Leo Durocher had been thinking. Before a game against the Cardinals on July 27, he called Mays into his office and closed the door.
“Willie, I want you to do something for me and the ball club,” he said.
“What’s up?”
“I want you to stop going for home runs.” He explained that many of his home runs were with the bases empty, so if he got more hits and were on base more often, the team could produce more runs with Irvin or Thompson driving him in.
That night, Durocher moved Mays to the third spot in the order. He also told Mays that he’d have a chance to win the batting title—at the time, he was hitting .326, a strong average, but well below the league leaders, Duke Snider of the Dodgers and his teammate Don Mueller.
Mays needed little convincing, having felt the stress surrounding Babe Ruth’s record. He wouldn’t miss that, and if more base hits meant more wins, who could argue? Durocher asked him to change his stance as well. He had been hitting with his legs spread wide apart in a slight crouch. Durocher had him stand straighter with his feet closer together. Pitchers knew his power had been against high inside deliveries, so they were keeping the ball down and away. This new stance allowed Mays to more easily drive those pitches to right center and right field.
The strategy worked. Mays hit his thirty-sixth home run on July 28, but in the next fifty-five games, he hit only five more, one of which was inside the park. He also hit .379 over that stretch, including a twenty-one-game hitting streak, putting himself in the thick of the batting race.
Mays has always insisted that his transformation that year, from a slugger to a high-percentage hitter, was Durocher’s doing. It’s also possible that pitchers made adjustments and forced Mays to hit to the opposite field. By throwing outside, they prevented Mays from pulling cheap home runs down the left field line, and he was content to slash the ball the other way.
A more intriguing question is whether Durocher urged Mays to change his batting style to protect him. He surely recognized the emotional toll that the Ruth chase had already taken on Mays. Durocher’s rationale for altering Mays’s stance was flimsy at best: even as a home run hitter, Mays was batting .326. There was no reason to sacrifice home runs for a few more singles—unless, of course, the stress to hit those home runs would reduce their frequency.
Durocher knew that if Mays continued his assault on Ruth, the pressure would intensify. Having played with Ruth, Durocher appreciated his hold on the country, and he also understood America’s racial divisions. He may well have foreseen the ugliness that would confront Hank Aaron, who received death threats when he broke Ruth’s career home run record twenty years later.
Durocher protected Willie like a father, and he concluded that Willie was better off gunning for a batting crown than toppling the Babe.
The Giants had several near-collapses, but they proved resilient. After they lost six in a row at the end of July, their lead was down to two games, but they won seven out of their next eight. On August 15, after losing three to the Dodgers, they were in first by only half a game, but they peeled off seven straight wins. On August 29, the Giants were in first by only one and a half games, but four straight wins returned them to a comfortable margin.
Mays’s excessive deference, particularly in his youth, to white authority may not have sat well with every African American, but he was still embraced by the black community. That was evident on August 8, when the Amsterdam News, a black newspaper in New York, sponsored Willie Mays Day at the Polo Grounds. This was already Mays’s second “Day,” though his first in New York. It began with a parade through Harlem and ended with a ceremony on the field, with Mays telling the crowd: “All my life, I’ve been dreaming and living for a day like this.” He received plenty of goodies: a television, an air conditioner, jewelry, some cash, and—from a real estate agent—a plot of land in New Jersey. The ballpark ushers chipped in for a new portable record player; his teammates gave him a record cutter, which he could use to make his own acetate recordings. The sexy Rheingold girls (named for the beer) gave him some luggage; the Grace Del Marco models, wearing very tiny baseball uniforms, paraded with a sign: WILLIE IS OUR BOY!; the Chesterfield cover girl smiled sweetly.
Black dignitaries were also on the field, all of whom were pleased to be seen with the man of the hour. There was a state senator, the borough president of Manhattan, some Broadway figures, and a newspaper columnist. Also in the gathering was Thurgood Marshall, a future associate justice of the Supreme Court who, at the time, was a celebrated NAACP lawyer. He had represented the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education and, less than three months earlier, had won the case. In a group photograph at the Polo Grounds, Marshall, tall and strapping, wearing a dark suit and a serious expression, stands right next to the smiling Mays. The other men all have their arms at their sides, but Marshall’s right hand is draped tightly across Mays’s shoulder.
Willie Mays knew nothing of Thurgood Marshall, but Thurgood Marshall knew all about Willie Mays.
The Giants won the pennant on September 20, the last Monday of the season, at Ebbets Field and finished the season at 97–57, five games ahead of the Dodgers. In the clubhouse, amid the popping champagne corks and sprays of beer, Mays told a reporter: “I had a big lucky year—not a real good year—but you got to have luck in this game.”
Mays’s regular season, however, wasn’t over. He’d had three hits in the clinching game and now, for the first time, was in the batting lead. He had missed only three games and needed a rest, but with two Giants and a Dodger—Mays, Mueller, and Snider—vying for the title, all hovering in the .340s, Durocher thought it only fair that Mays and Mueller remain in the lineup for the remaining six games.
The competition, for Mays, was partly for bragging rights. He began the year as New York’s third-best center fielder. Mantle was having his best season of his young career (.300, 27 homers, 102 RBIs), but it was easily exceeded by Mays’s. Snider was having a superb year and finished with 40 homers, 130 RBIs, and a .647 slugging percentage. If Snider won the batting title, he could also claim the center field crown.
For Don Mueller, the competition with Mays was far more personal. Though only twenty-seven, Mueller had been with Giants for seven years. He choked up high on the bat, allowing his deft, left-handed stroke to spray balls to all fields and earning him the nickname “Mandrake the Magician.” But he was one-dimensional: he couldn’t hit the long ball, was a slow runner, and was a below-par fielder. Durocher wanted him to hit more home runs, and each spring he would try to replace Mueller in right field. Durocher and Mueller held each other in contempt, and the animosity intensified before the 1954 season when Durocher told Mueller to let Mays catch any ball he could in right field. The other outfielders accepted this directive. Monte Irvin, who had never fully regained his speed after breaking his ankle, gladly ceded balls to Mays. But Mueller was insulted by Mays’s annexation of his territory. “He’d be miffed whenever a ball was just a little to his right, and I’d be calling for it,” Mays said.
