Willie Mays was exhausted. He had played about 175 games, including the exhibition season and the World Series, in seven months. Virtually everyone in the major leagues played hard, but Mays competed with a boundless intensity. Roger Angell said Mays was more “into the game” than any player he’d ever seen. Always alert mentally, he positioned players from center field, studied pitchers, dissected the practice throws of opposing fielders, tried to anticipate the next bounce or ricochet, and agonized over letting down the fans. Physically, he covered the gaps, bowled over catchers, slammed into fences, and hit the dirt hard to avoid fastballs at his head.
He even warmed up with greater purpose. Before the first game of the World Series, the outfielders were making practice throws in their usual perfunctory manner. Then it was Mays’s turn. As Arnold Hano described it, his first throw, to third base, was on a low line that never bounced, striking the infielder’s glove two inches to the inside of the bag—a “magnificent throw,” Hano marveled. Then he realized that a third baseman prefers that throw on the outside of the bag so it doesn’t collide with the sliding runner. Mays’s next bullet painted the outer edge of third base on a fly. Mays then threw two home without a bounce—the first, waist high, directly over the plate; the second, slightly lower, hit the catcher’s mitt ankle high, the tip of the glove resting on home plate. “I do not believe I ever saw a more impressive display in my baseball life,” Hano said. Mays “appeared superhuman.”
Baseball simply meant more to him. The Sporting News wrote in 1958, “Mays attacks a ball game—any game, one that doesn’t count as well as one that figures importantly in the standings—as if history for the ages depended on that score.... He vibrates with urgency. Of course that can be called showmanship... but that only stems from his aggressiveness. He actually registers belligerence towards a simple grounder directed his way. He handles it like a Panzer sortie sweeping a flank. It’s an enemy; it’s got to be wiped out. Any time Willie faces a critical situation at bat, with a glove or on the bases, the spectator has to get the idea that this one play represents the difference between dawn over Olympus and Stygian gloom. It does to Willie.”
Mays aptly described his approach one spring training when a fan asked him if players worked as hard in an exhibition game as in the regular season. “I don’t know about other players,” Mays said, “I only know about myself.”
“Well, do you?”
Mays nodded slowly. “Yes, I do. Don’t make no difference about what kind of game it is. I always work as hard as I can.” He pondered the thought. “That’s the onliest way,” he concluded, “I even know how to play ball.”
That passion was always part of his appeal, but it also contributed to his fatigue. Even as a teenager, he’d collapse on the field from exhaustion in front of his father, and he would again, more than once, as a professional. Instead of resting during the season or even afterward, he pushed himself to play more—or, as in 1954, was prodded to stay on the field.
After the season, Mays could have made decent money with endorsements and appearances. He was even offered part of a nightclub act in Las Vegas. But the Giants, fearing predators as well as temptations, wanted him out of New York and certainly not in Las Vegas. Mays was never a man about town, but he wasn’t a choirboy either. Frank Forbes said that his biggest challenge was keeping the young women away from Willie and keeping Willie away from the young women.
That was evident during the 1954 season, when a pregnant woman approached Mays with the claim that he was the father of her baby and demanded money for child support. Mays vehemently denied the claim. When the baby was born in early October, the woman’s lawyer demanded a cash payment. Mays sought assistance from the Giants, and all parties agreed that a blood test would be used to determine if Mays was the father. Conducted by Dr. Philip Levine, a pioneering researcher whose discovery of the Rh factor in human blood was used to identify paternity, the test confirmed that Mays was not the father. The incident was kept out of the newspapers, but Stoneham was eager to remove his star as far as possible from harm’s way.
He asked Mays to play winter ball in Puerto Rico, where he would still be in the Giants’ orbit: Giant coach Herman Franks was managing the Santurce Cangrejeros (Crabbers) in San Juan. Stoneham also wanted to return a favor to Pedrin Zorilla, who had founded the Crabbers in the 1930s and had helped deliver Ruben Gomez, a native of Puerto Rico, to the Giants in 1953.
