Willie Mays’s rookie year would not be his finest or the year of his greatest celebrity, but it was his sunburst, creating a perception of athleticism, innocence, and joy that would shape the public’s view for years. By happenstance and calculation, he had chosen baseball as his livelihood, and it proved to be the perfect stage for a sport that was about to be transformed.
Baseball reigned supreme in 1951, with games generating $55.4 million in ticket sales, more money than all the other sports combined. Professional football, basketball, and hockey remained on the cultural periphery. America was a baseball nation, where millions of kids played in thousands of leagues and where games derived from the national pastime—stickball, kickball, stoopball, wallball—deepened childhood ties to the sport. In November, former president Herbert Hoover said baseball was second only to religion as a positive influence in American life; only boxing and horse racing challenged the major leagues in popularity. Including the Negro Leagues, there were thirty big league baseball teams in 1951, more than all the professional football, basketball, and hockey teams combined.
For all its dominance, the major leagues were concentrated in the northeast quadrant of America, with half of the sixteen teams clustered in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington. A “western” trip took players no farther than St. Louis and Chicago, and there were no teams south of the Ohio River. Fans around the country could follow their favorite stars on radio and black-and-white newsreels as well as in newspapers, but the game itself was played largely in the Northeast, and it was played more frequently, and with greater competitive fury, in New York than anywhere else.
New York was the only city that claimed more than two teams, with the Dodgers, Giants, and Yankees entrenched in three of the city’s five boroughs. Between 1947 and 1957, a stretch bracketed by the arrival of Jackie Robinson and the departure of the Dodgers and Giants, New York was the nation’s baseball capital. The city did not hold a monopoly on baseball luminaries. Ted Williams, Stan Musial, Ernie Banks, and Hank Aaron, to name just four, all played outside New York. But the city’s own stars inevitably received more attention because New York dominated the country’s growing publishing, radio, television, and recording industries, and the teams dominated as well. Between 1947 and 1957, every World Series but one had at least one squad from New York; a New York club won all but two of the championships; and seven times, both teams in the Series represented Gotham.
The ticker-tape parades aren’t the only reason the era is celebrated with pride and nostalgia. The New Yorkers who embraced Jackie Robinson, and the black Dodgers and Giants who followed, were on the right side of history. The period was a comforting time when neighborhoods had some semblance of continuity, when baseball owners displayed loyalty to their cities, when the game itself was still a game. The players, raised during the Great Depression and drawn from farms, factories, and coal mines, were not that far removed, economically and socially, from their fans. With one-year contracts, the stars as well as the scrubs understood the tenuous existence of the working class, for they themselves were a bad season or a twisted ankle away from unemployment or at least a significant pay cut. Many lived in urban neighborhoods, perhaps walking distance from the ballpark. They were visible and without pretense, taking jobs in the off-season to make ends meet. They didn’t just represent the city for which they played—they were of it.
Those intimate ties would be shattered in the 1950s, a period of growth and upheaval that reshaped the landscape of New York baseball and the country at large. Commercial air travel, with nonstop, transcontinental flights, connected the coasts. National highways linked new suburban developments. Air-conditioning opened markets in the Sun Belt. Long-distance calls could be made without an operator. Credit cards spawned a new consumer culture. There was sugarless chewing gum, power steering, Dacron suits—America was expanding, spending, and innovating.
And in 1951 the NAACP filed a class-action lawsuit against the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, demanding that twenty black schoolchildren be admitted to a segregated elementary school. One of the children was Linda Brown, and the trial of Brown v. Board of Education began on June 25.
In another breakthrough, Blumstein’s Department Store in Harlem featured a group of Negro and white window mannequins in summer frocks and play clothes. Civic leaders gathered to celebrate this bold symbol of integration. “This is only the beginning,” Jack Blumstein said.
Change was coming from all directions.
Few commercial developments were more important, to the country and to baseball, than television. In 1948, Americans had 400,000 sets; by 1950, they had 10 million, and by 1957, 42 million. Baseball had been televised in New York since 1947, but most fans there and around the country still relied on radio for live games, a programming staple at local, regional, and national levels.
But 1951 marked a turning point in what would become the inseparable relationship between this new medium and the national pastime. The networks, still in their infancy, could not broadcast live shows from coast to coast. Toast of the Town (after 1955 The Ed Sullivan Show ), for example, would broadcast live in New York on Saturday night; the tape would then be flown to California the next day and be televised there that night. But by 1951 an underground coaxial cable, combined with radio transmitters and receivers, allowed the networks to televise events live across time zones.
The technology, to be sure, was crude. On most sets, the actual black-and-white images were fuzzy; in some cases, blizzards broke out on the screen when an airplane flew overhead. The first baseball games in color were broadcast in 1951, though, as Red Smith noted, the players all emerged with “magnificently bronzed complexions” and Gil Hodges’s arms appeared “encased in a pelt of somewhat lovelier tone—about the shade of medium roast beef—than Gil wears in real life.”
But the sport itself, as national televised entertainment, had arrived. In 1953, ABC aired the first national Game of the Week on Saturday, with commentary from the inimitable Dizzy Dean, the former star pitcher for the Cardinals’ Gashouse Gang. He described how players “slud into third,” “swang the bat,” and returned to “their respected bases,” and he urged his viewers, “Don’t fail to miss next week’s game.” Saturday baseball, shown on various networks over the next half century, became a weekly institution.
However gradual its steps, television showcased players in all corners of the country, forged connections with distant fans, and elevated stars to heroic status. In that sense, the medium paralleled a similar change in communications technology of a previous generation. At the beginning of the century, Americans would gather in town squares or urban arenas and watch pitch-by-pitch recreations of World Series games on large electrical scoreboards. In the 1920s a new medium, commercial radio, expanded baseball’s reach and changed the experience itself for its followers.
Radio, however, represented just one new medium in America’s “new way of knowing.” According to the historian Jules Tygiel, movies, newsreels, tabloid newspapers, magazines, and advertising were all “revolutionizing people’s ability to vicariously participate in the world around them.” And baseball was a prime beneficiary. Fans who only a few years earlier could never have hoped to see or hear a big league game could now listen to radio broadcasts or watch their heroes in movie houses and in dramatic photo displays.
The new media needed a messenger, and they found one in Babe Ruth. His dominance on the field would have made him famous in any era, but his ascendance in the 1920s made him a highly visible national folk hero who embodied the thrilling, sybaritic jazz age. Newsreels, radio, and even several forgettable movies celebrated the Babe’s exploits; he may have been the most photographed American in the decade, his hefty torso and platter-face smile appearing on the cover of major periodicals as well as such arcane journals as American Boy, Strength, and Hardware Age . In a decade when the modern celebrity was virtually invented, the new media helped to make Ruth both mythic and accessible.
By the 1950s, when the next communications revolution occurred, new heroes were needed, and they would emerge.
The New York Giants weren’t the only ones who needed Willie Mays. So too did the major leagues. By 1951 the game had grown stagnant, the league—with the exception of the black and Latin players—seemingly frozen in time. All sixteen teams had been rooted in their respective cities since the turn of the century. The newest park was Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium, which had opened in 1932. All the others, except Yankee Stadium, had been built before 1915. The actual game, as the baseball historian Bill James has noted, “was perhaps the most one-dimensional, uniform, predictable version of the [sport] which has ever been offered to the public.” Most teams had little use for bunting, hitting behind the runner, or stealing bases, which was so rare that it was considered a “surprise play.” Jackie Robinson stood out not only because of his skin color but because of his speed, excitement, and versatility. Defense, meanwhile, was desired but not honored, the Gold Glove Award not introduced until 1957. With few exceptions, baseball strategy consisted of trying to get someone on base and then hitting a home run.
Mays would have made a splash no matter when he entered the major leagues, but 1951 served him unusually well. His skills shined brightly on a sluggish team in a plodding league, in a big-stage city that was about to lead a communications revolution. He was a game-changing catalyst in a storied rivalry about to embark on a historic pennant race, a radiant contributor to an era forever consecrated as the golden age of baseball.
Mays had one more thing going for him: the historic Polo Grounds, whose bizarre configuration was an ideal setting for his talents. The stadium itself, hunched on the eastern shoulder of Manhattan beside the Harlem River, was an acquired taste. Derided by some as a metropolis of steel and concrete whose age and squalor could incubate a communicable disease, it was also celebrated as “an absurd and lovely” sanctum built at the foot of a cliff—Coogan’s Bluff—so patrons actually walked downhill to their seats. Roger Angell wrote:
You came slowly down the John T. Brush stairs in the cool of the evening, looking down at the flags [and] the tiers of brilliant floodlights on the stand and, beyond them, at the softer shimmer of lights on the Harlem River. Sometimes there was even a moon, rising right out of the Bronx. As you came closer and were fingering for your ticket in your pocket, you could hear brave music from the loud-speakers, broken by the crack of a fungo bat, and through a space in the upper deck you caught a glimpse of grass, soft and incredibly green, in the outfield. You walked faster, tasting excitement in your mouth and with it—every single time—the conviction of victory.
One oddity of the Polo Grounds was that no one ever played polo there. The name was derived from a polo field used by a Giants team in the 1880s. When the squad moved uptown, to Eighth Avenue between 155th and 157th streets, the name moved with it. When that structure burned down in 1911, it was replaced by an opulent wonder, wired for telegraphs and telephones, the facade of the upper deck displaying a decorative frieze depicting allegories in bas-relief. The roof was decorated with eight shields on successive panels representing the teams in the National League; the box seats were designed on the lines of the royal boxes of the Coliseum in Rome, while the aisle seats had the Giants’ logo, “NY,” carved in iron scrollwork. Attendants in white uniforms peddled scorecards. Baseball Magazine called the Polo Grounds “the mightiest temple ever erected to the Goddess of sport”—a venue for boxing and football as well as baseball, where Jack Dempsey, Jim Thorpe, and the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame all found glory.
The stadium’s most distinctive feature was its elongated shape—from above, it looked like a horseshoe, a footprint, or even a bowling alley. The right field foul pole was 258 feet from home plate, the pole in left 22 feet farther, which allowed many pop fly home runs down the lines. But the stands, instead of curving into a conventional oval, extended straight out until they reached the outfield bleachers. The alleys were about 450 feet away. Dead center was even farther, a staggering 505 feet, where the massive green scoreboard urged patrons to buy Chesterfields and where the clubhouses offered a distant haven for a struggling pitcher sent to the showers. “To a batter standing at home plate,” Jonathan Eig wrote, “center field at the Polo Grounds looked like it ended somewhere in the Hamptons.”
To Willie Mays, the Polo Grounds were magical even before he became a Giant. When he played in the Negro Leagues, several Black Barons had told him about their duels there against Satchel Paige or Josh Gibson, and of course Mays played there as a Black Baron. Compared to the tired parks in black baseball, the Polo Grounds seemed like a pastoral shrine.
With Mays in center field, the stadium joined the most spacious tract in the major leagues with the man uniquely qualified to cover it. Buck O’Neil, the Negro League star who later scouted for the majors, once said: “There were men faster than Willie Mays, but I never saw one faster with a fly ball in the air.” The Polo Grounds gave Mays a sprawling pasture for those skills—the quick jumps, the pell-mell running style, the rocket arm—and made possible, in the 1954 World Series, the defining play of his career. He would have been badly miscast in, say, Ebbets Field or Wrigley Field. As Donald Honig wrote, “Putting Mays in a small ballpark would have been like trimming a masterpiece to fit a frame.”
Initially, the Polo Grounds didn’t bring much luck to Mays; he almost didn’t survive his first two weeks.
His home run off Warren Spahn marked his arrival in New York but did not end his slump. The following day, against Boston, he went 0-for-3 in the first game of a doubleheader and made outs in his first two at-bats in the second game. Leg cramps then forced him to the bench. Mays tried to put up a brave front after the game. “It’s only a slump,” he told reporters. “I’ve been taking a lot of pitches because I want to see what they throw up here. Now I’ve found out. They’re throwing me the same stuff I was beltin’ in Minneapolis. Not many curves either. They’re giving me the sort of stuff I want.”
In truth, he was repeating his experience from a year earlier, when he began 0-for-22 with Trenton. The harder he tried, the worse he performed. Maybe the pitching was too tough; maybe the Polo Grounds, with 54,500 seats, was too daunting. Regardless, the pressure was all self-imposed. Mays had played in only six games, four of which the Giants had won. The press and the fans remained patient; his teammates, sympathetic. “If anything, he seemed even younger than twenty,” Alvin Dark recalls. “He just seemed to be a kid, maybe seventeen or eighteen.”