Mueller also resented Durocher’s obvious favoritism. While the manager openly cheered on Mays, he all but ignored Mueller except for an occasional unflattering remark about his fielding. Mays’s giddy acclaim, combined with the fawning reporters who interviewed him each day, created inevitable jealousies. Several Giants, including Mueller, lived in the same hotel and would pick Mays apart over their morning coffee. One reporter described it: “Sure, Willie was a bouncing, bubbly boy when he was hitting, they’d say, but he’d break down and cry when he was in a slump. Sure, he threw out a lot of runners with that booming arm of his, but his throws would sometimes come in so high that the cutoff man was helpless to stop a runner from taking an extra base. Sure, he knocked in a lot of runs, but when a hit was needed to pull out a game, he was just another guy with a bat in his hand.” Roger Kahn said that by midseason, “there were resentments on the club so obvious that even the casual observer noticed... a coterie of detractors, small but bitter.”
Most of the Giants were grateful to have Mays. As Whitey Lockman, decades later, says, “Once you got to know how good he was and what he meant to the team, you couldn’t really be jealous of Willie’s fame. I wish I could have been that good, for God’s sake. Nobody was.”
At the time, Durocher kept insisting that Willie put money in all their pockets, but for Mueller, a batting title would avenge the slights and rebalance the credit for the team’s success.
Going into the final four-game series against the Phillies, Mays led the race by seven points and didn’t slow down. He went 4-for-12 in his next three games, but Mueller went 7-for-13 and Snider, 4-for-7. Suddenly, on the last day of the season, Mueller held a one-tenth-of-a-point edge on Snider and four-tenths on Mays. Mueller was hitting .3426; Snider, who had led the race for most of the season, was at .3425; and Mays, .3422. The odds favored Mueller or Snider. The Giants were facing Robin Roberts, a right-hander who would lead the National League in wins (23), complete games (26), and strikeouts (160). Mueller, a left-hander, would have the advantage over Mays. Since the pennant race was over, the Dodger manager, Walter Alston, had tried to preserve Snider’s narrow lead by sitting him against left-handed starters. For the final game, the Dodgers faced a Pittsburgh right-hander named Jake Thies, who had a 3–8 record, and Snider was in the lineup.
He went 0-for-3 as Thies gave up only four hits in the game; Snider finished at .341.
In Philadelphia, the Giants were keeping tabs on Snider on a telephone in their dugout. New York’s game went eleven innings, giving Mueller, batting third, and Mays, fifth, ample opportunity. Both players singled their first time up; both made outs their second time. Third time up, Mueller flied out, but Mays tripled. Next time around, Mueller again flied out, but Mays doubled. His hits reflected the success of his batting approach over the past two months. His first was to left off an inside fastball, while his extra-base hits came on outside curveballs slammed to right center.
Mueller doubled in the tenth inning, and with one out, the Phillies intentionally walked Mays. He did not come to the plate again; Mueller made one more out in the eleventh. Mays finished 3-for-4; Mueller, 2-for-6.
Final batting averages: Mays, .3451; Mueller, .3425.
As predicted by Durocher, Mays won the batting title, the Giants’ first since Bill Terry hit .401 in 1930. On the train ride back to New York, Leo said, “I told you so.” And at gatherings in the off-season, he introduced Mueller as “the man who lost the hitting title to Willie Mays.”
With 41 home runs (second in the National League, behind Gil Hodges), Mays was the first player in more than thirty years to lead the league in batting average and hit more than 40 long balls. He finished first in the league in triples (13) and slugging percentage (.667), fifth in on-base percentage (.415), sixth in RBIs (110), and tenth in doubles (33). His most noteworthy achievement may have been in the outfield, where his thirteen assists included nine that were part of double plays, a phenomenal number. In comparison, the highest single-season total that strong-armed Carl Furillo ever had in this category—assists that were part of double plays—was six. Neither Roberto Clemente nor Mickey Mantle nor Joe DiMaggio ever had more than five; Duke Snider’s best year, three.
Mays’s final day of the 1954 season ended with a madcap evening in the celebrity vortex. He agreed to appear, wearing his home uniform, on both Ed Sullivan’s Toast of the Town, on CBS, and the Colgate Comedy Hour, with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, on NBC . The shows appeared at the same time on Sunday nights, but Mays tried to accommodate both. When he and an associate of Art Flynn’s arrived at the Sullivan studio at about 7:25 P.M., they realized that the Giants uniform had been sent to the Colgate studio. So they had to take a cab from Fifty-seventh and Eighth to Fifty-third and Broadway, get the uniform, and race back. Mays appeared with Sullivan from 8:10 to 8:20. He then jumped back in the cab and made it to NBC in time to appear at 8:35.
The next morning, Mays was a guest on the Today show with Dave Garroway, and that evening, Steve Allen interviewed him on The Tonight Show.
In many of these appearances, Mays’s competition with his own teammate was the obvious angle. Ed Sullivan asked him what it was like to beat out another Giant. “If I hadn’t won it,” Mays said, “I would have wanted him to.”
The goodwill did not last long. The following day, the Giants were at the Polo Grounds for a team photograph, and Mueller walked past Mays as he was tying his shoes. “Hey, Willie,” he asked, “is it true you’re the best center fielder in baseball?”
“The best right fielder too,” he said. He never looked up.
After the photo, the Giants rode in fifteen open cars down Broadway to City Hall, cheered by a half-million fans beneath showers of ticker-tape confetti. The last two World Series had been between the Yankees and the Dodgers, but the Cleveland Indians won the American League pennant in 1954, so New York could rally around one team. Mayor Robert F. Wagner described the celebration as “equal to the receptions for Eisenhower, Lindbergh, and MacArthur.” Not everyone celebrated. New York City’s council president, Abe Stark, was a Brooklyn fan. He took the microphone and cried, “Wait till next year!” The crowd booed.
Riding in the first car was Alvin Dark, because he was the team captain, and Willie Mays, because he was Willie Mays. According to the Sporting News, “When the players were introduced individually after the parade, Willie drew the most applause.”
