstated in 1948, but the team, playing poorly, was in sixth place by July. The Dodger owner, Walter O’Malley, had already concluded that Durocher was “poison at the gate,” and Branch Rickey, the son of a Methodist preacher who was fond of quoting Scripture, viewed his manager as a superb field general but an unrepentant heathen. Rickey demanded Durocher’s resignation.
Across town, the Giants were faring no better. Mel Ott, in his seventh year as manager, had never finished higher than third; twice his teams finished last. Durocher was right. Surrounded by cronies, Ott could neither urge nor bully his players to greatness or even mediocrity. He had been with the team for twenty-two years, and to Stoneham, who valued loyalty above all else, Ott was family—Horace was a boy when he had first met him. But now Stoneham had to fire Ott or watch his club sink further into the abyss. “My daughter,” he recalled, “didn’t speak to me for a month.”
Stoneham didn’t have any internal candidates but had been impressed by Burt Shotton’s calm stewardship in Durocher’s absence. So on July 15 he called a meeting with Branch Rickey and told him that he was firing Ott. He needed a replacement.
“Who did you have in mind?” Rickey asked.
Stoneham drew his breath. “I want your permission to talk to Burt Shotton,” he said.
“I have plans for Burt.”
“Doing what?”
Stoneham was shocked. “What about Leo?” he asked.
“I’m about to dismiss him,” Rickey said. “Why? Do you want to talk to him instead of Shotton?”
Hiring the loathsome, tarnished Durocher, as the Giant fans saw him, would be an act of heresy, but Stoneham saw opportunity. He arranged to meet Durocher at his Manhattan apartment. Arriving first, he asked Laraine Day for a drink and told her that he hoped Leo would be managing the Giants soon. Day needed little convincing. She walked to her console radio, tuned to WHN, which was about to broadcast the Dodger game. “Then why am I listening to this?” She clicked off the radio and asked, “Scotch, Mr. Stoneham, or bourbon?”
Durocher had one final visit with Rickey. He wanted to know his job status in Brooklyn if he didn’t take the New York job.
“Your future lies over the river, Leo,” Rickey said.
Durocher quickly came to terms with Stoneham, receiving a raise that made him the highest paid manager in baseball. On July 17, the front page of the Daily News blared: LIP REPLACES OTT! BURT BACK WITH FLOCK!!
Durocher was satisfied, though Laraine Day begrudged the Dodgers. Responsible for the decor in Leo’s office at Ebbets Field, she had everything moved to his new office at the Polo Grounds save an autographed picture of Branch Rickey on the wall. Day had it moved to a nearby bathroom, directly over the toilet. Day herself assumed a higher profile with the Giants. She did a television show before each game from the Polo Grounds, in which she interviewed players or coaches. Her loyalty to the Giants was not appreciated at Ebbets Field, however, where a Dodger fan, during one game, threw his paper-bag lunch at her.
Durocher moved quickly to remake the Giants into his image, a hustling team that could play defense, run, and battle until they bled. He traded the lumberjacks (Mize and Cooper) and acquired the gritty double-play combination of Alvin Dark and Eddie Stanky, both of whom could bunt, hit-and-run, and barrel into catchers. The moves, as Day noted, were risky. “Leo was on the horns of a dilemma,” she said. “The home run hitters were great favorites in New York, but he felt they would never bring the Giants a pennant. He could keep them—and get booed, or he could trade them and possibly get murdered.”
Durocher brought up the Giants’ first three black players, Monte Irvin, Hank Thompson, and Ray Noble (a black Latin), and he improved his pitching through good trades (Jim Hearn from the Cardinals) and good luck (Sal Maglie returned from the Mexican League). Wins still came slowly, leaving the Giant fans to boo Durocher or to forswear the team entirely. But in the second half of the 1950 season, the Giants won thirty-four out of forty-six games in one stretch and finished third, five games out of first. Durocher was certain that he finally had his kind of team. He told reporters, “If we don’t win it next year, boys, you can have me. You can write whatever you want about me and you’ll get no complaints. Because if we don’t win it by at least six games, I don’t fucking belong in baseball.”
