When the San Francisco Giants took the field in 1958, they were unlike any other team that had ever played in the league. They were, of course, the first major league squad from the Bay Area, but that didn’t make them distinctive. They had six rookies, but they weren’t the story. What was most striking was the team’s racial and ethnic composition. In 1958, the Giants fielded four blacks and six Latins. The Dodgers that year had four blacks and no Latins. It was the Giants, not the Dodgers, who now set the standard for integration. They were Major League Baseball’s melting pot, and their outreach brought in some of the finest players of the era while creating a vibrant—and at times divisive—backdrop for Mays’s long tenure in San Francisco.
Mays himself played an indirect role in the team’s changing demographic. In his rookie season, Stoneham was still adhering to the informal quota on the number of nonwhites on the roster. But that year was pivotal, for Mays’s instant stardom coincided with Stoneham’s decision to hire as a full-time scout a colorful baseball impresario named Alejandro “Alex” Pompez. His job: to find talent in the Caribbean. Stoneham had a long history with Pompez and may have eventually hired him anyway, but Mays’s success alleviated his concerns about the white fans’ support of minorities.
Pompez was a central figure in the remaking of the Giants. The son of a cigarmaker in Cuba, he grew up in Florida and moved to New York after World War I, where in Harlem he became the king of the numbers racket, a kind of lottery, illegal but lucrative. He also had legitimate business interests involving sports. He bought Dyckman Oval, a park in Harlem about two miles from the Polo Grounds, where he sponsored boxing and wrestling matches and motorcycle races. He also founded the New York Cuban Stars, which won the Eastern Color League title in 1924. When the league foundered, the Cuban Stars survived as barnstormers. Pompez’s shadow business dealings caught up with him in the 1930s; he fled the country for a number of years to escape government prosecution, but he returned in 1937 and agreed to testify against figures in organized crime.
Pompez resumed the operations of the New York Cubans but needed a ballpark, so he leased the Polo Grounds from Stoneham. When Jackie Robinson broke into the majors, Pompez foresaw a new opportunity—providing players of color to big league teams. In 1947, he invited major league executives to a Negro League All-Star Game at the Polo Grounds. Most declined, but Stoneham showed up, and their friendship deepened. Stoneham would forgive Pompez his rent when he couldn’t pay, and Pompez helped Stoneham sign Cuban catcher Ray Noble as well as Ray Dandridge and David Barnhill. With extensive contacts in the Negro Leagues and throughout the Caribbean, Pompez became a valuable scout, providing a direct line to huge pools of talent.
In 1955, Pompez helped sign Orlando Cepeda, the seventeen-year-old slugger from Puerto Rico. At Cepeda’s first spring training in Melbourne, Florida, the team’s director of scouting wanted to cut him, but, according to Cepeda, Pompez fought to keep him, and he soon emerged as the hottest prospect in the Giants’ system. Jose Pagan was also signed out of Puerto Rico in 1955. The following year, Felipe Alou, the first of the Alou brothers, came out of the Dominican Republic, to be followed by Matty Alou and Manny Mota, then Juan Marichal and Jesus Alou. Out of the Bahamas came Andre Rodgers; out of Venezuela, Raymond Monzant. Pompez’s native country, Cuba, delivered Jose Cardenal and Tito Fuentes. Cuba would have produced more players except that Fidel Castro, after seizing power in 1959, locked out all U.S. baseball teams.
Pompez also helped to scout black players, and he was in charge of all black and Latin prospects during spring training. He bunked them by nationality (Dominicans with Dominicans, etc.) and supervised their food, manners (no hats when eating), and dress. “When they first start out,” he said, “I tell my boys, ‘If you want to stay in organized baseball, you got to do things a little bit better. You got to fight, play hard, and hustle.’ And they do. They’re more ambitious, and they’re hungry.”
They also came on the cheap. At a time that Stoneham paid a $60,000 signing bonus to a white pitcher, Mike McCormick, he paid signing bonuses of $500 to Cepeda, $500 to Willie McCovey, $500 to Felipe Alou, and $4,000 to Juan Marichal.
Nevertheless, they and others created a pipeline of talent that fed the Giants for years to come.
Whatever misgivings the Giants had about their acceptance were dispelled almost immediately. On April 14, two days before their home opener, the team landed in San Francisco on a late-night flight from Omaha and was met by four hundred fans at the airport. All the players were taken to a downtown hotel except Mays, who returned to his house. The following day, the city threw a ticker-tape parade for the Giants through the financial district down Montgomery Street; the police estimated that hundreds of thousands lined the roads and watched from office buildings. Behind a marching marine band and cheerleaders with S F GIANTS on their sweaters, sparkling new convertibles carried various dignitaries: the mayors of San Francisco and Los Angeles, the commissioner of baseball and the president of the National League, Stoneham and Blanche McGraw. The former child movie star Shirley Temple Black was the parade queen. Finally, the players arrived, their names attached to the doors so the fans would know who they were screaming for. Five hundred pounds of rose-petal confetti, ticker tape, and punch cards fell from the top floors of the buildings.
The last car was occupied by Willie Mays and Hank Sauer, whom the Giants had acquired the previous year in a desperate attempt for a power hitter. When they came into view, hundreds of balloons descended on them, and Mays, smiling, grabbed one and waved it. Kids ran up to his car, pleading for autographs. Their parents did as well. At Montgomery and California streets, two twelve-year-old boys asked Mays if they could get in the car; he agreed, and they rode together for four blocks.