Durocher addressed the crowd, and when he said, “Willie Mays is the greatest player I ever laid eyes on,” he brought tears to his favorite player’s eyes.
Few people gave the Giants a chance against the Indians, who had just completed one of the finest regular seasons in baseball history. Their 111 wins was an American League record; the 1927 Yankees, often cited as the greatest team ever, had won 110. (The Chicago Cubs’ 116 victories in 1906 is the highest single-season total in a 154-game season.) The Indians’ winning percentage of .721 remains an American League record. Cleveland lost four consecutive games only once all season. Otherwise, the Indians never slumped—nor could they, as the Yankees won 103 games, which represented Casey Stengel’s best record in his twelve seasons as their manager.
The Indians were also heavily favored because the American League had been so dominant, winning seven consecutive World Series, six by the Yankees and one by Cleveland, in 1948. The Giants had won ninety-seven games in 1954, but their past disappointments in the Fall Classic—thirteen appearances and only four championships—hardened opinion against them.
The Indians’ strength lay in their starting pitchers, which included three future Hall of Famers: Bob Lemon, Early Wynn, and Bob Feller; the fourth starter was Mike Garcia. Collectively, they had forty-six years of experience in the major leagues, and their combined ERA of 2.78 that year set an American League record. The number one starter was Lemon, who with Wynn tied for the league best in victories—twenty-three. Garcia had perhaps the most freakish statistic: 259 innings pitched; only six home runs allowed. The Giants’ best pitcher that year, Johnny Antonelli, also pitched 259 innings and gave up twenty-two homers.
The Indians could hit as well. Second baseman Bobby Avila, with a .341 average, was the American League batting champion. Outfielder Larry Doby led the league in home runs, with thirty-two. Third baseman Al Rosen had won the MVP in the previous season and finished the year with a .300 average and 102 RBIs. If the Indians won the World Series decisively, as expected, they would be remembered as one of the best teams in history.
The Giants, however, were not intimidated. Because both teams trained in Arizona, they had played twenty-one exhibition games together. The Giants had won more than they lost, believed they had the edge defensively, were better on the bases, and saw no reason to be unnerved. Willie Mays also thought Cleveland drank too much.
The Series again featured the advantages of racial and ethnic diversity: the Giants had, in addition to Mays, Irvin, and Thompson, pitcher Ruben Gomez, born in Puerto Rico, starting in Game Three; the Indians, meanwhile, had two African Americans in the starting lineup, outfielders Larry Doby and Al Smith, plus a black reserve, Dave Pope; Avila was born in Mexico; and Mike Garcia was of Mexican descent.
Mays had hit poorly in the 1951 postseason. He did not carry the performance of one game or one series into the next, so he added no extra pressure on himself for the ’54 Series. But unlike in his rookie season, he was now the centerpiece of the Giants’ attack—he would bat fourth—and he knew he’d have to perform far better if the Giants were to have a chance.
The first two contests were at the Polo Grounds, Game One on September 29. In the coming decades, the World Series would begin almost a month later, in the frigid night air before fans huddled in parkas, ski caps, and mittens. But in 1954 the games started in the hazy autumn sunshine, with men in sports coats and ties, women in dresses and pearls. Today, a gentle breeze drifted through the park, and the grass was moist with dew. The Polo Grounds was swept, scrubbed, and decked in bunting, a dowager in finery. The capacity crowd of 52,751 sat shoulder to shoulder—Laraine Day with Spencer Tracy; the wives of Lou Gehrig and John McGraw; Jackie Gleason, Don Ameche, Danny Kaye, and Perry Como, who would sing the national anthem; and the white-shoe bankers, the well-connected politicians, and the great swarm of humanity that brought with them, in Don DeLillo’s words, “the body heat of a great city.”
As the teams warmed up, a band with a female vocalist stationed in center field played “Say Hey.” Mays himself posed for photographs, laughing and smiling, with his fellow batting champion, Avila.
The Herald Tribune wrote, “The Polo Grounds was a place to see and to be seen and call friendly greetings. But as the game approached everyone grew hushed with expectations.”
Right-hander Sal Maglie started the game for the Giants. His career had appeared over the previous season, undone by a back injury. But he went to a chiropractor and was fitted with a rubber lift an eighth of an inch thick, which he put in the heel of one shoe. “My pelvis is tilted,” Maglie explained. “The lift evens up my legs.” A rebalanced Maglie went 14–6 in ’54 and posted a 3.26 ERA. Mays liked Maglie because he had a penchant for throwing high inside fastballs, designed to move batters off the plate as well as to protect his own hitters. His tight pitches, plus his menacing stare and heavy beard—one writer called him God’s gift to Gillette—contributed to his nickname, “the Barber.” Stand too close to the plate, and he’ll shave you.
The first batter of the World Series was Al Smith, and Maglie hit him in the back.
Avila followed with a single, which was booted by Mueller, allowing Smith to go to third. After the next two batters were retired, Vic Wertz boomed a triple to right, scoring the game’s first two runs and beginning the most memorable day of Wertz’s career.
NBC was televising the game, and viewers who had never seen Mays in action got their first glimpse of his abilities in the third inning. With Bob Lemon pitching, the Giants had already scored a run and had a man on first when Mays came to the plate. He walked, making it first and second. The next batter, Hank Thompson, hit a sharp ground ball to the right side. Mays had to freeze until the ball passed him, then he took off for second. Despite the delay, Mays skittered around the diamond for third. Right fielder Dave Philley had a strong arm—he had twenty-two assists one year—and his throw was right on target, but Mays narrowly beat it with a hook slide just as his hat flew off.
With the score tied 2–2, Maglie and Lemon settled into a pitcher’s duel, the Indians getting the better chances. The problem for Maglie was Wertz. After his triple, he singled to left in the fourth and, in the sixth, ripped another hit to right. Mueller tried to throw behind Wertz at first but missed everyone for an error. Wertz ended up at second with one out, but the Indians stranded him.