The next day, at home against the Pittsburgh Pirates, was even more distressing. Mays came to the plate four times with men on base but didn’t register a hit or drive in a run. The Giants won, 8–2, but after the game Mays retreated to the clubhouse. He was now 1-for-26 (.038), and he feared he would be sent back to Minneapolis. Maybe it was just as well. Smaller parks, easier pitching, fewer fans. He had dreamed of playing in the major leagues, and he had failed. Now, slumped in front of his locker, he wept.
Giant coach Herman Franks saw Mays and went upstairs to Durocher’s office. “You better do something about your boy,” Franks said.
“What’s the matter?”
“Well, Leo, he’s in front of his locker, crying.”
Durocher raced down the stairs, entered the locker room, and saw his rookie crying uncontrollably. He understood how much pressure Mays had been putting on himself, how unforgiving his own standards were. Some managers would have dismissed the kid right there. Mays was only the seventeenth black player to reach the majors; twelve teams, three quarters of the league, remained white. Baseball’s “great experiment” had not reached a definitive conclusion, and the managers who accepted the racism of the day would have seen Mays as evidence that most Negroes were unfit for the majors. But not Leo Durocher.
He sat down next to Willie, put his arm on his shoulder, and asked, “What’s the matter, son?”
When Mays became excited or nervous, particularly in his early years as a pro, his voice would run so high that it sounded like a chirping canary. Sometimes Durocher couldn’t even hear him.
“Mr. Leo,” Mays said, “I can’t help you. I can’t even get a hit. I know I can’t play up here, and you’re gonna send me back to Minneapolis. That’s where I belong. I don’t belong up here. I can’t play up here...”
Durocher couldn’t tell if Mays had stopped talking or if his voice was simply no longer audible. Mays believed that Durocher was angry but wasn’t showing it. The manager, however, was more alarmed than anything else, realizing that his prodigy’s shattered confidence could quickly derail his season, and given black players’ shaky status in the majors, maybe much more was at stake. He patted Mays on the back.
“What do you mean you can’t hit? You’re going to be a great ballplayer!”
“The pitching is just too fast for me up here. They’re going to send me back to Minneapolis.”
Durocher’s voice was steady and soothing. “Look, son. I brought you up here to do one thing. That’s to play center field. You’re the best center fielder I’ve ever looked at. Willie, see what’s printed across my jersey?”
Mays nodded.
“It says Giants,” Durocher continued. “As long as I’m the manager of the Giants, you’re my center fielder. Tomorrow, next week, next month. You’re here to stay. With your talent, you’re going to get plenty of hits.”
Durocher told Mays there were five things a player had to do to be great: hit, hit with power, run, field, and throw. “Willie, you could do all five from the first time I ever saw you. You’re the greatest ballplayer I ever saw or hoped to see.”
Praise wasn’t enough. As Durocher saw it, Mays needed some specific advice in the way that a man in a burning building needed a ladder. Regardless of whether the ladder worked, at least it gave some immediate hope.
“Willie,” Durocher cried, “you and your damn pull hitting!”
Durocher had noticed that Mays was turning over his right hand too quickly when swinging, producing soft ground balls to the left side. “I don’t know why you don’t take the ball to right field. You can hit it into the bleachers here, over the fence, anywhere you want, yet you’re still trying to pull the ball all the time. For you to do something wrong is an absolute disgrace. And I know you don’t want to disgrace me, do you, Willie?”
Mays wiped his eyes.
“Go home and get some sleep,” Durocher said. “Tomorrow’s another day.”
He walked back to the staircase to his office but suddenly stopped.
“And by the way—who do you think you are? Hubbell?”
Mays stared at him. “Hubbell?”
“The way you wear the legs of your pants down nearly to the ankles,” he said. “Pull them up.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re making the umpires think your strike zone’s down where your pants are. They’re hurting you on the low pitch.”
Mays had worn his trousers long to imitate DiMaggio and Williams, but the next day he pulled them up, and he also concentrated on keeping his top hand back. Durocher dropped Mays from third to eighth in the batting order, telling him someone needed to spark it, and, what the hell, it might as well be him. Mays said he would try. Durocher had reassured him. As long as “Mr. Leo” was his manager, he was safe. Against the Pirates that day, he hit a single and a triple, the latter traveling more than 400 feet to right center, and the Giants won, 14–3. In the next game, against the Cardinals, he hit two doubles and scored the game’s only run in a 1–0 victory. His 1-for-26 drought was followed by a 9-for-24 spree, and the Giants were above .500 to stay.
On the surface, Durocher and Mays could not have been more different—the cynical boulevardier and the guileless man-child, but each needed the other, Durocher boosting his yearling’s fragile self-esteem, Mays coming through with clutch hits and acrobatic catches. Durocher understood that Mays required both a gentle touch and unconditional support. Piper Davis knew that as well, though he had the benefit of Cat’s guidance—“Don’t holler at him.” Durocher figured it out on his own. “With Willie,” he later said, “you have to just keep patting him, keep rubbing him.” And so he did, lavishly extolling Mays to anyone who’d listen. Russ Hodges recalled, “Mays was the only player I ever saw who could do no wrong in Durocher’s eyes. Everyone else felt the lash of Leo’s tongue sooner or later, but Willie never did. Durocher even got a kick out of his errors. One day at the Polo Grounds... Willie dropped a fly ball.... I looked toward the Giants’ dugout, and Leo was laughing.”
Durocher believed he could state the same thing to two players but convey very different impressions—the tone and body language spelled the difference. If he thought a veteran made a mistake because of laziness or poor preparation, he played the bully with loud, harsh inflections: “You play like my kid. What the hell’s the matter with you. Bear down out there. How the hell can you make a mistake like that.”
With Mays, however, he turned sentences into questions, used a softer voice, and communicated bewilderment, even hurt. “You play like my kid. What the hell’s the matter with you? Bear down out there. How the hell can you make a mistake like that?”
Durocher also launched a public campaign for Mays, sparing no adjective to raise the fans’ expectations further. He initially compared Mays to Pete Reiser, a switch-hitting rookie sensation who played for Durocher as a Dodger in 1941; Reiser’s star-crossed career was curtailed by injury. In June, Durocher told the New York Post : “You got to like [Mays]. He’s got less experience than anybody I ever had playing for me, but he doesn’t seem bigheaded or too eager or too anything.” By August, Durocher told the Sporting News : “This is the best-looking rookie I’ve seen in twenty-five years in baseball. I look at Willie and you know who I see? Pete Reiser when he came up.... There’s nobody in the league got a better arm than this kid. There’s nobody got more power. There’s nobody can go get them any better than he can.... And he’s just a baby. In two years, Mays is going to be the greatest ever to lace on a pair of spiked shoes.”
Durocher wanted Mays to confirm his high opinion, so the needs of both men meshed perfectly. Pleasing his own father or those, like Piper Davis, who were father figures had always motivated Mays. He played for men who taught and protected him, who loved him, and now Leo Durocher played that role. Mays said at the time, “All those nice things that Leo says about me make me feel like I wanna go out there and do all those things he says I can do.”
He was equally intent on satisfying the fans: “I know they expect much from me. I wanna be good more than they want me to.... I’m miserable down inside when I mess up a play in the field or when I don’t get a hit.”
Durocher’s paternal touch, his gentle discipline, was evident when Mays didn’t show up for the start of the Giants’ doubleheader in Pittsburgh on June 17. His roommate, Monte Irvin, was also missing. Durocher seethed.
At the Crosley Hotel across the street, Irvin and Mays were eating in the dining room when their waiter asked, “Aren’t you guys playing today?”
Irvin said they were. “Why do you ask?”
“Well, I think they’re playing now,” the waiter said. “In fact, I know they are, because I’ve got it on the radio.”
The ball game’s starting time had been moved up by one hour, but neither Irvin nor Mays had gotten the message. They paid their bill and ran to Forbes Field, and someone told Durocher that his missing players had arrived. The manager walked into the clubhouse and said, “It better be good.”
Irvin said no one had told them about the time change.
“All right, get dressed and come on out.”
Both players saw action, but it didn’t help—the Giants lost, 11–5. They took the second game, but Irvin went hitless for the day and Mays dropped a fly ball. In the clubhouse, Durocher told Irvin and Mays to meet him in his hotel room. Both players were nervous, uncertain of their punishment. The meeting didn’t last long.
“I don’t know why you guys were late and why you didn’t know the game had been moved up an hour,” Durocher said. “Monte, you ought to know not to be late. You’re old enough to know better.” And to Mays: “And you, you little son of a gun, you haven’t been here that long, and you ought to have more respect for Monte than to keep him up late.”
Mays made no effort to defend himself or deny any wrongdoing. Durocher knew that Mays wasn’t responsible—he just wanted to make a point. “I’m going to say this and then I’m finished,” he said. “The next time it happens, it’ll cost you $500.” Irvin and Mays were never late again.
This level of attention given to a twenty-year-old could create problems in the clubhouse, so Durocher appealed to the other players in the same way he appealed to the Dodgers who threatened not to play with Jackie Robinson. “Look, there’s something about Willie Mays,” he said. “I don’t know whether you see it, but I see it. He’s a young boy, he’s a baby. But he’s got more talent in five minutes than the rest of us have in our lifetime. It doesn’t mean that I don’t like you fellows equally well. But I think it does something for Mays if I keep telling him, ‘You’re the greatest, no one can carry your glove, nobody can put your shoes on.’ I think it makes him a better player, and as long as it does, buddy, he puts money in your pocket and mine.”
From the outset, Mays was a willing student, asking Monte Irvin for the tendencies of each hitter and seeking guidance in the outfield on positioning. Years later, computer analyses could create detailed profiles of every hitter, but during Mays’s career, the players usually had to get scouting reports on their own. Mays did that and much more. He once asked Irvin how he stole home with a left-handed hitter at the plate, defying conventional wisdom, because the catcher had a clear shot at him. Irvin said that it’s sometimes easier to steal home with a lefty at the plate. “Did you notice how the third baseman was playing very wide because a pull hitter was at bat? So I could take a bigger lead.”
The Giants’ double-play combination, two combative Southerners, continued Mays’s education. Second baseman Eddie Stanky, from Mobile, Alabama, was described by Durocher as someone who “can’t run, can’t hit, can’t field [but] he just knows how to win.” If anything, he was meaner than Durocher: he once said, “I would spike my mother if it meant being safe on a close play.” He succeeded with creativity as well as tenacity, which he showed around the second base bag. With runners on first and second, nobody out, and a ground ball hit to the shortstop, Stanky would make the putout at second, but instead of turning the conventional double play, he’d throw to third and catch the runner making a wide turn.
Dark, from Comanche, Oklahoma, was a quarterback at Louisiana State University, and his ruggedness in baseball earned him the captaincy from Durocher. At shortstop, his job was to peer toward the catcher, get the sign, and flash his fingers behind his back so Mays could anticipate where the ball would be hit. On other pitches, Stanky did the same at second. They taught Mays that fastballs are struck differently from curves and changeups. An outfielder’s toughest chance is a line drive right at him, and the pitch’s speed influences the arc of the ball: fastballs will sail over the fielder’s head, a slower pitch will drop faster. On the bases, Dark and Stanky explained how to stay in a hot box so other runners could advance and how to draw throws to protect the trailing runner.
Not all of this was new to Mays, but the repetition and emphasis made a difference. He learned just by observing. He had always assumed, for example, that a runner stole bases on either the catcher or the pitcher, but by watching Whitey Lockman, he realized that the first baseman played a role as well. If the first baseman places his right foot against the inside corner of the bag, the runner can dive back head first. But as Lockman demonstrated, if the first baseman’s right leg is directly between the runner and the bag—standing, literally, as a barrier—a headfirst dive can easily be blocked. The runner needs to slide with his foot extended, spiking the first baseman if necessary but also requiring a shorter lead. First basemen who used the conventional stance to hold runners gave Mays a better chance to steal.
Mays rewarded Durocher’s faith in him. After his clubhouse pep talk, he began spraying the ball all over the field and soon posted a ten-game hitting streak, culminating on June 14 in a 3-for-5 performance against Cincinnati. He hit .408 during the stretch, collected four homers and sixteen RBIs, and raised his average to .280. He also helped the Giants win ten of twelve games. On June 22, after they had lost two straight, Mays hit a tenth-inning three-run homer in Chicago off knuckleballer Dutch Leonard to give the Giants a 9–6 win. Cub manager Frankie Frisch sought help from his friend Charlie Grimm, who had managed against Mays in Minneapolis:
“How should we pitch to this kid?” Frisch asked.