Stoneham was no less eager for a championship, in part to prove himself as an owner but also for more practical reasons. The Giants were suffering financially, having lost $466,503 from 1948 to 1950, while both the Yankees and Dodgers were in the black. The Giants, in fact, were hemorrhaging during a highly profitable era in baseball. But their aging ballpark, combined with its location in Harlem, had become increasingly problematic. White fans were moving to the suburbs, parking was scarce, and night games heightened anxieties. The emergence of television, meanwhile, brought baseball to people’s homes. Gate receipts fell as attendance dropped from a record 1.6 million in 1947 to barely 1 million in 1950.
With three teams in New York, the Giants had always had to compete for fan and media interest, but the pressures had intensified. The Yankees and Dodgers continued to win, but they had captured the public’s imagination in different ways. The arrival of Jackie Robinson in 1947 galvanized black Americans and riveted whites. His scintillating play meant fans could watch stalwart hitting and brilliant baserunning as well as dramatic social change. Commentators discussed Robinson’s political significance. The addition of the young black stars Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe created further excitement. Whatever Branch Rickey’s motives—commercial gain or racial progress—he clearly placed the Dodgers in the vanguard of the country’s most important social movement in the twentieth century. The Giants’ Monte Irvin, Hank Thompson, and Ray Noble were pioneers who withstood racial indignities, but they were not icons. They could not duplicate Robinson’s cultural import, his media acclaim, or the devotion from fans, even those in Harlem.
The Yankees were touting a very different drawing card. In spring training of 1951, a nineteen-year-old switch-hitter named Mickey Mantle created an uproar when he began hitting 430-foot home runs and was timed running to first base in just over three seconds. He was to have begun the year on the Yankees’ AAA squad in Kansas City, but his .402 batting average in Florida elevated him to the varsity—all the better for reporters, who’d already made him a folk hero: the handsome small-town kid from Oklahoma with short blond hair, blue eyes, and a dramatic combination of power and speed, arriving in the twilight of Joe DiMaggio’s career, offering the possibility of yet another pinstriped demigod in the House that Ruth Built. Mantle confirmed the breathless expectations when he blasted a home run over the scoreboard at Ebbets Field in an exhibition game. When the season began, Yankee fans wanted to see him themselves.
The Giants began the 1951 season with a collection of good players but no real stars, no charismatic leader, and no answer to Robinson or Mantle. That was painfully clear in the outfield. Bobby Thomson was a diffident Scotsman who seemed incapable of emotion. With the laconic Don Mueller in right and the bland Whitey Lockman in left, observed one writer, “the Giants’ outfield seemed like a trio of morticians.”
The Giants won two out of their first three games, but then lost eleven in a row on their way to a 6–13 start. It was inexplicable for a team that had the league’s best record in the second half of the previous season, and Durocher directed maniacal rages at his players. After one loss, recalled a Giant, “he was so hot you could’ve fried eggs on the language coming out of his mouth.” Laraine Day said, “I won’t say that Leo was suicidal on several occasions, but I give myself credit for saying nothing that might put the idea into his head.”
Compounding matters were the Dodgers, who won twenty-eight of their first thirty-six games. Stoneham faced the prospect of a near-empty Polo Grounds by July. On May 1, Arthur Daley wrote in the New York Times : “As far as the Giants are concerned, the damage has already been done. It will take a miracle for the Giants to win the championship now.”
One ray of hope centered on the organization’s young Negro outfielder in the minor leagues. During the losing streak, a Giant scout told reserve infielder Bill Rigney: “Don’t let the guys give up, because we’re going to bring up a young player from Minneapolis, and he might just be the difference for this club.”