By the seventh, the game had already lasted nearly two hours—long for that era—and the sun hovered over the grandstand behind first base, casting shadows past the right field foul line. It was still warm, the morning haze long since burned off.
The Indians went down in order in the seventh, and the Giants failed to score as well, with Mays, unable to read Lemon, making the final out. The score remained 2–2, Cleveland shut out since the first. There was little doubt that the next team to score would win.
The first hitter in the eighth, Larry Doby, was nursing a sore shoulder, but he was still the Indians’ most dangerous threat. Maglie may have been too fine with him or maybe just tired, but he walked Doby, his first freebie of the game. The next hitter, Al Rosen, batting cleanup, hit a ground ball sharply to the left side. Shortstop Alvin Dark ranged to his right and stuck out his bare hand but could not field the ball cleanly.
Two on, nobody out, and Vic Wertz was the batter.
He was in many ways a prototype of the stodgy long-ball era—“muscular men not long in grace nor noted for acceleration, but men who commanded large salaries for occasional home runs,” according to Bill James. Wertz was 6 feet tall and 186 pounds, a big man for his day, with a burly torso, quick wrists, and a chaw of tobacco in his mouth. By 1954, he had been a three-time All-Star with the Detroit Tigers and may have been the most grateful player in the World Series. He had begun the season with the Orioles and was traded to the Indians after twenty-nine games. The Orioles lost a hundred times and finished fifty-seven games out of first place.
Wertz was an outfielder, but Cleveland had no openings in the outfield. Rescued from baseball purgatory, he would have been satisfied pinch-hitting, but Indian manager Al Lopez had other ideas. He was without a quality first baseman, so he plugged in his brawny newcomer. Defensively, Wertz was barely adequate, but he gave the Indians another potent bat in the middle of the lineup.
The Giants wished he had stayed in purgatory. New York had a good read on all the Indians thanks to spring training, but they had never seen the left-handed-hitting Wertz. His three hits, all smoked, had come off a high fastball, a slider down and away, and an outside fastball.
Durocher was not going to let Maglie face Wertz again, so he dispatched his coach, Freddie Fitzsimmons, to the mound to change pitchers. Maglie, tall and brooding, took his long walk across the outfield to the clubhouse and was replaced by Don Liddle, a southpaw not quite 5-foot-10, with a narrow, pallid face and quick motion. He had come with Johnny Antonelli in the Bobby Thomson trade and had performed admirably as a spot starter and reliever, with nine wins and a 3.04 ERA. His best pitch was his curveball.
Mays knew that, so he was cheating in. Hitters tended to pound Liddle’s curveball into the ground, and Mays wanted to cut down the runner at the plate on a single. He was shading him to right and assumed that Wertz, like most hitters, would be swinging at the reliever’s first pitch.
Wertz indeed swung but missed, and Liddle was soon ahead in the count: one ball, two strikes. Wertz guessed he would see a high, tight fastball, which is what most lefties threw him with that count—drive him off the plate to set up the curveball. Liddle threw his fastball but aimed it poorly. The ball stayed over the plate, almost at the shoulders. Wertz extended his thick arms, rotated his wrists, and hit the ball squarely.
Ball game, thought Roger Kahn, who was standing in the lower deck between third and home.
Wertz thought so too as he watched his blazing line drive sail just to the right of second base. He put his head down and began pumping his stubby legs, confident he would end up on second or third or, if the center fielder misplayed it, all the way back at home.
Alvin Dark spun to his left. At shortstop, his first reaction on any ball hit straightaway was to spin and look over his left shoulder at the center fielder. In his fourteen years in the majors, Mays was the only center fielder who would be in full stride the moment he peered over his shoulder. (All other fielders were still picking up speed.)
Now Dark saw Mays at full speed and thought, two runs. The ball’s distance wasn’t the only problem. Mays had no angle on it. The ball was winging directly over his head, which is one of the toughest catches in baseball.
Al Rosen, nearing second base, was certain he would score.
Monte Irvin sprinted over from left field to prepare for the carom off the wall, hoping to deter an inside-the-park home run.
Liddle jogged, head down, toward the third base line to back up any errant throws to third or home.
The Giants in the dugout stood on the top step.
Leo Durocher retained hope, believing that any ball that stayed in the yard could be caught by Mays. He just wasn’t certain if the outfield was big enough.
Arnold Hano, sitting in the right field bleachers, later wrote that the ball was hit “about as hard as I have ever seen a ball hit,” but he was not immediately “perturbed” because it was hit to the deepest part of the Polo Grounds, Mays’s territory. He had seen other center fielders catch majestic drives in those distant recesses.
“Then I looked at Willie,” Hano wrote, “and alarm raced through me, peril flaring against my heart. To my utter astonishment, the young Giant center fielder—the inimitable Mays, most skilled of outfielders, unique for his ability to scent the length and direction of any drive and then turn and move to the final destination of the ball—Mays was turned full head around, head down, running as hard as he could, straight toward the runway between the two bleacher sections. I knew then that I had underestimated—badly underestimated—the length of Wertz’s blow.”
Watching this powerful tracer forty feet above Mays’s head, Hano reached a quick, mournful conclusion: it will beat him to the wall.
Rosen had pushed ahead and reached second base, but Doby, himself a center fielder, had hesitated and begun to retreat to second. He realized the ball could be caught, and if so, he would still have time to tag up and score.
Mays, barreling toward the bleacher wall, looked over his left shoulder, slowing a bit, then continued with his head straight, arms thrashing, legs churning.
The center field wall, at its deepest, is 483 feet. This area is an alcove, created by a gap in the center field bleachers, and in the alcove are the stairs that lead to the two clubhouses. The bleachers themselves did not have markers on them; their distance has been estimated from 450 to 460 feet. Wertz’s drive was not the farthest to have been hit to center field in the Polo Grounds. At least one ball had been hit into the bleachers, and two others had been caught at the foot of the clubhouse stairs.
What made Wertz’s hit so startling was its low, tailing trajectory. No ball, it seemed, had ever traveled so far on such a low arc.