“How the hell should I know, Frankie,” Grimm barked. “He hit .580 against us.”
Mays’s friends and family in Fairfield tracked his progress through telephone calls, newspapers, and the radio. No one was prouder than Cat. “He was all smiles,” Herman Boykin recalls. “He would come around and say, ‘That’s my son.’ ”
Mays still had his slumps but never lost his confidence. On July 3, against the Phillies at the Polo Grounds, he was mired in an 0-for-15 spiral when he stroked three hits, including a game-tying homer in the thirteenth inning. The Giants won, 9–8, putting them ten games over .500, their high mark until the middle of August and still within striking distance of the Dodgers. Later in July, Mays had an eight-day stretch in which he had only six hits, but they were all home runs. He was also stealing the occasional base; he had seven for the year, which would increase in later seasons but still wasn’t bad for a power hitter. DiMaggio didn’t steal seven bases in one season in his entire career.
Mays made his greatest mark in the field. He played the shallowest center field since Tris Speaker, whose proximity to the infield was less risky during the “dead ball” era. After Mays caught Richie Ashburn’s sinking line drive in short center, Ashburn quipped, “Goddammit, can’t someone tell that guy this isn’t the Little Leagues.” Mays also charged grounders as no outfielder had ever done in organized ball. Outfielders tended to lay back, which suited the era of lumbering, station-to-station baseball. But Mays tore after base hits with a headlong rush, scoop, and throw. It was a radical concept—an outfielder who played like an infielder, derived from his experience with the Black Barons. He occasionally overcharged balls—a costly blunder in the acreage of the Polo Grounds—turning singles into doubles, triples, or even inside-the-park homers. But the miscues were offset by his gunning down advancing runners—he had twelve assists for the year, or one every ten games. The Dodgers’ Carl Furillo had the most assists in the majors, twenty-four, averaging one every seven games. In his first month or two, the baseball writer Arnold Hano concluded, Mays “had revolutionized outfield play: outfielders today must be shortstops in their approach to ground-ball base hits.”
Even if other outfielders copied his aggression, none could match his singular exploits. On the evening of July 24, the Giants played the Pirates at Forbes Field, where the center field fence was 457 feet from home. When left-handed Rocky Nelson hit a soaring drive to the deepest part of the park, Mays broke fast, calculated the ball’s flight, and sprinted toward the brick wall. But as the ball began to descend, it flared toward left field. Still running at full speed, Mays appeared deep enough, but the ball, sinking fast, remained to his right. He adjusted his route and briefly ran parallel to the wall. He could not get his glove into position, so he reached out with his large, bare hand. The ball smacked the palm. The third out was recorded. When Mays turned toward the infield, a smile creased his face.
Mays had caught balls bare-handed in the minors and with the Black Barons, and he had almost made a leaping, bare-handed catch two nights earlier at the Polo Grounds. But the fans at Forbes Field had never seen anything like it. Mays touched his cap to acknowledge the crowd, ran off the field, and walked three steps down into the dugout. He expected handshakes, but Durocher was looking at the lineup card. Bobby Thomson was cleaning his spikes. Hank Thompson was drinking at the water fountain. Others sat there with their arms folded. No one patted him on the back, said “Nice catch,” or even looked him in the eye.
At Durocher’s orders, they were giving Mays the silent treatment, a small prank on their eager-to-please outfielder.
Confused, Mays confronted his manager. “Hey, Leo, didn’t you see what I did out there?”
Durocher looked at him and shrugged. “No, I didn’t see it. You’ll have to go out there and do it again before I’ll believe it.”
Branch Rickey saw it. He was, by then, the general manager of the Pirates, and he sent a note to the visitors’ dugout: “That was the finest catch I have ever seen and the finest catch I ever hope to see.”
A team photograph was taken of the 1951 Giants at the end of the season. Beneath the clubhouse at the Polo Grounds, three rows of men are presented in their bridal white uniforms, their faces stoic, solemn. Only one player doesn’t quite fit in. Not because he’s black or his baggy uniform appears to be swallowing him or he looks so young, but because his face has a heartwarming smile—as if no one told the kid he’s not supposed to be happy. Willie Mays not only played different—beyond the color of his skin, he looked different. He tilted his black woolen hat forward, for example, so the rear band ran precariously high on his crown. The visor’s jaunty angle protected his eyes from the glare of the sun or lights, but its teetering repose also ensured that it would fly off when he rounded the bases or chased fly balls, a pulsating flourish turned into pure theater.
In one game his rookie year, Mays raced in for a line drive, and as he dove with arms extended, his hat blew off. He caught the ball with one hand and his hat with the other (called “the double catch” by reporters). He displayed a similar flair when his cap launched as he made a wide turn around first base. He put on the brakes and dove back to the bag, grabbing his hat with one hand while touching the base with the other. His cap could be a stage prop or even a riveting subplot on a given play. In one instance, he tried to go from first to third on a hit and, as recounted in the New York Journal-American, “Mays turned back between second and third to get the cap that had, as usual, blown off his head. The throw already was on its way to third [and] it was a run at the moment that could have meant the game and, in retrospect, the pennant for the Giants [but] he rescued his precious cap [because] Willie instinctively had timed the play so accurately that he knew he could retrieve his cap and make it safely into third. Which he did.”
Reporters invariably described such plays as “instinctive,” but even as a rookie, Mays was a savvy showman who, importing the stylistic brio of the Negro Leagues, wanted to give the fans, the players, and the writers something to talk about. “With the average player, you take for granted what he’s doing,” Hank Thompson said. “But Willie was different. It isn’t often that you watch another guy play ball. But you always watched Willie, because there was always the chance that he was going to do something that you’d never seen before.”
The love affair between Mays and the New York baseball fans began at the outset. “I don’t think any ballplayer ever related to the fans as quickly as Willie,” Red Smith wrote. “Maybe Giant fans were more trusting, but they seemed to believe from the very beginning that he was the real article, that he had bypassed ‘promise’ and ‘potential’ and showed up in full arrival.” Grantland Rice tagged him as “the kid everybody liked.” There was something irresistible about the way Mays, after missing a tough chance in the field, reprimanded his glove. “Shame on you for not catching that ball,” he’d say, slapping the mitt. Several weeks after he had joined the Giants, a writer walking through the stands in search of a story was startled to hear parents pointing to the field during batting practice, saying to their children, “There he is. There’s Willie.”
Mays introduced a new aesthetic, a combination of drama and athleticism that broke fresh ground on the playing field. As the New York Times ’s Arthur Daley noted at the end of the season, “He was blessed with that rarest intangible, color. He was a colorful player and this had nothing to do with the pigmentation of his skin. His crowd appeal was immense because of the Wonder’s flair for the spectacular.”
In one of the keenest observations of Mays, Daley wrote: “It just seemed as though he could do nothing unostentatiously.”
Reporters dubbed him “Willie the Wonder,” “the Amazin’ Mays,” or “the Minneapolis Marvel,” but those tags didn’t stick. They were too conventional, too generic, relying on the crutch of alliteration instead of something truly original. A better moniker soon evolved. Mays had a habit of greeting people with “Hey,” which was often used instead of “Hello” where he grew up. His “Hey” was a high-spirited chirp, and because he was terrible with names and was constantly being introduced to strangers, he would follow his greeting with a question: “Hey, how you doin’?” or “Hey, where you been?” hoping that he might learn who he was talking to. A reporter for the New York Journal-American, Barney Kremenko, noted how frequently Mays used “Hey.” Thus was born the nickname, “the Say Hey Kid.” It was pithy, unique, and flowed directly from his being. So perfectly attuned was the name to the character that neither age nor injury nor the long, sobering grind of experience ever replaced it.
But the name was also misunderstood. The public and the press thought that Mays liked to call out “Say hey!” He did chant those words for a record that was produced in 1954, but according to Mays, he never used the phrase in any conversation. The confusion reigned for years. As early as 1955, reporters noted that Mays no longer said “Say hey,” which was seen as evidence of his waning innocence. In 1970, Sports Illustrated mourned: “It has been 15 years, probably, since Mays last actually said, ‘Say Hey!’ ” Mays made no effort to set the record straight. He always enjoyed being “the Say Hey Kid.”
Once Mays knew he belonged, he lost his timidity with his teammates. He always enjoyed pranks, and the Giants’ sullen clubhouse needed a few laughs. Mays bantered, snapped towels, battled in the showers, and led choruses of “It’s Howdy Doody Time” on the train. He let his nails grow, put his index finger in someone’s ear, turned his finger—and laughed uproariously. His teammates began covering their ears when they saw him coming. Whitey Lockman said Mays was “the life of the party.... It would not be right to call him a clown. He was just bubbling over with excitement and enthusiasm.”
Durocher recalled, “He electrified the clubhouse. When he came in, all eyes were on him. The other players would make jokes around him and Willie would laugh in that tenor voice and suddenly everyone would feel good and know that our team had no more worries.” Reporters were also smitten. “Willie answers all your questions breathlessly,” said Bill Roeder of the New York World-Telegram Sun . “He sounds like a guy who has just been told that his house is on fire.”
His teammates found Mays an easy target; they sometimes used a coarse hairbrush to scrub him down in the shower. In the locker room after one victory, they walked past him on their way to the shower, patting him on the back, each player with concealed shaving cream in his hand. Mays soon looked like a stick of cotton candy. In mock horror, he cried out in complaint, his voice, according to one sportswriter, sounding like “a ferryboat whistle tooting frantically in a fog.”
On one occasion, he was given a handsome clock for a bubble gum endorsement. He was admiring it with cries of exultation when Durocher came in.
“You have to hand that thing over,” he said sternly.
“How come?” Mays asked, his eyes getting large.
“First-year players have to hand over all gifts to the manager.”
“Is that in the contract?”
“Right there in small print.”
Mays complied. “Whatta I want to know the time for?” he said resignedly.
One day, Mays was walking to the clubhouse in center field after batting practice, and Earl Rapp, a journeyman outfielder with little speed, said, “Race you the rest of the way for five dollars.”
“Let’s go,” Mays said. They took off, and Mays easily won.
“Okay,” Rapp said. “Let’s have the five.”
“What do you mean? You owe me five! I beat you.”
“Wasn’t anything about beating anybody,” Rapp said. “I just said I’d race you.”
Sal Maglie was standing nearby. “Hey, Maglie!” Mays yelled. “What am I supposed to do?”
Maglie didn’t hesitate. “Pay him.”
Before Mays could reach into his pocket, another race was arranged, this one legitimate. Mays won by ten yards and squared his bet.
Even warm-ups could be turned into performance art, as Mays showed when he played “pepper” with Monte Irvin and Durocher. The game involves a hitter’s rapping ground balls or liners to fielders ten to fifteen feet away, but Durocher had a different approach. As a member of the Gashouse Gang, he, with Pepper Martin and Joe Medwick, played a version that more closely resembled three jugglers in a circus, a game that Durocher’s new partners embraced. For example, with Irvin hitting, Durocher seized a line drive and wound up to throw it back, but in a blur of elbows and knees tossed the ball to Mays, who snared it, faked a throw to Irvin, and floated the ball back to his manager. When Durocher lunged for it, Mays slapped him in the gut with his glove. “Ooof!” Durocher grunted. Mays spun away, keeling over in laughter.
Fans showed up early for these lively exchanges: the wily Durocher, with nimble hands and crackling ad libs, versus the amateur Mays, with his captivating pantomime and wailing ripostes. Mays and Durocher would place bets on the pepper games—each error by Willie would cost him a Coke. One morning, Durocher smashed the ball well to Mays’s right, and all he could do was knock it down with a full-stretch lunge.
“Coke!” Durocher roared. “That’s six you owe me.”
“Ain’t no Coke for that!” Mays cried in his high, plaintive voice. “That’s a base hit.”
“Six Cokes you owe me.”
“Monte, what you say, roomie?”
“Six Cokes,” Irvin deadpanned. Mays pouted while the appreciative fans cheered and hooted and the reporters noted his indelible spirit.
“Willie’s exuberance,” Roger Kahn says, “was his immortality.”
Not everyone immediately embraced Mays, whose arrival forced Bobby Thomson to switch positions. “Naturally, you stay a little laid back when a new kid comes and takes over a key position,” Lockman recalled. “We knew a little about Willie but didn’t know whether he would be able to do the job, having just turned twenty. But after watching him for a while, we could certainly see he was going to be something special. Later in the season, there were a couple of players who began feeling resentful that Leo paid so much attention to Willie.”