The Giants started winning in May, taking eleven of fourteen games, and Durocher began reworking his lineup. Monte Irvin, a natural out-fielder, had been at first base, where his mounting errors were impairing his hitting. On a hunch, Durocher switched him and left fielder Whitey Lockman, even though Lockman had never played first. But he held his own, and a grateful Irvin, repatriated to the outfield, found his stroke.
Durocher, however, still didn’t believe he had enough speed or punch in the lineup. He was demanding Mays’s promotion from the outset of the season, and six weeks later, after three days of phone calls, Stoneham finally relented. By May 25, the Giants were a respectable 17–19, in fifth place, only 4½ games behind the Dodgers. Mays was not joining a sinking ship but a vessel that was picking up steam. Nonetheless, the Giants became a very different team once Willie Mays arrived.
Word of his promotion traveled fast. A wire service reporter found Mays at the airport in Omaha, Nebraska, waiting for his nighttime flight to New York. How many black men in 1951 had ever flown on a commercial flight out of that airport? But there is Mays, photographed wearing a plaid sports coat over a white mesh shirt with a black collar, a black waistband, and pleated pants. A fedora with a stiff brim completes the stylish look. Leaning against the United Airlines counter between a white ticket agent and a white passenger, Mays appears somber, calm, and determined.
He knew nothing of the pressures confronting the Giants, only that they had started the season badly, nor was he fully aware of the hype surrounding his promotion. He figured he would initially be a role player, contributing as a pinch runner, defensive replacement, or spot starter. He landed in New York, and as his taxi moved through Manhattan, he warmly recalled the last time he had traveled there, with the Birmingham Black Barons, when they played at the Polo Grounds after their bus caught fire in the Holland Tunnel. Now he hoped his meeting with Horace Stoneham at the Giants’ offices would go quickly, for Durocher had said on the phone that he was supposed to be in Philadelphia that night.
Mays was still carrying his two baseball bats in a golf bag when he reached the midtown offices, and as he rode the elevator, one woman looked at him, looked again, and said, “My God.” She turned her head and pretended not to see him.
Though so nervous he initially could barely speak to his boss, Mays appreciated Stoneham’s confidence. The owner had no doubts about his talent. What he wasn’t sure of was Mays’s toughness.
“Willie, they’re going to try to find out about you fast up here,” he said. “They’re going to try you out with pitches at your cap.”
Mays shrugged. “That’s okay, Mr. Stoneham. When I played in the Negro Leagues, they threw at me too, only it didn’t count.”
“What do you mean?”
“They couldn’t hit me.”
“They throw harder up here,” Stoneham warned.
“They can throw as hard as they want,” Mays said. “I won’t be there.”
Before Mays left for Philadelphia, he had to take care of one last piece of business. Eddie Brannick, the Giants’ traveling secretary, presented him with a new contract, already filled out. Under salary it read $5,000. There was no discussion. Mays read it, signed it, and was gone.
On the train to Philadelphia, he passed through Trenton, and he recalled how Chick Genovese and Bill McKechnie would fire questions at him on the bus, envisioned their staying up late at night to write reports about him for Stoneham, and he was comforted by their concern. The Pullman car rumbled over a bridge, and out the window Mays saw a sign: TRENTON MAKES, THE WORLD TAKES.
Mays opened the door of his hotel room to a familiar black face. “Hi there, roomie,” Monte Irvin said. He was twelve years older than Mays, a muscular man with a slope-shouldered, tapered body and a quiet, dignified aura. One writer compared Irvin to a lean, mahogany Buddha; another said he spoke like a Latin professor. Mays had met Irvin, as well as Hank Thompson, the previous year when they came through Birmingham on a barnstorming tour, and he was glad that he knew at least two of his new teammates.
“Does skip know you’re here?” Irvin asked.
“I don’t think anyone knows I’m here,” said Mays, which was fine by him. He just wanted to blend in.