The bleacher wall was 8½ feet high, concrete with no padding, but the image on television made it appear that Mays was running toward something much bigger. To create a dark green background for hitters, large screens were attached to the top of the concrete wall closest to the alcove. On television, the wall and the screen were indistinguishable, so it looked as if Mays were just running toward an impenetrable barrier.
He ran past the farthest edge of the outfield grass, veering slightly to his right as his spikes touched the narrow cinder strip near the base of the wall. At the last moment, he looked up, extended his arms like a wide receiver, and opened his Rawlings Model HH glove. The ball fell gently inside. He had ten feet to spare.
Jack Brickhouse, the usually understated announcer who was calling the game for NBC, conveyed his surprise in his call: “There’s a long drive... way back at center field... way back, way back, it is a—Oh, my! Caught by Mays! Willie Mays just brought this crowd to its feet with a catch which must have been an optical illusion to a lot of people. Boy!” The film clip shows a fan slapping his forehead, mouthing the words “Oh, my God.”
Doby, seeing Mays’s catch, completed his retreat to second, touched the bag, and took off for third. With Mays on the fringe, his momentum carrying him away from the plate, Doby, a fast runner, could score by advancing two bases.
But Mays whirled and threw “like some olden statue of a Greek javelin hurler, his head twisted away to the left as his right arm swept out and around,” Hano wrote. His hat flew off in perfect sync with the corkscrew motion, and it was “the throw of a giant, the throw of a howitzer made human, arriving at second base... just as Doby was pulling into third and as Rosen was scampering back to first.”
Second base umpire Jocko Conlan saw the ball coming in and said to himself, “This has to be the best throw anybody could ever make.”
Television viewers at the time, and the millions who watched the film clip in years to come, couldn’t admire the throw; it had been hurled out of the frame. But they saw something just as good: Mays from the ground, propped up by his arms, hatless, clean cut, his eyes squinting, scanning, trying to determine if his catch and throw had restored order to the infield.
It had, for Doby stopped at third. Rosen later said, “Normally, an outfielder has to make two or three more steps, but not Willie.”
Vic Wertz never saw the catch. In all the crazy movements of baserunners and cutoff men and amid the gasps and cheers of the fans, he had passed the retreating Rosen and, finally at second base, saw the incoming throw and realized what had happened. He looked at Mays in disbelief, returned to the dugout, cursed, and kicked the water cooler.
No one thought about the historical significance of the catch. All it meant was that the Indians were now on first and third with one out.
Cleveland manager Al Lopez sent up right-handed pinch hitter Hank Majeski, so Durocher countered with right-hander Marv Grissom, a screwball pitcher. Liddle was done after one hitter. On his way off the mound, he said something to Grissom, which was reported as: “I got my man.” (Liddle’s son, Craig, later said that his father would never have made such a comment on the field but said it to Durocher in the clubhouse.)
Lopez then pinch-hit Dale Mitchell, who walked to load the bases. Another pinch hitter, Dave Pope, now had a chance to render Mays’s catch meaningless, but he struck out. The next batter, catcher Jim Hegan, pulled a fly ball into left field, where the short fence and an overhanging facade allowed cheap home runs. Irvin ran to the 315-foot marker and a grand slam appeared imminent, but the ball dropped into his glove. Hano swore that the slight breeze had “developed a backbone” and pushed the ball back into play.
As Irvin jogged off the field with Mays, Irvin said, “That was a helluva catch, roomie. I didn’t think you’d make it.”
Mays said, “I had it all the way.”
The game continued, but neither team could push a run across. Extra innings followed, and Wertz led off the tenth.
Grissom, still in the game, threw several screwballs low and away, forcing Wertz to foul them down the left field line. But the next screwball got too much of the plate, and Wertz shot it into left center, between the outfielders, down for extra bases. Mays raced to cut the ball off as it scooted toward the wall. Irvin had no chance for it. Mays had to decide: should he try to intercept the ball before it reached the wall and possibly hold Wertz to a long double—a strong throw would still be needed—or should he play it off the wall for a triple. If he tried to cut it off and missed, he would be out of position to retrieve it, and Wertz, given the deep alleys and angled wall that would kick the ball toward center, would circle the bases.
Mays gambled. He ran straight across the outfield, homed in on the ball, bent down, and scooped and hurled it in one flawless motion to third base, where Hank Thompson caught it on the fly one step before the bag. At least this time Wertz could watch Mays. He later recalled, “Willie came running in and grabbed it off the grass as he was skidding to the ground” and stopped him at second—a four-hundred-foot double.
Mays later said that play was as good if not even better than the catch because it required an instant calculation—could he or couldn’t he reach the ball?—and Wertz himself said, “I think Willie may have made a better play on me in the tenth.”
Hano wrote, “At this point, I think, the Indians quit. It is not fair to say they quit in the eighth when Mays made his catch. They still had clawed away, stopping the Giants in the eighth and ninth, and they opened the tenth (or at least Wertz had) full of vinegar. But when Mays again indicated he was not Mays, but Superman—they must have known they were through.”
Wertz was through, replaced by a pinch runner, who was sacrificed to third. But the next hitter struck out. Next at bat was Bob Lemon, who was allowed to swing even though he had already pitched nine innings in the heat. He was, however, a solid hitter, swinging left-handed, and he smacked a line drive—right to the first baseman for the final out.
In the bottom of the tenth, Mays was due up second. The Indians had a new catcher, Mickey Grasso, a thirty-four-year-old career minor leaguer who had been in only four major league games that year. The usual backup catcher, Hal Naragon, had played in forty-six games, but he was only twenty-five, and Lopez wanted more experience behind the plate.
Mays, watching Grasso warm up Lemon, noticed that his return throws were weak, and after the practice pitches, he only lobbed the ball to second base. Mays figured Grasso for a sore arm, so he asked Durocher for the green light to steal if he reached first. Mays was not yet a good base stealer. He had only eight for the year and was thrown out five times. But Durocher said yes.
With one out, Mays came to the plate. He was 0-for-3 with a walk and hadn’t hit the ball hard all day. But Lemon, perhaps tiring in the third hour of the game, walked him. On first, Mays took a lead and broke with the first pitch. He did not get a good jump, breaking well after Lemon had committed himself to throw. Hank Thompson took the pitch. Grasso jumped from his squat, grabbed the ball from his mitt, and threw it so low that it skipped fifteen feet in front of second base. Mays slid in safely.