The black players in the league were clearly targeted by pitchers for brushbacks and beanballs. Of the four batsmen who were hit most often, three were African American: the Braves’ Sam Jethroe (eleven times), Monte Irvin (nine), and Jackie Robinson (nine). As Horace Stoneham predicted, Mays was targeted, but as Mays had known, his quick reflexes allowed him to escape—pitches hit him only twice. One writer noted that Mays hit the dirt “as violently as anybody [and then] he’s up in a second and back over the plate, waving his bat ominously and offering no word of complaint. His teammates recognize that as the mark of a real professional.”
The Dodgers were particularly aggressive, and their catcher, Roy Campanella, delighted in taunting Mays—he called him “my pigeon.” When Mays stepped into the box, Campanella would start the razzing: “What do you say, pup? What do you say? What do you say, Willie? When you going to get married? You getting much?”
Mays would address his tormentor as “Mr. Campanella,” urging him to “leave me be,” until one day he stepped out of the box and asked Durocher, who was the third base coach, for help.
“He’s bothering me,” Mays told him.
That could be easily solved, Durocher told him: “Pick up a handful of dirt and throw it in his face.” Mays told Campy he would do just that if the catcher kept harassing him.
One time, Dodger pitcher Preacher Roe almost drilled Mays with a pitch at his chin. As Mays stared at him from the ground, Campanella said, “You think he’s a good pitcher, Willie? Well, wait till you see Newcombe. He just hates young niggers.”[6] It was a joke designed to rattle, but the hazing came with an edge. Campanella had spent nine years in the Negro Leagues and didn’t believe Mays had paid his dues—it all came too easy, too fast. He deserved to be knocked down. This resentment softened over the years, but not in Mays’s rookie season. Campanella said, “When I was his age, I couldn’t get into the majors. I had to learn the hard way. This kid walks right in, and he’s gonna have to learn the hard way too.”
The Giants recognized the pressures that uniquely affected their Negro players, so they asked the boxing promoter Frank Forbes to be their guardian. Forbes was a distinguished fifty-eight-year-old Harlemite, a former athlete himself (baseball, football, and boxing) who favored bow ties and erudite phrases. In 1951, his principal responsibility was Willie Mays.
“When I first met Willie,” Forbes later said, “I thought he was the most open, decent, down-to-earth guy I’d ever seen—completely unspoiled and completely natural. I was worried to death about the kind of people he might get mixed up with. He’d have to live in Harlem, and believe me, that can be a bad place, full of people just wanting to part an innocent youngster from his money. Somebody had to see to it that Willie wasn’t exploited, sift the chalk from the flour, figure out who was in a racket and who was in a legitimate organization.”
His first task was finding Mays a suitable place to live. When they met, Mays was living near the Polo Grounds, in a railroad flat with seven rooms, an arrangement made through a family acquaintance in Fairfield. Forbes disapproved. The place was crowded, with two or three sleeping in a room, and far too loud with conversation and “hilarity.” It was no place for a ballplayer. Mays needed a “good home environment” with “good home-cooked meals,” and Forbes found one: the first floor of a house owned by David and Ann Goosby, on the corner of St. Nicholas Place and 155th Street, a short walk from the ballpark.
“Mrs. Goosby,” as Mays called her, reminded him of his aunt Sarah. She was a stout, light-skinned matron who cooked two meals a day for Willie (breakfast: bacon and eggs, hash browns, fruit, and milk; dinner: steaks or chops, vegetables, and potatoes), cleaned for him, washed his clothes, and smothered him with stern affection. As she told Time magazine, she spoke to Willie “about taking care of himself... not that he needs it often. Willie’s a good boy. About all I have to lecture him on besides eating properly is his habit of reading comic books. That boy spends hours, I swear, with those comics.” She also became one of his biggest fans, the walls of her living room soon adorned with his photographs above her floral sofas, her tables lined with his trophies. Mays had his own bedroom, which gave him space to stock his expanding wardrobe, and Ann Goosby was impressed by her boarder’s fastidiousness: “He’s not flashy, but my, is he fussy. He won’t wear anything that’s the slightest bit wrinkled or spotted.”
Mays couldn’t go anywhere far without Forbes—a diner, a menswear store—though he discovered that his most persistent challenges were not from hustlers or gamblers but from young women. Of the half a dozen or so ladies who stood outside the clubhouse seeking autographs after games, “maybe four or five would be after Willie,” Forbes recalled. “Some would rush up with autograph books and have notes in the books—‘My name is so-and-so and you can reach me at such-and-such a number.’ When I have seen such notes, I have taken them and torn them up then and there. When Willie saw them, he would look at them but make no comment. He would never say anything about them. Some he just put in his pocket and others he paid no attention to. He probably threw the notes away when he got home.”
Mays found dates; Forbes just tried to screen out the undesirables. That Mays didn’t drink alcohol made his job easier, but Willie’s love of cherry Cokes still left him vulnerable. On one occasion, Forbes was at a bar in Harlem, Bowman’s, when someone came in and announced the sighting of a certain woman drinking sodas at a nearby drugstore. The woman’s taste for brandy made her foray into carbonation rather odd until Forbes realized this particular drugstore was frequented by Mays. He smelled a trap. He rushed to the emporium and found Mays at the food counter, soft drink in hand, chatting with the woman. She was dressed nicely.
Forbes concluded that quick intervention was required. He sat on the stool next to her and ordered the most muscular drink on the menu, a double chocolate ice cream soda with extra cream. Once it arrived, he reached over for a straw and intentionally knocked it onto the woman’s lap. In mock alarm, he jumped back and bumped the would-be seductress off the stool. “When she hit the floor,” Forbes said, “she was really a mess, but I had to do it to protect Willie. I apologized most profusely.”
Mays remained serenely above the fray, only commenting later to Forbes, “Damn. She sure got messed up.”
Forbes was not above self-promotion, and he contributed to the view that Mays was unnecessarily coddled, even patronized, by the Giants. But Mays appreciated that an experienced hand was looking out for him. Many years later, he lamented that teams no longer provided their young players with guardians. Those players now had lawyers, accountants, and agents, but to Mays they were high-priced mercenaries paid to advance their clients’ financial interests as well as their own. They were not part of the larger baseball family; they were not there to actually protect young men, to help them find a place to live, to escort them shopping, to divert them from trouble, and, if need be, to knock an ice cream soda into the lap of a fashionable temptress.
Once Mays moved in with the Goosbys, Durocher began to call almost every night, and their relationship deepened as the season progressed. Durocher offered tips on playing pool, buying clothes, negotiating with the owner, dealing with the press, dating, and being a big leaguer. Even Ann Goosby was surprised at their closeness. “Willie takes that man’s word for just about everything,” she said. “He almost won’t make a move unless he’s talked to him first.”
One evening, Durocher was to pick up Mays in his new black Cadillac and drive him to a father-son fan banquet in Hackensack, New Jersey. By now, Mays was friendly with the kids on the block, so he told them that his chauffeur was coming to pick him up in a limousine. It was hard to fathom—luxury transport for a mere baseball player, in Harlem no less, so by the time Durocher drove up, several dozen people were waiting for him. Mays opened the back door, waved to everyone, and shouted, “Okay, James, let’s go!”
Durocher played along, obediently driving off before telling Willie to get his ass in the front seat. Durocher, however, had the next surprise. Once at the banquet, he told Mays he was going to have to say a few words. Mays had never given a speech and wasn’t about to now.
“Nothing to it,” Durocher said. “Just tell them you’re happy to be here. Stuff like that. When I think you’ve said enough, I’ll pull on your coat so you’ll know you should sit down.”
Mays had no escape, and it was even worse than he’d imagined. He was the first speaker called, and when he stood and looked into the room of upturned faces—more than twelve hundred—he felt more nerves than before a big game. He began hesitantly.
“Mr. Leo is the main speaker,” he said, “so I’m not going to say much.” While he was stammering for more words, a black boy hollered something from the back. Mays couldn’t make out the question and looked at Durocher, who told him to ask the boy to come up front.
Mays did, and the boy stepped forward with awestruck eyes. It was hard to say who was trembling more, Mays or the boy. Finally, the boy asked, “Willie, who’s the greatest center fielder in baseball?”
Mays just stared at him and delivered the perfect answer: “You’re looking at him.”
The crowd went wild. Mays grinned, and Durocher grabbed his coattail and began pulling it. “Sit down,” he said, “you got ’em now! You don’t have to say anything more!”
Mays was so completely unaffected, so transparent, that he always amused Durocher. On the road, he would approach him in the hotel lobby, pull out his pockets, and ask to borrow twenty dollars. “I’m empty, man.”
“Well, what do you want from me?”
“I know you’re loaded, man. You’re loaded.”
Durocher would pull out a twenty-dollar bill, Mays would snatch it, and the next day when Durocher asked for his change, Mays would again plead poverty, claiming he bought ice cream for a group of kids.
But Durocher needed no excuse to spoil him. He would invite Mays into his room and show him a mohair sweater or a handsome sports coat. “How’d you like one of these?” he’d ask. And before Mays could respond, he’d say, “Well, it’s yours!” And Mays would beam with appreciation.
If Durocher was Mays’s father figure, then Monte Irvin was his surrogate older brother. Their friendship played a decisive role in both their careers and the fate of the ’51 Giants.
Understated and respectful, Irvin took remarkable care never to offend. His name, for example, was Monford Merrill Irvin, and he was called “Monty.” But when he reached the big leagues, he changed his name to “Monte” because when he signed baseballs, the y ran into the names of other players. He was born in Alabama, one of thirteen children, but in grade school his family moved to Orange, New Jersey, where he lived in a hardscrabble, integrated neighborhood. Monte could have easily found trouble but turned to sports instead.
He almost died as a senior in high school when he contracted hemolytic streptococcus, a potentially fatal infection. The doctors thought they needed to amputate his left arm to save him. “No,” his mother said. “He’s an athlete. If he wakes up with no left arm, he’ll die anyhow.” She called on a “higher doctor.” Monte survived, leading him to conclude that he had been saved for a special mission on earth. That mission was baseball, played with gratitude and honor.
At nineteen, he joined the Newark Eagles in the Negro Leagues, a fast, right-handed-hitting outfielder who could catch, throw, and drive the ball with power to all fields. So great was his potential that one of his high school teachers called a major league owner, urging him to watch the kid play. The owner sent three different scouts. Their conclusion: “He’s the next DiMaggio.”
The owner was Horace Stoneham. But it was 1938, and Stoneham was no pioneer. “It was too soon,” he later told Irvin. So Irvin stayed with the Eagles and by 1941 may have been the best player in the Negro Leagues, averaging .409 over two full seasons. The following year, he played in the Mexican League, got married, and hit .397 on his honeymoon. He was just reaching his prime when he was drafted by the army and served in a segregated engineering outfit in England, France, and Germany. After the war, he was playing baseball again, and in 1945 the Brooklyn Dodgers approached him about signing with them. But while Irvin was stationed overseas, he developed an inner-ear imbalance, which cost him his timing and even some of his strength. He told the Dodgers he wasn’t ready. Jackie Robinson got the call instead. By all rights, Irvin should have broken the color line: he and Robinson were born less than a month apart, but he had more experience than Robinson and, but for the effects of a freak military ailment, he was the better player. He missed his chance at history.
Irvin stayed with the Newark Eagles. Four years later, Stoneham amended his previous oversight and signed him to a contract. When Irvin made his debut for the Giants in July of 1949, he was already thirty years old.
The Giants had pegged him as their Great Black Hope, a counterpoint to Robinson, and he indeed increased the attendance of African Americans at the Polo Grounds. But his performance was erratic. After a disappointing start in thirty-four games in 1949 (.224 average, seven RBIs, and no home runs), he began the 1950 season in the minors. He returned to the Giants in a month and, over 110 games, had a good year: .299 average, with fifteen homers and sixty-six RBIs.
But 1951 began as a disaster. Playing out of position at first base, he made eight errors in thirty-four games—he said he felt like “a bear trying to open a sardine can”—and was hitting .276 with two homers. He was dropped to eighth in the order. He was bitter about his defensive assignment and, his career seemingly stalled, sullen about the glory that had eluded him. His fortunes began to improve when he was returned to the outfield in the middle of May, but the arrival of Willie Mays did far more.
Irvin saw something special in the young man from his own state of Alabama. Irvin saw himself. He had been nineteen when Stoneham concluded “it was too soon” to bring a black player to the majors, but the time was right for Mays. Irvin believed he could be a role model, a credit to their race, someone whose accomplishments on and off the field could far exceed any of his own.