Irvin reached for the phone and dialed another room. “Skip, three guesses who just checked in.” Minutes later, Irvin and Mays were in Leo Durocher’s plush hotel suite. The manager stood in the center with a deck of cards in his hands (he’d been playing solitaire). He had thinning, dirty blond hair, combed tightly back, and was a whirlwind of moving hands, quick steps, and rapid-fire comments. He was known as “Fifth Avenue” for his extravagant clothes—the custom-made suits and argyle socks and pearl-buttoned shirts, all delivered from Sulka’s. Though he was in Philadelphia for only a weekend series, his closet was stuffed with more suits and ties than Mays had ever seen outside a store.
“Glad to see you here, son,” Durocher said. “Glad you’re hitting .477.” He told Mays how he had wanted him to be with the club since spring training, but Stoneham wouldn’t let him. “He said you needed more seasoning, but I could see you were a natural and only needed to play.” Durocher told him not to worry about anything. His only job was to hit and field.
Durocher’s efforts to build his confidence had begun. The manager correctly assumed that the transition would be rocky. How could it not be? In less than one year, Mays had moved from Fairfield Industrial High School to the New York Giants—from the provincial South to the sprawling metropolis, from a regimented lifestyle to endless temptations, from a black canvass to a glaring white tapestry. To survive, he would need unconditional support and an extensive education.
“Why do you have all the suits?” Mays asked.
“Because I’m the only asshole in this organization with an ounce of brains,” Durocher said. “Ballplayer buys an expensive suit, then lets the hotel clean it for him. Hotels care about how quick they do a suit, not how good they do it. This way I can change to a new suit and leave the ones I was wearing till I get home, so they can get a decent cleaning and pressing. Remember that.”
That night’s game against the Phillies was at Shibe Park, built in 1909 as the major leagues’ first steel and concrete stadium. When Mays walked into the clubhouse, he noticed how solemn it was, at least compared to the usual banter of the Black Barons. Maybe every fifth-place team is quiet, he thought. There isn’t much to talk about. His locker was next to Irvin’s, and a jersey with the number 24 hung inside. “Mays, 24” seemed fitting, given that he was called to the majors on May 24. He was still looking at his number when Durocher walked over to him.
“Son, you’re batting third and playing center field.”
Mays stood in disbelief. Batting third and playing center field? Isn’t that what Joe DiMaggio did? Isn’t the third hitter supposed to be your best batsman? Isn’t your center fielder the one who takes charge, leads the team, makes plays? He tried to mask his fears by giving Durocher a big smile, but his heart was pounding. He sat down and tried to gather his thoughts, focus on his responsibilities. Someone passed him a baseball to autograph. He’d autographed balls before for fans, but now no fans were around. He picked up the ball and wrote, “Willie Mays.” Then he added, “#24.” It looked so... real. He wished his father and aunts could see him now.
Newspapers in New York and Philadelphia whipped up interest in his debut. The New York Times published a story and photograph beneath the headline MAYS, NEGRO STAR, JOINS GIANTS TODAY. Just before 6 P.M., on a cool, clear evening, Mays walked onto the spacious field, with the outfield alleys stretching more than 400 feet and the center field wall at 447 feet. The reporters who crowded into the press box noticed an unusual stirring this night. Hundreds of black fans, who normally attended only when Jackie Robinson was in town, had been eagerly waiting for Mays. So too were the players on both the Giants and Phillies. As Mays walked to the batting cage for his pregame cuts, the relaxed atmosphere suddenly gave way to anticipation and excitement. Mays stepped in, felt loose, and began swinging.
Bill Rigney recalled, “He popped it up, hit a weak grounder, fouled one back... then all of a sudden he hit a rocket that landed in the middle of the upper deck in left field. Then he hit another rocket that went over the roof. Then he hit one that hit the right field scoreboard. Everything stopped. The Phillies stopped warming up and Ashburn and Hammer and Puddin’ Head Jones and all the others stopped to watch him hit. He got everyone’s attention. He was amazing.”