With Mays in scoring position, the Indians intentionally walked Thompson to set up a double play. The next hitter was Irvin, but Durocher pinch-hit James “Dusty” Rhodes, one of the more colorful players on the team. The Alabaman was well qualified to be one of Stoneham’s drinking buddies. His father, Rhodes would explain, was a corn farmer: “He used to raise two hundred gallons.” Rhodes was a lousy outfielder, and knew it. Asked what position he played, he would say, “Me and Willie play left field.”
But Rhodes earned his keep at the plate, batting .341 with fifteen home runs as a spot starter and pinch hitter.
The first pitch from Lemon, Rhodes popped a fly ball down the right field line. Second baseman Avila ran after it, but the ball, aided by the wind, drifted toward the wall. Dave Pope gave chase and reached the track. Would so cheap a hit make it to the wall? Would it win the game? The fielder leaped. The ball fell into the first row of the stands above a sign marked 257 feet. The home run traveled 200 feet less than Wertz’s mighty clout.
Mays, tagging up at second, saw umpire Larry Napp signal the homer, and he began jumping and clapping in glee. He suddenly realized that Thompson was right on his heels, running hard, apparently unaware of Napp’s signal—the ball had bounced off a fan’s chest and rolled back onto the field. Mays, like a traffic cop, began madly signaling to Thompson while watching that both Thompson and Rhodes touched all the bases. Everyone made it around the diamond, and the Giants won, 5–2.
In the clubhouse, Lopez said, “It was the longest out and the shortest homer of the year.”
Mays’s catch was the talk of the game.
Joe DiMaggio, who watched it from the press box, said what made it remarkable was Mays’s courage in coming so close to the wall, refusing to slow down until he grabbed the ball. He called the catch “greater than Al Gionfriddo’s in the 1947 Series,” referring to the Dodger left fielder’s brilliant grab of a DiMaggio hit deep in the corner at Yankee Stadium.
A reporter asked Durocher if it was the greatest catch he’d ever seen, and Durocher used the question to make it clear, however crudely, that Mays was not a one-catch wonder: “What the fuck are you talking about? Willie makes fucking catches like that every day. Do you keep your fucking eyes closed in the press box?”
When Lopez heard Durocher’s comments, he grew indignant, saying, “I’ve been playing ball since I was a kid. I’ve been around the major leagues for thirty years. That was the greatest catch I’ve ever seen. Just the catch, mind you. Now put it all together. The catch. The throw. The pressure on the kid. I’d say that was the best play anybody ever made in baseball.”
Al Rosen later said, “Nobody else could’ve made that play at that venue at that time. It was a catch for the ages.”
Not every Indian was so generous. Bob Feller said bitterly, “We knew Willie had it all the way... he was a great actor.” Larry Doby, who would have scored had he anticipated the play at the outset, said that he would have made the catch as well “and without making it look so hard.”
Several months later, Durocher claimed that Mays said after the game, “I don’t rank ’em, I just catch ’em.” These words cannot be found in a sampling of game stories, and Mays contends he never said them. In postgame interviews, he did convey a combination of confidence and humility. “I had the ball all the way,” he said. “There was nothing too hard about that one. Did that save the game? Well, maybe it did. But what about my hitting? I wasn’t any help up there at the plate.”
He did, of course, contribute at the plate, with two walks, a run scored, and a pivotal stolen base, but he dwelled on his need to improve.
The game’s aftermath included one other noteworthy moment. To get to the Giants’ clubhouse, reporters and photographers had to walk past the steps that led to the showers. After Game One, Mays ambled out of the steamy room with his towel draped around his waist. The photographers yelled for him: “Wait! Look at the cameras! Smile!” Willie at first appeared dazed by the deafening gibberish, but just before the cameras snapped, he dropped his white cover. The bulbs flashed, and Mays, naked, laughed uproariously in his high-pitched squeal.
Mays loved a good prank, but all Robert Creamer, with Sports Illustrated, could think was: “This was the most perfectly sculpted, most beautiful human being I’ve ever seen—like a Roman god.” Mays’s glistening skin wasn’t really black or even brown. It was a mottled gray brown. “It looked like marble,” Creamer recalls. With careful modesty, Mays retrieved his towel, the photographers pleaded with him to cooperate, and just as they prepared to snap their next round of pictures, he dropped his towel again. He was having fun.
Finally Mays showed them mercy and allowed the photograph to be taken with the towel around his waist. What became of the other negatives is unknown. “That picture,” Creamer says, “would be worth a million bucks today.”
The Catch has a rich but complicated legacy. Mays’s claim that he had it all the way is not false modesty. He had a fielding tic in which he would tap his glove when he knew he would catch a ball, and the replay shows him doing just that on his sprint to the wall. Mays also says that he didn’t have to contend with other variables that cause mayhem in the outfield: he didn’t have to worry about colliding with other players; he didn’t have a difficult sky, strong winds, or rain; he didn’t have wet grass or a slippery ball; he didn’t have to jump over a wall, against ivy, or around a batting cage. It was a pure play, and he made it.
Mays regrets that his greatest plays, such as his Morgan catch at the base of the wall at Ebbets Field, were not preserved on film, so his “signature catch” is actually something less than his best work. What made the Catch legendary, he says, was not the catch but the atmospherics—it was on television before 23 million viewers at a decisive moment in a World Series game. It bothers Mays when he hears that he threw the ball back by “instinct.” Most people, he believes, miss the artistry of the play, unaware of the many elements—including the ball’s sound against the bat—that had to be synthesized in a few fleeting seconds. As he later recalled it:
“I’m playing a shallow center field. It’s the eighth inning, score is tied, and I don’t want Larry Doby scoring from second base. One run could be the ball game. The ball game could be the Series. You never know.