Durocher told Irvin, “Tell him what to do and how to do it.” That partly referred to baseball: Irvin positioned him in the outfield and advised him on what pitchers threw, how well they held runners, and which catchers had good arms. Mays helped Irvin as well. After the two bumped into each other on their first night in the outfield in Philadelphia, Durocher ordered that any ball Mays could reach was his to catch. The corner outfielders could cede the gaps and just protect the lines, reducing their burdens. Irvin had a good arm, but on some balls hit over his head, Mays sprinted to medium left field to serve as the cutoff man, shortening the distance for Irvin while giving the Giants a much stronger arm for throws to home plate.
Off the field, Irvin saw Mays for what he was—good-natured, shy, naive, unschooled in city life, untouched by cynicism. Mays all but shouted out his vulnerability. At one point, he signed an exclusive bubble gum testimonial, but then he signed another testimonial, equally exclusive, for the bubble gum’s chief competitor. Something had to be done, so he sent the second company a letter that said in full: “Being an infant, and under 21, I could not sign legally with you people. Please forgive me. Willie Mays.”
As Irvin recalls: “Coming from the South, he didn’t have a lot of the social graces or the sophistication that he should have, but he was a quick learner.” In restaurants, Irvin taught him how to order food (for eggs, “just say medium”), what fork to use, how much to tip. Mays bought a car in New York, a Pontiac, because that’s what Irvin drove, but it sat in a parking lot. Durocher didn’t want him to use it, and Mays wouldn’t learn how to drive until the off-season. Irvin told him the places to go and—more important—the places and people to avoid: “sharpies,” “numbers runners,” “pimps,” and “unsavory characters” as well as “bar maids” and women with bad reputations or questionable motives. Mays had already heard some of this advice from the Black Barons as well as from Frank Forbes, such as the warning not to date white women (Mays never did).
“All the women came after him,” Irvin says. “He would ask me, ‘Irv, do you know this girl?’ I’d just say, ‘If she’s got a good reputation, then good luck.’ ”
Irvin, like Durocher, recognized how sensitive Mays was to criticism, so he made sure never to embarrass him when he did something wrong. “If it were me,” Irvin would say, “I’d do it this way.”
Sometimes his advice was taken, sometimes not. Irvin, for example, believed that Mays’s reluctance to talk to reporters hurt his endorsement opportunities. As a rookie, Mays allowed Durocher to do most of his talking, and Durocher typically screened interview requests as well. But by 1954 Mays was still uncomfortable around many writers and in some cases wouldn’t speak with them, even those eager to praise him. Irvin told Mays to look at Mickey Mantle, who was depicted in the press as a personable fellow ready to share a good joke and an easy laugh.
“I think if you just kid around with reporters a little more, be a little friendlier and be more like Mantle, you’d get more endorsements,” Irvin said.
“I have to be me,” Mays replied.
Irvin was also mindful that the journalists were using Mays to perpetuate negative stereotypes about Negroes. At the time, blacks were often presented in literature and film as having an “innate gayety of soul”; they lived an “entire lifetime of laughs and thrills [of] excitement and fun” in a society burdened “with unnatural inhibitions.” Mays had his first brush with the Stepin Fetchit image—servile and simpleminded—in Minneapolis but would experience it more broadly in New York. One newspaper cartoon in 1951, echoing the cartoon that had appeared in Minneapolis a year earlier, depicted Mays in action, saying, “Ah gives baserunners the heave ho! Ah aims to go up in the world.”
While he was constantly described as a great “natural” or “instinctive” player, the cliché was often used to patronize him, to diminish his intelligence, to imply that he was simply following the impulses of his body. As the New York Journal-American ’s Bill Corum wrote, “He is no mental Giant, Willie.... Yet baseball is played by instinct and a fellow with a quick eye, sense of timing and natural instinct for it seldom makes the wrong play. My observation of Mays is that he was born with these things. The born ball player with physical equipment.”
Even the favorable representations of Mays depicted him as a poorly educated naif. As the Sporting News wrote, “With his wide, white smile gleaming out of a pug-nose, baby face, Willie says, ‘If you worry about one thing, pretty soon you start to worry about others. I don’t worry about nothin’. ’ ” On another occasion, the Sporting News published a story about a reporter’s asking Mays what it felt like to be the game’s most “exciting” player. Mays misunderstood the word, confusing it with “excitable,” and he responded, “I don’t know why they call me that. I don’t ever get excited. I just play my game and let others get excited.”
Durocher contributed to the unfavorable perceptions. His protection bordered on condescension. With Mays calling him “Mr. Leo” and Durocher responding with “my boy,” with the manager’s screening interview requests and the center fielder’s allowing Leo to answer for him, at times they projected an uncomfortable image—in Roger Kahn’s words—of “straw boss” and “plantation hand.” In Durocher’s autobiography, he claimed that Mays “could hardly read or write when he came up,” which was false. (Mays’s postcards from the time demonstrate competent writing skills.) Durocher defended his pampering as a means of restoring Mays’s confidence, but the effect was also to infantilize him at a time when blacks were already stereotyped as intellectually inferior.
Monte Irvin knew that some black fans were uncomfortable with the relationship. “It bothered me a little too,” he says. “I saw what was going on. I thought the whole situation could have been handled a little better.” He also feared that the public did not respect Mays beyond his baseball skills. “All he did was go out there and play great baseball, but I also wanted him to carry himself with a certain amount of dignity,” he says. He encouraged Mays to get a tutor and improve his elocution, but Mays was reluctant. “It’s never too much trouble,” Irvin told him, “if you want to progress the right way.”
In truth, with a high school degree, Mays had as much education as most big league players, who were hardly exemplars in diction and grammar. What worked against him was his race and his southern roots. “Black folks had their own language, a comfortable language that we all understood,” says Mays’s cousin, Loretta Richardson. This separate language made them “bilingual,” she says, as they spoke an informal “black dialect” as well as standard English. “When you got into proper places,” she notes, “you had to speak proper language”—a language, however, that her cousin had not mastered as a suddenly famous rookie.
Indeed, Mays was self-conscious about his voice, his verbal skills, and his education, so he was grateful to Durocher for rescuing him. “When the newspapermen used to ask me questions,” he recalled, “I didn’t know how to answer. Leo knew how scared I was, and he told the newspapermen to ask him the questions, and he’d try to answer them for me. I never forgot that.”
In years to come, when he had more self-confidence, he committed himself to improving his speaking skills, paying attention to the sounds of words and making connections with audiences—everything, in other words, that Monte Irvin had once urged.
If Irvin’s maturity inched Mays into adulthood, Mays had a more catalytic effect on Irvin. They played silly games on the road, such as Captain of the Room—whoever got more base hits that day was Captain for the night, so the other guy had to carry the bags, get the newspaper, and answer the telephone. Mays wouldn’t allow Irvin to be discouraged, even when he was slumping. The rookie brought his portable record player on the road, and one night after Irvin had taken the collar, Mays put on some music and started humming. When Irvin demanded that he turn it off, Mays asked if he wanted to play cards. Or go to the movies. Or shop for clothes. Irvin kept shaking his head.
“I know you not hitting, but what good you going to do worrying?” Mays said. “Be like Willie. I don’t worry about nothing.”
When Irvin started to argue, Mays cut him off. “There’s good in every bad,” he said.
What meant the most to Irvin was simply Mays’s presence. His running gags and pealing laughter seemed to disperse his own gloom and frustration. “Willie gave me a lift,” Irvin says. “You always knew when he was around, because the love of life just flowed out of him, and it got to the point where it was a pleasure to come to the ballpark every day.”
It showed in Irvin’s performance. Despite his bad start in 1951, he led the team in batting average (.312), RBIs (121, which also led the league), and on-base percentage (.415); was tied for first in stolen bases (12); and was second in homers (24) and slugging percentage (.514). By far his finest year in the majors, he finished third as the National League’s MVP. But he said he was not the most important player on the team. “The single greatest factor [in our pennant run], beyond a shadow of a doubt, was the presence of Willie Mays.... He just made it better for everybody,” he said.
At the All-Star break, the Giants were 44–36 and eight games behind the Dodgers. The Giants brought up second baseman Davey Williams from Minneapolis—Stanky was fine, but Durocher wanted to look at Williams for the next year. The move seemed reasonable, for the Giants couldn’t close the gap in July, and by early August, the Dodgers appeared to have sealed the race. On August 9, they beat the Giants, 6–5, in a bitter ten-inning contest that concluded a three-game sweep. The Dodgers had now won twelve of fifteen against the Giants and were 12½ games in front. Afterward, in the thinly partitioned locker rooms at Ebbets Field, the Dodgers taunted Durocher: “Leo, Leo, you in there? Eat your heart out, Leo! Yeah, that’s your team! Nobody else wants it!” Next they sang, “Roll out the barrel. We’ve got the Giants on the run.” Finally, Jackie Robinson stood outside the locker room. He and Durocher had had an ugly falling out when Durocher returned as the Dodgers’ manager in 1948, and these two single-minded, competitive men now hated each other. With the pennant seemingly in hand, Robinson raised a bat, pounded the door, and unleashed a victor’s stream of epithets.
There was a pause. Then Eddie Stanky walked over to the door and yelled, “Stick that bat down your throat, you black nigger son-of-a-bitch.” Stanky, as well as Bill Rigney and Alvin Dark, turned and suddenly saw Monte Irvin. The three white men stood sheepishly until Irvin, a slight grin forming on his face, said, “That’s good enough for me, Eddie.”
The next game, on August 11, was another Giant loss to the Phillies, giving them six losses in the last eight games. After the Dodgers won the first game of a doubleheader, the Giants trailed by 13½ games. At some point in July or August (the date is unclear), Dodger manager Charlie Dressen summarized the race: “The Giants is dead.”
But the Giants also had Willie Mays, and while no pennant race turns on a single catch or throw, Mays was responsible for one memorable play that convinced his teammates that any game down the stretch, no matter the inning or odds, could be won.
On August 15, the Giants and Dodgers played each other again, this time at the Polo Grounds before 21,007 fans. The Giants had won the first game of the series, giving them four in a row and stirring thoughts of a comeback. The Dodgers still had a comfortable lead but wanted to squash a possible uprising. Mays had cooled off at the plate—he hit just two homers in August—but in less than three months, he had proven he belonged in the big leagues.
With Jim Hearn pitching for the Giants, New York grabbed a one-run lead in the first inning, but the Dodgers’ Ralph Branca kept the game close and Brooklyn pushed a run across in the seventh. In the top of the eighth with one out, Billy Cox was on third, and Carl Furillo, a right-handed pull hitter, was at the plate. Mays shaded him to left center. Furillo drove the ball into right center, and Mays took off. At first glance, it appeared a certain run. The ball was either going to fall for a hit or Mays would catch it and Cox would tag up and score. Cox, a defensive specialist, had come to the majors as a shortstop, and he looked like one—slender and fast. As Mays closed in on the ball, Cox stood poised at third in a sprinter’s stance. Mays extended his glove and speared the drive—an outstanding catch—but the play was just getting started. Cox bolted for the plate as Mays was barreling toward the right field line, his momentum carrying him away from the play. He was in no position to throw, but when he planted his left foot, he sharply pivoted counterclockwise, his number temporarily facing home plate, his eyes flashing intensely before the bleacher fans. It appeared as if the impact of the ball had given him the additional thrust to pirouette in spikes. Without hesitating or even looking, he whipped his right arm around and fired the ball, then corkscrewed his body into the ground. His hat flew off. He peered under his armpit and tried to follow the drama at home plate.
Despite Mays’s impossibly awkward position, the ball, according to one writer, “took off as though it had a will of its own,” cutting through the air like a bullet, taking aim at the orange-trimmed black letters across the chest of first baseman Whitey Lockman, who had positioned himself to cut off the ball. The catcher, Wes Westrum, screamed, “Let it go!” Lockman ducked, he later said, “more out of self-preservation than anything else.” Westrum, built like a block of granite, hadn’t removed his mask because he didn’t expect a play, but now both ball and runner came bearing down. He later estimated that when the ball reached him, it was traveling 85 mph, and if the umpire had called it, it would have been a strike. Russ Hodges had the call: “Willie Mays... is reaching up with one hand, he’s got it, he spins 180 degrees. Cox breaks for home. Wait a minute! Wait a minute! The ball comes into Westrum on the fly. Cox slides, and Westrum cuts him down at the plate! Cox is out! Billy Cox is out!”
Inside the Polo Grounds, there was a momentary silence, similar to the response when Mays hit his first homer, as if the fans couldn’t comprehend what they had just seen. Then the stadium erupted while Cox sat staring at the plate in disbelief. The double play complete, Mays trotted off the field, and when his teammates greeted him on the top steps of the dugout, he shrugged his way through, as though uncomfortable with all the fuss. He was already thinking about the bottom of the eighth—he was the first man up.