Over the years, Zorilla had recruited several standout black players from America, including Josh Gibson, Roy Campanella, and Ray Dandridge, who were all embraced by Puerto Rico’s delirious baseball fans. Zorilla had never lured a player of Mays’s skill or status; in fact, no major league MVP had ever played in Puerto Rico. With attendance sagging, Zorilla knew that Mays would electrify the island. He just needed Stoneham and Franks to convince him.
Franks made a practical appeal. He said that he already had a very good team, which included Gomez; Negro League star Bob Thurman; future All-Star George Crowe; and Don Zimmer, who had been a rookie shortstop for Brooklyn. Franks said he had one other player of note, a young Puerto Rican who had just completed his first year in the Dodger farm system: Roberto Clemente.
Mays told Franks that he was tired, but Franks said that this team, if he joined it, could win the Caribbean World Series, which would mean more money for all.
When Mays agreed, the announcement surprised Puerto Rico’s baseball fans, some of whom made wagers on whether he would actually arrive. On the morning of October 16, about a thousand people showed up at San Juan’s Isla Grande Airport either to greet Mays or collect on their bets. Mays had fallen asleep while the Clipper was taxiing on the runway in New York. Despite a passing hurricane, he did not wake up until the plane landed in San Juan in a gray drizzle at 6:45 A.M. He couldn’t believe the crowd.
That day, Mays agreed to a contract that would pay him $1,000 a month. He signed it with a pen and also marked it with his fingerprint.
Santurce played at Sixto Escobar Stadium, and at his first game Mays met the team’s batboy, an eighteen-year-old named Orlando Cepeda, whose father, Pedro Cepeda, was one of the island’s most prominent players. Neither Mays nor Cepeda could have imagined that in just a few years they would be teammates. At the time, Cepeda literally stood in awe before games as he positioned himself near the pitcher’s mound to take throws from the outfield—Mays in center, Clemente in right or left.
Mays played an unintentional, though significant, role in Clemente’s career. In 1954, Clemente was nineteen years old and attracting attention from five major league teams, including the Dodgers and the Giants. He wanted to play in New York, where he had friends and relatives in the city’s large Puerto Rican community. The Giants believed he needed at least one year in the minors, so they would not exceed the $6,000 bonus limit, which would require keeping him on the major league roster for his first two years. The Dodgers concurred that he needed more experience but still offered a $10,000 bonus. Clemente accepted and was sent to the Dodgers’ top farm club, in Montreal. As a result, he was left unprotected in the “rule 5” draft of minor league players: over two rounds that ran from the club with the worst record to the one with the best, any big league team can select any unprotected minor league player, which that winter included Clemente. The Pittsburgh Pirates chose him as their first draft pick.
Why did the Dodgers sign Clemente if they were not going to protect him? They feared the Giants were going to sign him. “We didn’t want the Giants to have Willie Mays and Clemente in the same outfield and be the big attraction in New York,” Dodger executive Buzzie Bavasi said later. “It was a cheap deal for us any way you figure it.”
Mays and Clemente played together on numerous All-Star teams, but the only time they played together on a continuous basis was on Santurce. Clemente respected Mays but idolized another black Giant, Monte Irvin, who had played in the Puerto Rican winter league in 1945. While Mays and Clemente were never close, they pushed each other as Santurce teammates and were the backbone of a team that also included future major league catcher Valmy Thomas; Buster Clarkson, who had played in the Negro Leagues and the big leagues; Bob Thurman, a talented Negro League player who would reach the majors at the end of his career; and aging Puerto Rican stars Luis Olmo and Pepe Lucas St. Clair. “I always said that was the greatest winter league team ever assembled,” Don Zimmer later said. “Can you imagine Mays, Clemente, and Thurman in the outfield? And Orlando Cepeda just hanging around, a big kid just stumbling all over himself because he was growing so fast.”
Mays hadn’t picked up a bat in more than two weeks, and Franks offered to use him only as a pinch hitter at the outset. But Mays said he was ready to play, striking out in his first two at-bats, then rapping two hits. Before the game, Franks was asked if Durocher had given him any instructions on handling Mays, and Franks looked surprised: “Instructions? What could you tell Willie? He doesn’t drink and he doesn’t smoke and he loves to sleep, so you don’t have to worry about him being out of shape. Maybe he shouldn’t go after that first pitch so often, but that’s the way he is. Maybe his throwing might be more disciplined, but his one idea is to get the ball and fire it home as quickly as possible. If Willie lets a fellow get an extra base once in a while because of his throws, it’s nothing compared to the extra bases he takes away from ’em.”