Phillie pitcher Robin Roberts remembered: “I’m thinking, ‘Wow, I’ve got to face this kid tomorrow night. How will I pitch to him?’ He was hitting them over the left field grandstands.”
Stoneham had driven to the game with other Giant executives, and after Mays was done hitting, Durocher walked past Stoneham’s box. The owner yelled, “Hey, Leo, how do you like him?”
“I’ll marry him,” Durocher yelled back.
Next, Mays jogged into the outfield and, according to the New York Times, “started winging the ball in from deep center to third and home plate without a hop. It was a tremendous exhibition and impressed one and all.”
But Mays’s nerves showed in the actual game. He took a third strike in his first at-bat against Bubba Church and finished the night 0-for-5. He also misplayed a fly ball in the first inning for a triple and later bumped into Irvin in right field on a ball that fell for a double. His debut could not have gone much worse, and yet it didn’t matter, certainly not to reporters. “Inspired by the presence of their flashy rookie, Willie Mays, the Giants rallied for five runs in the eighth inning,” the Times reported.
The next day was more of the same. Mays went hitless against Roberts, but the Giants’ Larry Jansen pitched a shutout for a win that pushed New York to the .500 mark. On Sunday, Mays went 0-for-4 against Russ Meyer, but the Giants notched another victory.
Now 0-for-12, Mays was sulking on the train ride back to New York, wondering if he really could hit this pitching. Irvin tried to relax him. “Listen, man,” he said, “we won three in a row without you hitting. Now figure it out. As long as you don’t hit, we win. Only trouble’ll be if you get a hit.”
The Giants returned to the Polo Grounds, and Mays came out early before the series opener against the Boston Braves. He took extra batting practice, he told Durocher, “because I’m not feeling easy up there.” He feared his slow start would prompt catcalls from fans. Before the game, he was sitting in the dugout when his name was announced in the batting order. Loud cheers rose from the stands. Mays turned to Irvin. “Is everybody here crazy except me?” he asked.
Pitching for the Boston Braves was Warren Spahn, a lean, cunning veteran who would win more games than any left-hander in major league history. With his huge leg kick, crooked delivery, and long fingers that snapped off curveballs, he was difficult to time. In the first inning, Mays stepped to the plate and assumed his classic stance—legs astraddle, weight equally divided between both legs, the bat held high. In form and movement, he was a clear descendant of DiMaggio’s, with one barely noticeable exception: the thumb on Mays’s top hand extended off the bat, sticking out like it was sore, except it wasn’t. It was simply a quirk. When the pitcher threw the ball, the thumb wrapped back around the handle, a movement that Mays believed gave him more balance and strength.
Spahn threw his first pitch, and Mays took a curve on the outside corner. Mays then swung and missed badly on a fastball. Apparently overmatched, he guessed curve, and guessed right. His bat flashed across the plate— crack! For a moment, there was silence, then a gasp, as fans tried to register what they saw. The ball didn’t tower or loft. It soared, flying over the left field roof, still rising on one long line as it disappeared into the night. Thunderous cheers rolled across the stands, and Mays jogged purposefully around the bases, head down, unsmiling, seemingly embarrassed by the adulation. Spahn stood with his hands on his hips, looked down, and kicked the dirt behind the rubber. When Mays reached the dugout, he slapped hands with Durocher, who smiled like a proud father.
As Robert Creamer wrote in Sports Illustrated: “The crowd... roared and cheered as though Willie had just won the World Series. It was a strange, tingly thing to be part of, because all that the crowd was saying really was, ‘Welcome, Willie. We’ve been waiting for you all our lives.’ ”
The Giant announcer Russ Hodges said, “If it’s the only home run he ever hits, they’ll still remember him.”
Spahn said, “For the first sixty feet, it was a helluva pitch.”
Durocher: “I never saw a fucking ball leave a fucking park so fucking fast in my fucking life.”
The savior had arrived.