When he walked to the plate, he received another standing ovation and still another when he lined a single to left. The next hitter, Westrum, launched a home run into the upper deck, and the Giants won, 3–1.
After the game, Jackie Robinson said it was the greatest throw he’d ever seen, but his manager, Charlie Dressen, was less magnanimous. “I’d like to see him do it again. If he does it again, I’ll say he’s great.” Furillo was bitter. “That was the luckiest throw I ever saw in my life,” he said. “He can try that fifty times and he won’t come close again.”
But Eddie Brannick, the Giants’ well-groomed traveling secretary known for his lilting Irish brogue and his kindness to reporters, made a rare visit to the clubhouse to compliment Mays. “I have been in baseball for forty-five years,” he said. “I have seen Speaker, DiMaggio, Moore, all of them in center, but I’ve never seen anything like that throw. This kid made the greatest play I ever saw.”
Indeed, the play became known as “the Throw,” except it wasn’t really the throw that made it spectacular. It was Mays’s improvisation, the subtlety of his footwork, the ability to redirect his momentum toward home plate. Strictly speaking, it was an “instinctive” play in that he had never mapped it out on a practice field, but while chasing the ball, he envisioned how he would catch it, spin, and throw. The key was to glimpse the cutoff man in his peripheral vision, so he had a target—and hope the cutoff man was positioned correctly. Nevertheless, Bill Corum wrote that Mays only attempted the play because he wasn’t very smart: “A thinking ball player probably would have thought... that the play was impossible and never have attempted it.”
Mays’s teammates gave him his due. As Lockman later said, “I was absolutely astounded. I’d had balls thrown to me by Stanky, or whoever was playing second, only a few feet away, really hard—you know how hard it is, you hardly have time to react. Well, this ball was like that, only it was coming from, what, 250, 275 feet away. I remember seeing Willie throw, and the next instant the ball was on top of me.”
Because the play was not filmed, it survives only in written accounts and in the fading memories of those few who saw it. But Mays knows it was one of his greatest feats ever on the playing field. As he said at the time, “It was the perfectest throw I ever made.”
It also cut the Dodger lead to 10½ games.
The win continued a streak that would reach sixteen games, culminating in a doubleheader sweep against the Cubs on August 27, which cut the Dodger lead to five games. Oddly, with the exception of Mays and Westrum, the Giants were not that good defensively. In August they committed at least one error in twenty-two consecutive games. But they were led by fine pitching, the double-play combination of Dark and Stanky, and the emergence of Irvin as a consistent force at the plate. Irvin credits Durocher for encouraging his team without applying undue pressure. He would not implore, “We have to catch the Dodgers” or “You have to get a hit.” Rather, he’d say, “Let’s see how close we can come” or “I need another hero today—who’s going to step up?”
Mays’s inexperience showed at times. On September 3 in the Polo Grounds, Mays hit what appeared to be an inside-the-park homer against Robin Roberts of the Phillies. But he missed third base and was called out, and the Giants lost, 6–3. Another time, he ran from first to third on a drive to the outfield. When the ball was caught, he raced across the diamond, forgetting to touch second, and was doubled off. He made rookie mistakes in the outfield as well. He could be too aggressive, charging past grounders, overthrowing bases, or taking balls that would have been easier caught by teammates. Though Durocher had told him to catch everything in sight, some reporters accused him of “hogging” balls.
Mays’s miscues were easily forgiven, however, as his popularity extended beyond the Polo Grounds. At the time, players were occasionally given their own “day,” for some special tribute, in their own ballpark. But on August 17 in Philadelphia, Shibe Park was the unlikely site of Willie Mays Day. The residents of nearby Trenton wanted to honor Mays for his previous season in their town. A nine-man citizens committee in Trenton organized the tribute, and with several thousand Trentonians in the stands, a ceremony was held before the game. Mays received, among other things, $250 in cash from the Carver YMCA, a plaque from the city of Trenton, a golf bag and clubs, and an oil painting of himself, in his Giants uniform, leaping for a catch.
The bleacher fans in the Polo Grounds, perhaps discomfited by a rival city’s celebrating their hero, pooled their coins together and, on September 1, gave Mays a new wristwatch.
On September 8, the Giants lost to the Dodgers in a blowout at Ebbets Field. With the Dodgers ahead, 7–0, in the eighth inning, Dressen ordered Jackie Robinson to squeeze a run home. After the game, Durocher cheerfully dismissed the suggestion that the Dodgers were rubbing it in. Asked why, he said, “Because now I’ve got their motherfucking bunt sign, that’s why.”
After winning the next game, New York was now 5½ games behind, and the schedule had broken against them—they were in the midst of a sixteen-game road trip. On September 11, they split a doubleheader in St. Louis, putting them eight games out on the loss side. Newspapers began printing the Dodgers’ magic number: 11. But the Giants kept winning, inching to five games out on September 15, though the fans were losing faith. One week later, with the Giants 4½ games out, fewer than twelve thousand people showed up at the Polo Grounds with the Boston Braves in town. The Giants won while the Dodgers lost a doubleheader, then the Giants reeled off four more straight wins, including two in Philadelphia. On September 27 and 28, as the Giants rested, the Dodgers lost two games, finally tying the teams as they headed into the last two games of the regular season. The race had captivated New York. The Times began putting the scores on the front page, and at the featherweight title fight between Sandy Saddler and Willie Pep at the Polo Grounds on September 26, the public address announcer gave the Giants’ score between each round.
In the final weekend, the Giants faced the Braves in Boston, with Warren Spahn pitching. Mays was still struggling at the plate, perhaps feeling the pressure of the pennant race, and went hitless for the game—but was still a key offensive player. In the second inning, he drew a walk. At the time, if he wanted to steal, he would nod his head just enough so that the bill of his cap would bob. If Durocher consented, he would show Mays the palm of his hand. Now Durocher, standing in the third base coaching box, looked at Mays and thought he saw his cap bob. Durocher couldn’t believe it. As he later said, “Warren Spahn had the best move to first base anybody had ever seen. You didn’t steal second base on Spahn. You just tried not to get picked off. But sure enough, the bill on Willie’s hat jumps again. He not only wants to run against Spahn, he wants to run right now.... I’m sweating, and this rookie, all he wants to do is run? You want to go, son, here’s the palm. Go ahead. Boom! He stole second base clean as a whistle, dusted off his pants, and the cap is going up and down again. He stole third just as easily and scored on Don Mueller’s single. We scored two more runs before the day was over, but the game was won right there. He took the pressure right off the whole club, especially their dandy little manager.”
The Dodgers won their game against the Phillies as well, setting up the final day of the regular season. The Giants, in another low-scoring contest, took a 3–1 lead into the ninth; the Braves rallied for a run, but starter Larry Jansen held on to win. After Irvin caught the final out, the Giants rushed onto the field and engulfed their exhausted pitcher. Mays went 0-for-4 with a strikeout.
The Giants finished the season at 96–58, winning their last seven games and forty out of their last fifty-four. At least for now, they had sole possession of first place for the first time.
When Mays reached the clubhouse, he thought the Giants were going to win the pennant, for the Dodgers had been trailing in Philadelphia. But there was no celebration. Initially down, 6–1, the Dodgers had rallied and were now losing, 8–5, in the fifth. With six cases of unopened champagne at the ready, the Giants gathered around radios in a steamy locker room, expecting to celebrate, and for more than an hour they paced, cheered, and cursed, awaiting their fate. Finally showered and dressed, they left Braves Field by bus, and when they boarded the Merchants Limited, the premier Boston–New York train, the Dodgers were still losing by three. The champagne came with them. Heading toward Grand Central Station, the Giants ate steaks and played cards. “They were having a hell of a time,” Herman Franks recalled. “They were cutting each other’s ties off.”
Giant Vice President Chub Feeney could follow the Dodgers’ game on a telephone in the back of the train—he dialed into a radio station in New York—and he relayed the action, play by play. The Giants heard that the Dodgers scored three runs to push the game into extra innings, but when the Phillies loaded the bases with one out in the bottom of the twelfth, Feeney lost his contact at the station.
With two outs, the Phillies’ Eddie Waitkus smashed a low line drive to the right of second base. Surely this would end the Dodgers’ season. But Jackie Robinson ran to his right, dove, and caught the ball with his glove just off the ground. He fell hard on his shoulder, scraped his face, and stayed on the ground, but he finally rose and walked unsteadily to the dugout. In the top of the fourteenth, in what might have been Robinson’s greatest day in the majors, he came up with two outs and crashed a homer off Robin Roberts, giving the Dodgers a 9–8 win. A reporter on the Giants’ train was told of the score by phone; word soon spread, and the champagne was never opened.
Five thousand fans met the Giants at Grand Central Terminal at nine-thirty that night, and another throng, not as large but equally boisterous, greeted the Dodgers at Penn Station. The resurrection of the Giants over the last two months had been matched by the Dodgers’ improbable comeback in one game. The teams would now face each other in a best-of-three playoff series; the winner would face the Yankees. Little else in New York seemed to matter. As the New York Times editorialized the next day: “Now the playoff comes. For the next few days, just as in the past weeks, even the grimmest of world-wide news will have an overshadowing rival for attention in the whirl and clash of the great American game. This is as it should be. It is not thoughtless or careless to turn away from time to time to the drama of fine sport, and what we have witnessed and, one hopes, will be privileged to continue witnessing for at least two more days, is the highest and most inspirational drama we could hope for.”
In September, the Giants won twenty out of twenty-five games. What Mays remembered from the race—what all the Giants remembered—was how the team pulled together. “I don’t think there’s ever been a club in the history of baseball that’s been closer than the New York Giants were the last week of that season,” Rigney later said. “I mean, guys were helping each other out so much, it was unbelievable.... We were still making errors, throwing to the wrong base, that kind of thing, but instead of getting on the culprit, or giving him the silent treatment, everyone else would sort of swarm around him and shower him with encouragement and love.”
The team’s racial diversity made its unity even more meaningful. “Back in those days, the race business was still a big problem for baseball,” Irvin recalled. “And we had, what, four or five black guys on the club, all from down South somewhere.... And then we had all these white guys, and a lot of them were Southerners—Dark, Stanky, Lockman, Hearn, Kennedy, at least a dozen others. And yet there was never any anti-feeling on the club. Everybody pulled for everybody, no matter the color. In that respect, it was a very unusual club. Most every other club that had blacks in ’51, there were problems. Even the Dodgers had problems. They still had guys on that club who were upset about playing with black men. My guess is that the Dodgers probably lost six or seven games purely on that alone.”
To Mays, the Giants’ togetherness simply confirmed his notion of baseball as a family enterprise. Just as the parents, uncles, or older brothers help out the youngest in the clan, the owner, the manager, and the veterans help out the inexperienced and the unsure. Mays still marvels at how much support he received from Dark and Stanky as well as Durocher, Irvin, Forbes, and the entire organization. That was the significance of his rookie season. Baseball’s familial bond was as powerful in the major leagues as it was in the cornfields of Alabama.
Mays had hit less than .200 down the stretch, which seemed to confirm Durocher’s decision in August to drop him in the order. He put Mays in the seventh hole, flipping him with Bobby Thomson, who had had a rocky year himself. Thomson was miffed at Durocher, and perhaps Mays himself, for removing him from center field. Durocher, for his part, didn’t believe Thomson showed enough emotion, and the disgruntled player rode the bench for a while; by the end of June, he was hitting just .220 with nine homers. But he rebounded in the second half, moving to third base in July to replace the injured Hank Thompson, and he proved to be one of the Giants’ most productive hitters, finishing the season with a team-best 32 home runs, 101 RBIs, and a .293 average.
The first playoff game, at Ebbets Field on a beautiful afternoon with temperatures in the low seventies, continued the hitting trends of the regular season. Mays went 0-for-3 and struck out twice against Dodger starter Ralph Branca. Overmatched, he didn’t want to face Branca again. But Thomson was one of the stars, hitting a home run, and the Giants won, 3–1, behind Jim Hearn.
In game two, at the Polo Grounds, Durocher could have started his ace, Sal Maglie, but he wanted to give his exhausted veteran one more day of rest. So the ball went to the erratic Sheldon Jones, a spot starter that year with a 6–10 record and a 4.26 ERA. He lost to the Dodgers, 10–0, the lousy weather intensifying the misery. Mays went 1-for-4 and committed an error.