“Wertz hits it. A solid sound. I learn a lot from the sound of the ball on the bat. Always did. I could tell from the sound whether to come in or go back. This time I’m going back, a long way back, but there is never any doubt in my mind. I am going to catch this ball. I turn and run for the bleachers. But I got it. Maybe you didn’t know that, but I knew it. Soon as it got hit, I knew I’d catch this ball.
“But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was Larry Doby on second base. On a deep fly to center field at the Polo Grounds, a runner could score all the way from second. I’ve done that myself and more than once. So if I make the catch, which I will, and Larry scores from second, they still get the run that puts them ahead.
“All the time I’m running back, I’m thinking, ‘Willie, you’ve got to get this ball back to the infield.’
“I run 50 or 75 yards—right to the warning track—and I take the ball a little over my left shoulder. Suppose I stop and turn and throw. I will get nothing on the ball. No momentum going into my throw. What I have to do is this: after I make the catch, turn. Put all my momentum into that turn. To keep my momentum, to get it working for me, I have to turn very hard and short and throw the ball from exactly the point that I caught it. The momentum goes into my turn and up through my legs and into my throw.
“That’s what I did. I got my momentum and my legs into that throw. Larry Doby ran to third but couldn’t score. Al Rosen didn’t even advance from first.
“All the while I’m runnin’ back, I was planning how to get off that throw.
“Then some of them wrote, ‘he made that throw by instinct.’ ”
Television defined the Catch as Mays’s iconic image, and the grainy film footage, run endlessly on ESPN and other sports channels as well as Internet sites, has become Mays’s most tangible connection to future generations. The black-and-white photographs showing Mays in four frames have been reproduced countless times in books and magazines to the same effect. It’s appropriate that a film clip or an image, not a statistic, defines him. Unlike other great players, who are associated with numbers—56, .406, 61, 714, 755—Mays holds no record with historical resonance. His brilliance was in how he played the game, and the Catch evokes the awe and wonder of those skills.
Ironically, the film clip does not capture its true magnificence. For all of Mays’s efforts to downplay the Catch’s value, virtually all who saw it recognized its greatness. But the scratchy kinescope replay makes it appear as if Mays simply ran back and caught the ball, not unlike any ESPN Web Gem shown every night of the season. There is no depth perception in the footage, no sense of how hard and low the ball was hit or how far and fast Mays had to run.
Bob Costas said, “It was more than just a great catch. It was a catch no one had ever seen before.... When the ball left Vic Wertz’s bat in the massive Polo Grounds, where it was headed, where Mays was standing, there was only one possibility. Could he get to it before it was an inside-the-park home run? Could he hold it to a triple? Catching it was out of the question. He turned and ran to a place where no one can go to get that ball, starting where he started with the ball hit as it was hit. So, it was more than just a great acrobatic play. It was a play that until that point was outside the realm of possibility.”
The Catch didn’t surprise Mays’s cousin Loretta, who watched it on television at Fairfield Industrial High School. E. J. Oliver had brought the students together to watch Willie play in the World Series. They cheered their hero when he grabbed the ball, but Loretta had seen it before. “When Willie would wash dishes,” Loretta says, “he would throw them up and reach out for them and dive and catch them. That’s where he got that catch from.”
The rest of the World Series was anticlimactic. No other game could match the drama (or length) of the first contest. Game Two opened well for the Indians, with leadoff hitter Al Smith swinging for a home run on the first pitch, but it was Cleveland’s only run. Vic Wertz had another good day, on base three times with a single and two walks, and Johnny Antonelli would repeatedly find himself in jams—the Indians stranded thirteen on eight hits. The Giants could muster only four safeties off Early Wynn, but once again, Durocher made the right move in pinch-hitting Dusty Rhodes for Monte Irvin in the fifth inning. Rhodes delivered the game-tying hit, driving in Mays, who had walked. The go-ahead run scored on a forceout, and Rhodes provided an insurance run with a homer in the seventh. The Giants prevailed, 3–1.
There were no days off in the 1954 World Series. The teams completed Game Two at the Polo Grounds, were bused over to the airport, flew to Cleveland, and were ready for Game Three the next day. The Indians were hoping that a hometown crowd of 71,555 would turn their luck, but the game was never in doubt. Mays saw to that. On the flight to Cleveland, Durocher told him that he had reverted to his previous batting stance and was again trying to pull the ball, which accounted for his lack of production. He instructed Mays to resume the style that had served him well down the stretch. In the first inning of Game Three, Mays got his first hit and RBI on a single to right field, then scored another run in the third. Incredibly, in the third inning Rhodes again pinch-hit for Irvin, and he again delivered—this time, a two-run single. The Giants laid down sacrifice bunts and ran the bases aggressively while Mays went 3-for-5 and drove in two runs. Two of his hits were to right field. The Indians, meanwhile, committed two errors in a listless performance. The only player with a pulse seemed to be Wertz, who hit a home run. With Ruben Gomez pitching, the Giants won, 6–2.
Cleveland’s fourth pitcher was Bob Feller, who at thirty-five was still formidable—pitching once a week, he was 13–3 with a 3.09 ERA—but he was no longer the ace. Facing a deciding Game Four, Lopez came back with Lemon, even though he’d only had two days off after throwing ten innings in New York. The Giants weren’t worried. Before the game, they ordered a repainting of their plane’s fuselage—from “National League Pennant Winners 1954” to “World Champions 1954.”
Lopez’s move backfired. The Giants riddled Lemon for six runs and seven hits in four innings, and they led, 7–0, before any Indian crossed the plate. Irvin finally played the entire game and got two hits and drove in two runs. The Giants executed three sacrifice bunts and two sacrifice flies, and Durocher deftly juggled his pitchers. Don Liddle, who relieved in Game One, started Game Four and pitched into the seventh, and Johnny Antonelli, who started Game Two, relieved in Game Four and pitched the final inning and two-thirds. Mays went 1-for-4 with a double, an RBI, and a run scored. The Giants won, 7–4.
Vic Wertz went 2-for-4.
The Giants’ championship was one of the greatest upsets in World Series history. The 1906 Chicago Cubs, who won 116 games, also blew the championship, but at least they won two World Series games. The Giants’ sweep was stunning. Two of the Indians’ best hitters, Doby and Rosen, played with injuries, but that alone could not really explain their futility. Lopez offered one possibility. “Losing the first game hurt us the most,” he said. “We had so many chances when a hit or a long fly would have scored someone. Willie Mays made that great catch on Wertz’s drive, and after that we never were the same.”