Mays played well, hitting safely in his first five games. The first pitcher to shut him down was a Dodger left-hander named Tom Lasorda, who gained fame as the Dodgers’ garrulous manager from 1976 to 1996. But he liked to talk even as a young pitcher in Puerto Rico, telling people that he had discovered Mays’s weakness: he swung on the first pitch, which led to easy outs on balls outside the strike zone. Mays was a free swinger who often cut on the first offering, but that didn’t make him a soft out. After thirteen games without a home run, Mays finally got one. The pitcher? Tom Lasorda. Mays then homered in four consecutive contests. After thirty-nine games over two months, Mays was leading the league in hitting with a .423 average, and he had twenty-eight RBIs. The fans loved him, initially singing out “Ole mira!”—the Spanish equivalent of “Say Hey!”—but in time they chanted, “Say Hey!” whenever he came to bat.
His desire to excel seemed to always shine through. One night in Caguas, a Santurce pitcher who was going to throw batting practice had no one to warm up with. Mays grabbed a catcher’s mitt and took the preliminary tosses, then threw a strike to second base to nail an imaginary runner. Branch Rickey, Jr., whose father signed Jackie Robinson, was now working for his father as the farm system director of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Watching Mays from the stands, he said, “Look at that boy. He just can’t wait to get things started. I’ve always maintained you can learn more about a ballplayer by watching him two days in the winter leagues than you can by watching him for two weeks in the States. Down here, you can tell who likes to play.”
Off the field it wasn’t as easy. Mays lived in a three-room apartment across the street from the ballpark, and the ever-present Frank Forbes, who helped Mays settle in, noticed that his first few days were difficult. “He had a real nice apartment, but he just couldn’t get over the fact that when he came home at night, there was nobody there to say ‘Hello’ to him,” Forbes said.
Mays felt adrift. The night after his first game, he appeared on a television show with a bilingual host, and the next day he discovered that the show was sponsored by a milk company. He was mortified, as he was already committed to a competitor in the States. Mays took loyalty to an extreme, even to a dairy products firm, and he was so distressed that he wouldn’t pose for any pictures for days for fear they would be used commercially. He spoke no Spanish and had no interest in it. Regardless of language, he was careful about talking to strangers, was cautious with teammates, and missed New York. (Franks permitted some trips home as long as the team was in first place.) “Perhaps to some people it seemed I had changed, that I wasn’t as easygoing as I had been,” he later said. Actually, he was just growing up.
Fortunately, one of his teammates was an old friend from the Birmingham Black Barons, Bill Greason; they lived in the same apartment building, and Greason’s wife cooked for them. Mays sometimes ventured into town, sampling local dishes at restaurants and going to movies, grateful that the sound track was in English. He once joined his teammates for a pig roast at Zorilla’s beach house. A photograph, published in Collier’s, shows the stylistic difference between Mays and his peers. A half dozen players and coaches, including Zorilla, are standing around the pig on the spit. The men are wearing wrinkled button-ups and baggy slacks, a portrait of disheveled disinterest; Mays is wearing khaki pants, perfectly creased, with pleats, cuffs, and a matching belt, plus a fitted blue gray short-sleeve shirt with a white collar and white trim. Even at a Puerto Rican pig roast, he looked like a million bucks.
Mays’s time with Santurce appeared to come to an ugly end in one of the more bizarre incidents of his career. On January 11 Mays got into a fight with Ruben Gomez, his teammate on the Crabbers as well as the Giants, creating a furor in both San Juan and New York. The New York Times ran a two-column story about it, and the headline and subhead merited five lines. It all began when Mays was waiting to hit for batting practice, and Gomez, according to the Times, jumped in front of him. Mays and Gomez argued over the hitting order, so Gomez decided to sit on the plate and refused to budge.