Day baseball was a communal event, and fans followed the games from their offices, factories, taverns, and schools. That was never more true than in the deciding playoff game on Wednesday, October 3. The Dow Jones ticker sprinkled baseball updates among the stock quotes. The New York Telephone Company expanded its time-of-day service so that callers heard the time as well as the inning and the score. Belmont Park announced updates in between races. A Brooklyn prison provided portable radios for its inmates. Libraries set up televisions in conference rooms. Taverns without TVs were empty.
Media interest had soared. The World Series was to be the first sporting event to be televised live. That New York would be the site of all the games was fortunate, because it had the best facilities for transmission. But as the season wound down, a new possibility emerged for television—a playoff and a World Series. This double bonanza, wrote Charles Einstein, “touched off the wildest set-buying spree in all of television’s history, before or after. In some cities, the sale of TV sets actually exceeded the sale of radios, even though the latter’s totals included the radios in automobiles.”
The radio kingpins were also at the final playoff game, including the Liberty Mutual network, which was carried on 520 stations, and powerful KMOX of St. Louis, which dispatched the animated Harry Caray to the Polo Grounds. Eight separate broadcasts aired the contest, but the story was television. By the time the game began beneath gray skies at 1:30 P.M., Americans across the nation were watching 16 million TVs, the first pitch seen, as Joshua Prager wrote, “by more sets of eyes than had ever before beheld a ball’s flight.”
Ironically, the game’s attendance was only 34,320; the previous game’s was more than 38,000. Threatening weather may have been a factor or just the nature of an unexpected third game. The crowd did include Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra, and Toots Shor, who, with tickets from Durocher, rode to the Polo Grounds in a limousine stocked with booze.
Both teams had their aces on the mound. Don Newcombe, the flame-throwing right-hander, and Sal Maglie, a curveball specialist with a reputation for knocking hitters down, had more than twenty wins apiece, but they each had tired arms. Newcombe had pitched more than fourteen innings over the weekend; Maglie had thrown a complete game on Saturday. Neither figured to be around by the end.
The Dodgers got off to a good start. Taking advantage of two walks by Maglie, they scored a run in the first, and a Thomson baserunning blunder snuffed out a scoring opportunity in the second. Maglie settled down and retired eleven in a row. The Giants appeared ready to rally in the fifth when Thomson stroked a double, but Mays couldn’t advance him. By the seventh inning, the score was still 1–0, and as the skies darkened, the Giants finally broke through. With Irvin on third and Lockman on first and nobody out, Thomson hit a fly ball to Duke Snider in center, and Irvin dashed home to tie the game.
Mays came up once again. At that point, he was hitless for the day and 1-for-9 in the playoffs, with three strikeouts. He could give the Giants the lead with one swing or at least advance Lockman into scoring position. With the Dodgers down to their final six outs, Mays could be the hero.
He hit into a double play. I could have been on the bench, he thought, and helped the team just as much.
In the eighth, the Giants fell apart. With Snider on first and Pee Wee Reese on third, Maglie uncorked a wild pitch, giving the Dodgers their second run. Maglie walked Robinson intentionally and Andy Pafko bounced a hard grounder to third, but Thomson failed to scoop it—the play was generously ruled a hit—and Snider scored as the ball bounced into left. The Dodgers led, 3–1, and with two outs, Billy Cox made it 4–1 with a single past the demoralized Thomson. Durocher replaced Maglie, who in the clubhouse saw Horace Stoneham. “Sal, you had a hell of a year,” he said. “Have a beer.”
The tension was gone from the Dodgers’ bench. Laughing and joking, they were certain of victory, their confidence reinforced by Newcombe’s quick retiring of the Giants in the eighth.
The Dodgers went in order in the ninth, leaving the Giants one last try. The number two hitter in the order, Alvin Dark, was leading off, which meant Mays would be sixth up. Newcombe had given up only four hits and showed little signs of weakening. Mays doubted he would get another at-bat and sat quietly at the end of the bench.
Dark quickly fell behind in the count, 0–2, but then reached out for a fastball and slapped a ground ball wide of first for a single. With Don Mueller, a left-handed hitter, up next, the Dodgers inexplicably had first baseman Gil Hodges hold Dark. Down by three, Dark was not going to steal (he had twelve stolen bases for the season), and Mueller was a good pull hitter. Mays noticed the mistake from the dugout. So did many of the other Giants, including Mueller, who said he saw that hole on the right side “sitting there like a deer in the hunting season.” He hit the first pitch to the right side, a certain double play if Hodges had been positioned correctly. Instead, the ball went through for a hit, chasing Dark to third. The tying run now came to the plate in Monte Irvin, but the slugger popped out to first. Two outs to go; an announcement was made in the press box: “Attention, press. World Series credentials for Ebbets Field can be picked up at six o’clock tonight at the Biltmore Hotel.”
The next batter, Whitey Lockman, came to the plate thinking home run, and he smashed the ball into the left field corner. Dark scored and Mueller made it safely to third, but he didn’t slide and, stepping awkwardly on the base, popped a tendon in his right ankle. He collapsed and was soon carried into the clubhouse on a stretcher. Clint Hartung, who had seen little action in recent weeks, ran for him. Durocher later said the selection of the broad-shouldered Hartung had little to do with strategy: as the third base coach, Durocher had been taunting Newcombe throughout the game and feared that after the final out, the bruising pitcher was going to attack him. Hartung was the only Giant big enough to stop him.
With the score 4–2 and runners at second and third, Dressen came to the mound, joined by the entire infield. Newcombe had thrown only 100 pitches, but he was spent, having thrown thirty-two innings in the last eight days. Three hurlers were ready in the bullpen—Ralph Branca, Carl Erskine, and Clem Labine. The next hitter, Bobby Thomson, watched the conference from the on-deck circle, with the next hitter peering out from the dugout. Mays wasn’t sure who’d be pitching if he were to bat, but he knew he didn’t want to face Branca. He had had one single and one double in nineteen at-bats against him, plus two walks and four strikeouts.
The first choice out of the bullpen might have been Erskine, but Dressen was told that he was bouncing his curveball, so Branca got the nod. A tall, swarthy right-hander, as a twenty-one-year-old in 1947, Branca posted a 21–12 record, won a World Series game, and was considered one of the best young pitchers in the game. He never developed into a star but by now was a dependable veteran. He had pitched eight innings just two days earlier.
Thomson headed for the plate, and Mays grabbed his bat. Just as center field in the Polo Grounds was oversized, so too was the area around home plate. It lay seventy-four feet from the backstop and was in the center of a large circle of dirt. Mays walked to the outer edge of that dirt, stopped, and dropped his right knee to the ground—as if he wanted the closest seat possible. He was usually not religious, but just as there are no atheists in a foxhole, there are none in the on-deck circle with a playoff series on the line. Mays began to pray: Please don’t let it be me. Don’t make me come to bat now, God.
With first base open, the Dodgers could have intentionally walked Thomson, who had smashed a home run off Branca in the first playoff game, to set up the double play, and given Mays’s record against Branca and his playoff slump, that seemed like a reasonable move. But it would have violated one of baseball’s hoariest axioms: never put the winning run on first base. There was another consideration—the Dodgers’ high regard for Mays. As Branca said the following spring, “Willie may not have had a great average last year, but the Dodger pitchers all respected him. You could fool him, but you couldn’t make any mistake and get away with it. He was too liable to get a hold of one and ruin you.... No, I never gave any thought to walking Thomson, and I don’t think Dressen did either.”
When Branca reached the mound, Dressen said, “Get [Thomson] out.” Durocher, walking up to Thomson along the third base line, had only a few more words: “Boy, if you ever hit one out, hit one now.”
The time was just shy of 4 P.M., and the Giant fans were clapping wildly. Branca’s first pitch, a fastball, was taken for a strike on the inside part of the plate above the knees, a pitch that a low-ball hitter like Thomson would usually swing at. Some Dodgers believed Branca had gotten away with one. As Thomson recalled, “It’s true, that first pitch was a blur, not because it was so fast but because I was so nervous my eyeballs were vibrating.”
Durocher thought that Branca had thrown Thomson a slider for his home run the other day and figured he would see fastballs today.
“C’mon!” Durocher yelled to Thomson. “He’ll come back with one!”
The catcher, Rube Walker, replacing the injured Campanella, called for another fastball. This one was a bit higher and more inside than the last pitch. Branca thought it was a good pitch—high and tight, tough to hit. But Thomson stepped in the bucket and uppercut the ball, powerfully rotating his broad back. He hit the ball flush, a line drive to left field toward the 315-foot mark. Branca yelled, “Sink! Sink! Sink!” Instead it sailed.
No one had a better view than Mays. When he looked up, he didn’t think it would be a home run. The crowd soon knew otherwise, and so did Russ Hodges, who screamed: “There’s a long drive. It’s gonna be... I believe... the Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!”
Recalled announcer Ernie Harwell: “It was the biggest crowd noise I ever heard, a complete eruption, like the sky was being pulled apart.”
Left fielder Andy Pafko, at the wall, gazed up plaintively into the stands. Thomson raced around the bases, dancing with joy. Durocher ran with him from third base. The other Giants fled the dugout and amassed at home plate. Photographers circled the gathering mob. Jackie Robinson stayed on the field, hands on hips, unwilling to leave until he saw Thomson touch each base. Ralph Branca picked up the rosin bag, threw it down, and began his long march into history.
In the clubhouse, Sal Maglie hoisted the bulky Horace Stoneham, put him down, then did a jig with the delirious owner.
And Willie Mays froze, paralyzed with excitement and wonder and relief, his knee still on the ground when Thomson touched second base. By the time he moved, he was on the fringe of the celebration, unable to break through the swarming mass, but he jumped like a pogo stick on the mob, leaping higher than anyone else. As one writer observed, “He was acting like a condemned man who had just received the midnight call from the governor.”
The players made their way to the clubhouse, and the fans who had stormed the field were mostly respectful, patting the players on the back and urging them to beat the Yankees the next day. Once in the clubhouse, the Giants discovered how much confidence the locker room attendant had; he had put the champagne away. He pulled it out and plunged it into ice, but the Giants ended up drinking warm champagne. For Mays, it was his first sip, and he almost vomited—or, as Irvin described it, “he got excited and fell out.”
Durocher said he was surprised that the Dodgers didn’t intentionally walk Thomson. “I’m glad they didn’t,” Mays said. “I didn’t want the pennant hanging on my shoulders.” Outside the clubhouse, fans were shouting the names of individual players—Thomson, Stanky, Irvin, and of course Willie—and a police officer finally entered the locker room and said the players needed to do something or the crowd would never disperse. Mays was one of several who walked onto the steps and waved. Flash bulbs popped. Pennants waved. Hats were thrown to the sky, and the cheers wouldn’t die. Mays couldn’t believe the World Series started the very next day.
Several Dodgers, including a tearful Duke Snider, made their way into the Giant clubhouse. Jackie Robinson tapped Bill Rigney on the shoulder. “I want you to know one thing,” he said. “We didn’t lose it. You won it.” He turned around and walked away.
At the time, neither Mays nor anyone else could have envisioned the historical significance of “the Shot Heard ’Round the World.” The journalist George W. Hunt wrote, “It was likely the most dramatic and shocking event in American sports and has since taken on the transcendent character of Pearl Harbor and the Kennedy assassination.” Decades later, the Sporting News declared it the greatest moment in baseball history, and Sports Illustrated ranked it the second greatest moment in sports history (after the U.S. hockey team’s victory over the Soviet Union in the 1980 Winter Olympics). The U.S. Postal Service honored it with a stamp. It has been the subject of books, documentaries, poems, sermons, and debates. It was the center of Underworld, Don DeLillo’s epic novel about America in the second half of the century. It inspired some of the best sportswriting in history (Red Smith: “Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again”) and some of the worst (“Bobby Thomson brought New York City, the entire country, indeed many parts of the world, to a limp and traumatized ending. The joy of Giant partisans was orgasmic”).
Willie Mays was a witness to history and the answer to a future trivia question—“Who was the on-deck batter when Bobby Thomson hit the Shot Heard ’Round the World?” One can only imagine what would have happened if Mays had faced Branca. Mays thinks that Durocher would have pinch-hit for him, but Durocher later said that Mays would have hit—he didn’t pinch-hit for Mays the entire year.
Had Mays driven in the winning run, his emerging cult status would have reached unimaginable heights—he would indeed have been the Giants’ savior who could deliver miracles. But at that moment, with him literally shaking, a winning hit seems unlikely, and had he made the final out, some of the luster of his rookie season would have been lost. He would have blamed himself for the team’s defeat and carried that burden into the off-season.