This view became part of the Willie Mays mystique—that his catch had crushed the spirit of the mighty Indians, that his supernatural skills had crippled their resistance. The perception of invincibility loomed among the Cleveland faithful. In the fourth game, after Mays had caught the third out of an inning, he threw to the plate on the mistaken belief that there were only two outs. The Cleveland Press sportswriter Frank Gibbons leaped to his feet and screamed, “We finally found his weakness—he can’t count!”
Mays himself accepts that the catch was the turning point, but he offers a more pragmatic explanation for its influence. “If Cleveland had won Game One, then they come back with Feller in Game Four and Lemon in Game Five,” he says. “A different Series.”
There were many victors. After eighteen years as owner, Horace Stoneham finally won a World Series, vindicating him as worthy of his inheritance. It was a triumph for Leo Durocher, his first championship in fifteen years as manager, placing him in the record books with John McGraw. Dusty Rhodes was the storybook hitting star. Johnny Antonelli picked up one win (on a complete game) and one save. The City of New York preserved its baseball dominance. The faded Polo Grounds reclaimed its glory.
The oddest loser was Vic Wertz, who was 8-for-16 in the Series, with two doubles, a triple, and a home run. He was, at the time, only the tenth player in World Series history to play every game and hit .500 or better. Many great hitting performances have been forgotten, but Wertz suffered a greater perversion. No one remembers his stupendous hitting. All they remember is his out . But infamy had its benefits. After the Series, the American League sent Wertz the film footage of the games, and he played the Catch when he gave speeches around the country. After he retired in 1963, he opened a beer distributorship in the Detroit area, but he could never escape Willie Mays. He told the Sporting News in 1973: “Even now, wherever I go, I’d say 90 percent of the people who recognize me ask me about the Catch. It really has given me a name. Heck, if the ball had gone over Willie’s head, I might have gotten an inside-the-park home run, and it would have given me 5-for-5 in a World Series game. But who’d have remembered? It really wouldn’t have meant a helluva lot.”
Mays himself, after a slow start, hit well enough in a Series dominated by pitching. He went 4-for-14 (.285) and drove in three runs, but of the eleven innings in which the Giants scored, he was on base in eight of them.
Other Giants may have chafed at the fuss surrounding a single play in a single game, but ultimately the Catch made the 1954 World Series. Five decades later, how many people can even name the teams in, say, the 1957 Series? But fans know that the Giants won in ’54 because of Mays’s mad dash to straightaway center.
The Catch began the Willie Mays brand. Few sports images have been reproduced as often or have as much iconic appeal as number 24’s reaching out and corralling the ball. To this day, when a kid on a sandlot or a big leaguer under the lights reaches over his shoulder for a ball on the dead run, the cry is heard—“a Willie Mays catch!” No explanation is needed.
The footage of the Catch helped shape Mays’s legacy by placing him in a particular time and place. In Ken Burns’s epic documentary Baseball, highlights are shown from the 1955 World Series, which was noteworthy only because it was the one Series won by the Brooklyn Dodgers. But the film is in color, which creates a startling contrast to the black-and-white highlights from 1954. In a single year, baseball seemed to have moved from one era to the next, from the old and hidebound to the glitzy and modern. The transition to the “modern” era of baseball occurred over many years and had no clear demarcation, but Mays played the bulk of his career in what’s been considered the “modern” era—defined by the expansion of the leagues, the inroads of television, and jet travel.
Yet the Catch came from the age of black-and-white images, a very different era, when professional athletes were part of their communities, when teams were tied to their cities, when All-Stars performed for meager wages, when ushers gave their hero a portable record player, and when World Series games began in the warm autumn sunshine.
Willie Mays, in film if not in reality, will always be of that era.
In 1954, Mays won the MVP, making him the only player to win the award in his first full season. Twenty-four sportswriters voted, sixteen giving him first-place ballots, though some voters were curiously unimpressed. Mays received one fifth-, one sixth-, and one seventh-place vote. A black player had now won the National League MVP in four of six straight years.
Mays was named the Sporting News number one player of the year and was named baseball player of the year by the Los Angeles Times . He received the B’nai B’rith Sports Lodge Award and was named New York’s most popular player by the Catholic Youth Organization. He was honored at separate dinners by the Boston baseball writers and the Metropolitan baseball writers in New York. He won the Ray Hickok $10,000 diamond-studded belt as Professional Athlete of the Year, and he won the Associated Press’s Male Athlete of the Year, though it clearly reflected the AP’s preference for fellow Americans. Mays beat Roger Bannister, the English trackman who broke the four-minute-mile barrier, a truly historic feat. The Sporting News, showing its bias for baseball and Americans, selected the Catch as the year’s “greatest sports thrill,” with Bannister’s “miracle mile” second. Mays received some seventy awards for his 1954 season.
He was now readily compared to some of the greatest center fielders in history, including Tris Speaker, Joe DiMaggio, and Terry Moore. Dan Daniel wrote in the Sporting News : “I doubt very much if they ever before had so pronounced a standout Player of the Year as Mays made himself for 1954. The complete Mays story is not to be sought in the averages.... He became the most talked about ballplayer in years, the most everyday spectacular cynosure, The Arm, The Swing, The Speed, The Pennant Producer.”
But these tributes also included the seeds of a downfall, as many celebrated Mays for his youth and innocence. According to Sport, “The Willie Mays that exists for [fans] is part Prince Valiant, part the dead Giant heroes of the past and part Peter Pan.” After the World Series, Arthur Daley of the New York Times wrote: “The only thing which could possibly prevent Willie the Wonder from becoming the biggest box office attraction since Babe Ruth would be for him to lose his simplicity and his little boy’s outlook on life.”
Those were the expectations and the burdens. No matter how many home runs and catches and thrills he would offer in the future, some would begrudge him an unavoidable sin. Willie Mays would never be twenty-three again.