Gomez, a wiry right-hander, had a temper. As a Giant, he once hit Braves first baseman Joe Adcock in the arm with a pitch. By the time Adcock decided to charge the mound, the ball had been returned to Gomez, so he fired it again at the onrushing batter, hitting him in the thigh. The Braves then chased Gomez into his dugout, where he picked up an ice pick, which was used on hot days. Gomez yelled at Adcock and threatened to give him a second navel. Umpire Jocko Conlan tried to intervene. “Give me the ice pick,” Conlan told him. “If you don’t give it to me, you’ll be suspended for life. And you have children, Ruben.”
In Puerto Rico, with Gomez sitting on home plate, Mays stood a few feet to the side and wouldn’t move either. He told the pitcher, Milton Ralat, to start throwing. Ralat’s first pitch was a fastball at Mays’s head. Now Mays began screaming at Ralat, who, like Gomez, was Puerto Rican. Mays wasn’t a bully, but he never backed down either. From Fairfield to Newport News, he had gotten into scraps with guys bigger than he. So when Ralat threw his next pitch, Mays caught it with his bare hand and fired it back, hitting Ralat in the shoulder. Ralat cursed him in Spanish, and Mays began walking toward the mound. Then Gomez, bat in hand, stood up and joined the fray—he later said he was trying to stop the fight. But Mays thought Gomez was trying to defend his fellow Puerto Rican, so Gomez and Mays ended up wrestling, with Mays knocking him down with a punch. Herman Franks and George Crowe finally broke it up, but when Gomez headed off the field, he threw several bats at Mays, and Mays threw them right back. When Franks told Mays to “take it easy,” Mays asked, “Are you on the Puerto Ricans’ side?”
In the locker room, Mays told Franks that he was leaving. He had recently told a television interviewer that he had played baseball without any rest since March 1 and was too tired to last the rest of the winter. Zorilla met with Mays and Franks and called Stoneham, and a compromise was reached: Mays could go to New York in a few days so long as he returned for the playoffs in February.
Gomez, having won Game Three of the World Series, was a national hero in his own right, so when Mays came to bat the following day, he was booed. He had rarely been jeered, certainly never by hometown fans, and he felt he had done nothing to warrant the sudden disfavor. But he didn’t show his anger or hurt. When he got to the plate, he hit a triple and came home on an outfielder’s error. All was forgiven. Mays and Gomez reconciled and were good friends for many years, and when the season ended two weeks later, Mays led the league in hitting with a .395 average, and despite missing games, he also led it in total bases, triples, and slugging percentage. Clemente was also spectacular, hitting .344 and leading the league in hits (ninety-four) and runs scored (sixty-five).
Santurce made it to the Caribbean World Series in Caracas, Venezuela, where the modern University City Stadium was jammed with forty thousand rabid fans to watch a four-team round robin of flagwinners in Cuba, Panama, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela. But the main attraction was Mays, as shown by a headline in El Nacional : YOU JUST HAVE TO SEE HIM. But just as he struggled offensively at the start of the World Series, Mays made outs in his first twelve at-bats in Caracas. Unlike the crowds back home, these fans were unforgiving, and the Venezuelan “fanaticos” booed him lustily. Mays had now played in more than 220 games in less than a year, and his grim face showed tension and weariness.
But in Santurce’s third game, with the score tied 2–2, Mays came to the plate in the eleventh inning with Clemente on base. He dug in, took a huge swing, and watched his miseries sail over the fence for the game-winner. Moments later, after leaping on home plate, he rode high on his teammates’ shoulders, his arms raised in joy. The homer, according to Peter Bjarkman, an authority on Latin American baseball, “remains one of the most dramatic clouts in Caribbean series history.” Mays then went on a rampage, collecting eleven hits in thirteen at-bats, including two home runs and two triples. His .440 average and nine RBIs were tops in the Series. The smile returned. His spirits lifted. Caracas was his.
Santurce won its third straight World Series, cementing Zorilla’s relationship with the Giants, which would bear fruit in years to come. Mays said that the next year he wasn’t going to play winter baseball in the Caribbean. The demands were too great, and a winning share of the Series was only $450. But Mays had proven that his stardom was not confined to the United States or to those who spoke English, and he would play in Latin America again. He never learned Spanish, but neither baseball nor Willie Mays ever needed translation.