In truth, the outcome served Mays well. He was given credit for raising the Giants’ play and their spirits, and a new mantra, pushed by Durocher, had begun: with Willie Mays, we can’t lose.
For Mays himself, the Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff was pivotal beyond the winning of a pennant. He was embarrassed by his timidity, ashamed that he did not want to be the man at the plate with the game on the line. He was determined to change that. As he gained experience, he accepted those decisive challenges, he craved them, he wanted to be in the batter’s box, staring at the pitcher, with the contest hanging in the balance. Fear did not best him again.
Thomson’s immortal blow lost some of its shine with the disclosure of Durocher’s elaborate effort to steal his opponents’ pitching signals. Rumors about the scheme had swirled for years but were confirmed by the Wall Street Journal reporter Joshua Prager. His story on January 31, 2001, described how a Giant coach or player positioned himself in the center field clubhouse with a Wollensak telescope, which could be used to steal the signals given by the catcher. A bell-and-buzzer system was used to relay the pitch to either the Giants’ bullpen or dugout. A player there would use various means to communicate the pitch to the hitter—crossing his legs, for example, or tossing a ball.
In Prager’s story, Thomson was equivocal on whether he got the sign before his home run: “I’d have to say more no than yes.” Even if he had, it was within the rules, for Major League Baseball didn’t ban sign stealing with a “mechanical device” until 1961. Nonetheless, the Dodger fans, not to mention Ralph Branca himself, took solace: a devious tactic had been used to help the Giants win games the last two months of the season, including the clincher against Brooklyn.
Willie Mays is circumspect on the issue. He would never say anything to diminish the achievement of another player, particularly a teammate and friend. He also says that stealing signs was always part of the game—everyone did it. Asked if he got signs through the bell-and-buzzer system, he laughs. “Look how I hit,” he says. From August 1 to the end of the regular season, he hit just .266 with three home runs. At the Polo Grounds in the postseason, he was 1-for-7 against the Dodgers; against the New York Yankees, he had two singles in ten at-bats, with one RBI in Game Three; he hit into three double plays. “If I had gotten any signals,” he says, “they sure didn’t help me.”
The World Series, which began less than twenty hours after Thomson’s home run, was anticlimactic. Though the Giants hadn’t been to the Series since 1937, the euphoria from the pennant championship could not be sustained. And the Giants were tired, especially their pitching staff, having gone the final six weeks with just three starters, Maglie, Jansen, and Hearn. The Yankees didn’t have their best team in history—only one regular position player, rookie Gil McDougald, hit over .300, and none drove in a hundred runs or hit thirty home runs—but they had won ninety-eight games to finish five games ahead of Cleveland and featured three excellent starting pitchers: Eddie Lopat, Vic Raschi, and Allie Reynolds, who had a combined 59–27 record. They also had two future Hall of Fame outfielders, one old, one young, which gave the games a whiff of nostalgia and a fleeting glimpse of the future. The Fall Classic had a unique intimacy as well—the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium were in sight of each other, separated only by the Harlem River.
The Series broke a racial barrier that may not have affected the outcome but added an intriguing subplot to the games and placed Mays at the center of history.
The Giants began the season with Hank Thompson as their starter at third, but he was injured on July 17. Bobby Thomson, who after Mays arrived became the team’s fourth outfielder, was given the third base job, and his hot bat allowed him to stay there after Thompson was healthy again. By the season’s end, Hank Thompson was stuck on the bench, but he now found himself in the starting lineup in the World Series. Don Mueller’s playoff injury left a vacancy in right field. Logic dictated that Bobby Thomson, an excellent outfielder, would be sent to right field, and that Hank Thompson would regain third base.
But Durocher had other ideas. He kept Bobby Thomson at third and sent Hank Thompson to the outfield, where he had played in only 10 of his 308 major league games. The move made no sense except in one regard: Hank Thompson was black, and in joining Mays and Irvin, the Giants had the first black outfield in big league history—in the World Series, no less. The trio had made history on June 3 in the Polo Grounds, when they were on base at the same time, a breakthrough noted in the press but not welcomed by all the fans. To cover the outfield symbolized something more permanent. Durocher said nothing to either Irvin or Mays about his decision, and neither particularly cared about the racial precedent—they were just hoping Thompson would end his season-long funk (for the year he hit .235, with eight home runs and thirty-three RBIs).
Durocher was sensitive to the country’s racial dynamics. In April 1954, the Giants played an exhibition game in Birmingham shortly after the city passed an ordinance to allow interracial competition. On a disputed play at third base, Hank Thompson got into a nose-to-nose argument with the umpire, a shocking example of black defiance. Durocher calmly walked out of the dugout and stood in front of the photographers poised to shoot, then waved them off. Nothing came of the confrontation.
Durocher himself wasn’t that interested in social statements. But he was a renegade who liked nothing more than embarrassing the baseball establishment that loathed him.
At the time of the 1951 World Series, only five major league teams had black players,[7] and Yankee General Manager George Weiss was known for making overtly racist comments. The Yankees did not have a black player on their roster for four more years. Durocher assumed that Bobby Thomson and Hank Thompson would handle their responsibilities on the field, and the sight of three black men chasing fly balls in Yankee Stadium was too much to resist.
The press noticed. A photograph of the three men, each holding a bat, was published across the country. The bigots also paid heed. While Mays and Thompson struggled in the Series, Irvin lashed out eleven hits in six games and also stole home, prompting an anonymous quatrain to circulate in the press box:
And Thompson’s lost his vigor,
But Irvin whacks for all the blacks—
It’s great to be a nigger.
Leo Durocher had made his point. In spring training the following year, he sent Bobby Thomson to the outfield and Hank Thompson back to third base.
What made the Series special for Mays was Joe DiMaggio. He saw the thirty-six-year-old for the first time on the field, surrounded by reporters, before the opening game, but he was too shy to introduce himself. A photographer approached him and asked if he would pose with DiMaggio. “Why would he want to take a picture with me?” Mays asked.
The photographer introduced him to DiMaggio and took their picture. The two chatted for a few minutes, a dream come true for Mays. DiMaggio had announced in spring training that this would be his final season, but Mays didn’t know that. The only time Mays got to see his hero play was when DiMaggio was trying to beat him.
The Giants split the first two games and in Game Three, at the Polo Grounds, demonstrated their grit. In the fifth inning, they held a slim 1–0 lead, with Stanky on first. Anticipating a hit-and-run, the Yankees pitched out and appeared to have guessed correctly—Stanky was trying to steal. Catcher Yogi Berra made a perfect throw to shortstop Phil Rizzuto, but Stanky kicked the ball out of his glove and reached third. He scored on a single by Dark on the way to the Giants’ 6–2 victory.
DiMaggio was a miserable 0-for-12, and to Mays he looked tired. DiMaggio may have gotten a break when rain washed out Game Four, giving him a day off. He did not go out in disgrace. In the next game, against Maglie, DiMaggio finally singled. His next at-bat, in the fifth inning, with one man on and the Yankees leading, 2–1, he lined a low curveball over the left field fence. It was the turning point of the game, and as DiMaggio circled the bases to the cheers of the Yankee fans, the most amazing thing happened. In center field Mays started to clap, his right hand slapping his glove. He didn’t even know he was clapping. It just seemed like the thing to do, to acknowledge the man whose grainy newsreel images were the model for his own batting stance, whose grace in center field and poise under pressure were always his own ideal. Mays stopped once he realized what he was doing, grateful that no one had taken a picture while he cheered the enemy.
The Series marked the only time that Mays, DiMaggio, and Mickey Mantle were all on the field at the same time, though the three would intersect in the Series with heartrending consequences.
Mantle, after a slow start that sent him to the minors, returned to the Yankees and posted fine rookie numbers (.267, thirteen homers, and sixty-five RBIs). His skills, like Mays’s, appeared to have justified the hype. Playing right field in the World Series, he was told by his manager, Casey Stengel, that he should take everything he could get toward center because DiMaggio had a sore heel. In the fifth inning of the second game, Mays lifted a fly ball to right center, and he thought Mantle was going to catch it. Mantle thought so too. He sprinted into the gap, and just as he was about to haul it in, DiMaggio called him off. Mantle stopped, and the spikes of his right shoe caught the rubber cover of a sprinkler. He heard a sound like a tire blowing out. His knee collapsed and he lay motionless, a bone sticking out of his right leg. The terrible injury reduced his speed—he had probably been faster than Mays—and plagued him in later years, giving him the aura of a tragic hero whose true greatness was never completely realized. That Willie Mays, Mantle’s only real peer in athletic skills, actually hit the ball that limited those skills was a cruel twist of fate.
After tying the Series 2–2, the Yankees crushed the Giants in the next game, 13–1. DiMaggio went 3-for-5, driving in three runs and impressing Mays with his resilience. He showed the rookie who the best center fielder in the Series was. Mays was 0-for-2, striking out once.
In the sixth game, at Yankee Stadium before 61,711 fans, history seemed poised to repeat itself. The Giants’ Dave Koslo faced Vic Raschi, whom Irvin described as one of the best pitchers he’d ever seen. The game was tied 1–1, when Hank Bauer’s two-out, bases-loaded triple in the sixth inning gave the Yankees a 4–1 lead. In the eighth, DiMaggio smacked a leadoff double and was thrown out at third trying to advance on a ground ball to the pitcher. The crowd, sensing the end, gave him a standing ovation as he trotted off the field.
The Giants entered the ninth trailing, 4–1, the same score that began their ninth inning against the Dodgers exactly one week earlier. Stanky, facing Johnny Sain, led off with a single, and Dark followed with a bunt hit. Lockman then drilled a single to center, loading the bases. With Irvin, a right-handed hitter, up next, Yankee manager Casey Stengel made a seemingly bizarre move: he lifted Sain and called for left-hander Bob Kuzava, a midseason acquisition with no World Series experience. Neither Mays nor anyone else on the Giant bench could figure it out, though in fact Kuzava fared better against righties than lefties. Irvin crushed a long fly to left center, but left fielder Gene Woodling ran it down for the first out. Stanky tagged and scored while the other two runners advanced. Next came Bobby Thomson—once again, hitting with the Giants behind, 4–2, with one out in the ninth.
This time, there would be no Shot Heard ’Round the World or even as far as Harlem. He flied out.
Dark scored, leaving the tying run on second with two outs. What had been the subject of speculation the week before—with the championship at stake, would Mays deliver like a true champion or choke like a petrified rookie—would now play out. Except for one problem: Mays was now batting eighth. In all the other games in the Series, he had hit seventh, but for this game Durocher dropped him one spot in the order.
Ironically, Game Six had been Mays’s best of the Series, with two singles and a run scored. But coming into the game he was 2-for-19 (a .105 average), with one RBI, and Durocher demoted him accordingly. Now, with the Giants down to their last out and Mays expected up, he wasn’t there—as if Durocher had made one last move to protect his rookie, to ensure that Willie would not be exposed to the potential shame or ridicule of making the final out of the World Series.
The scheduled hitter, Hank Thompson, was replaced by pinch hitter Sal Yvars, who lined out. Once again, the game ended with Willie Mays on deck.
Mays did not begrudge the change in the batting order. He said, “I had played like a twenty-year-old.”
He was still proud of his year. He could have given up after his terrible start, but he didn’t, and years later he often described his rookie season to children as a lesson in believing in yourself when you’re at your lowest and persevering through hardship. Mays did just that. In 121 games, he hit .274, with 20 homers, 68 RBIs, and 7 stolen bases. Those numbers, combined with his outfield play, earned him the Rookie of the Year Award, receiving eighteen out of twenty-four first-place votes. He was the third consecutive black player to win it, the fourth in five years. A black Cuban for the Chicago White Sox, Minnie Minoso, had the best rookie season in the American League (.326, 112 runs scored, 76 RBIs, 31 stolen bases), but he lost the award to the Yankees’ McDougald (.306, 72 runs scored, 63 RBIs, 14 stolen bases).
The sportswriters were not ready to vote a black player the Rookie of the Year in both leagues, but such resistance to integration could not hold. The players were simply too good. In the National League, three out of the top six vote-getters for MVP were black—Roy Campanella won the award; Monte Irvin finished third, Jackie Robinson, sixth. In the American League, Minnie Minoso was fourth in MVP voting. The black players’ contributions translated into victories: the five teams that were integrated for the entire season finished in the top half of the standings while only three of the eleven all-white teams finished in the top half. And since the color barrier had been broken, four out of five World Series had featured at least one African American.
“Perhaps other clubs,” the Sporting News wryly noted, “will soon add Negroes as good luck charms.”
A new era had begun, and while the black ballplayers had raised the level of the game, Willie Mays would redefine it.