The parade reminded Mays of the one in New York after the Giants won the World Series. Even without a championship, San Francisco was showing its love—this was important to Mays if he was going to perform his best. “You felt that no one could ever top New York,” he recalled. “Then you came out here and saw all the people. They shut down the businesses, they threw out paper. It was just a wonderful experience.... I needed that because sometimes when you go to new surroundings, you don’t know what’s going to happen. It was a good feeling.”
A luncheon at the Sheraton-Palace Hotel drew a thousand fans, who showed their knowledge of Giants history, and their grace, in reserving their one standing ovation for Blanche McGraw. Bill Rigney received a key to the city, and San Francisco preened. “The Giants... have given us all a notable civic strut,” wrote the Chronicle ’s Charles McCabe. “San Francisco has been saying for decades that it is big league. In its secret heart, it has never been quite sure. These days it is.”
Seals Stadium was nestled on the corner of 16th and Bryant streets, one of the warmest belts of the city and relatively free of fog. It was a gem of a park, a single-deck structure that held twenty-three thousand fans and featured a memorable sign over its clock in left center field: DAPHNE FUNERALS—EVENTUALLY. But not anymore. With the arrival of the Giants, the sign was replaced with one for Longines watches. The stadium’s facade was repainted forest green; its front office windowsills were adorned with flower boxes. The smallest park in either league, its fans sat so close to the field, said Ruben Gomez, “it was like you were sitting in the same kitchen together, eating at the same table. Everyone was so close you could look at their faces and remember them.” The fans at Seals Stadium, like those at the Polo Grounds, were allowed to come onto the field after the game, depart through an opening in center field, and visit, if they were so inclined, three neighborhood saloons—Double Play Bar, Third-Base, and Lou’s.
But Seals Stadium had a quirky, fragrant beauty all its own. The visiting clubhouse overlooked a bakery, which dispensed a lovely aroma of fresh cinnamon rolls, crusty bread, and pastries. The players couldn’t open their clubhouse window without feeling pangs of hunger.
Two breweries, meanwhile, were across the street; one of them, Hamm’s, erected a flashing mug high above the stands, and the glass would gradually fill with beer to its foam-covered top, flash on and off three times, and then start over again. Occasionally, a player would become so entranced by the image that he would lose his concentration and commit an error. When the beer was brewing, tufts of foam were released from their buildings and wafted over the left field grandstand, descending gently into the bullpen. “There is nothing quite like the smell of new beer in the morning after a night on Frisco town,” pitcher Jim Brosnan said.
Opening Day, April 15, was a warm, breezy afternoon, and the Giants faced the Dodgers. A downtown billboard read: WELCOME SF GIANTS. SWAT THEM BUMS. Joseph Magnin Company, a fine department store, distributed booklets to women that explained how baseball was played and offered tips on what to wear. Macy’s dressed its mannequins in Giants uniforms. A sellout crowd of 23,449 was on hand, with several dozen more watching from a hill on Franklin Square beyond the right field bleachers. Scalpers were getting as much as $15 for a $3.50 reserved seat. Red, white, and blue bunting was draped around the diamond, from one foul pole around home plate to the other.
To celebrate the new era, the mayor of Los Angeles, Norris Poulson, stepped into the batter’s box to face his San Francisco counterpart, Mayor Christopher. Two of the four pitches were wild, one bounced on the plate, and the fourth was hit by Poulson, who promptly ran to third base. During the introduction of the players, Willie Mays received the loudest ovation, though opposing players Gil Hodges, Pee Wee Reese, and Duke Snider were also cheered enthusiastically. At 1:34 P.M., the Giants’ Ruben Gomez threw the first pitch and quickly struck out Gino Cimoli.
Don Drysdale, the young ace who had won seventeen games the year before, pitched for the Dodgers, but he didn’t make it through four innings, and the Giants won handily, 8–0. Their muscular rookie, Orlando Cepeda, hit a home run, and Gomez went the distance. The game was covered by 110 reporters, the most ever for a regular-season contest, and the reviews, even among the New York scribes, were favorable. Joe King of the New York World-Telegram wrote, “It is sad for most of the old Giant fans to see their team depart, but the wrench is eased [by knowing] it has a new home in the city which keeps alive the spirit of old New York in which the great Giants prospered.”
Mays, batting fourth, chipped in two singles and two RBIs and lost his cap chasing a fly ball. “It’s like a World Series,” he said after the game. He received a surprise visit from a long-ago acquaintance—Eddie Montague, the scout who signed him with the Giants. He now lived in San Francisco, and he went into the locker room so his nine-year-old son, Ed, could meet Willie. The boy also met the actor Jeff Chandler, but Chandler didn’t leave nearly the impression that Willie did. “It was such a thrill,” recalls Montague, who became a National League umpire. “My dad introduced me... and Willie had that high-pitched voice. He pulled a brand-new glove with his name embroidered on it, and he gave it to me. I remember holding it out the window [on the way home] saying, ‘This is Willie Mays’s glove.’ ”
For the team at large, the transition to San Francisco went smoothly with only a few minor exceptions. The Oakland Tribune, miffed that the arrival of the Giants forced the minor league Oakland Oaks to leave town, refused to print the words “San Francisco” in its Giant stories, datelines, or standings. The words magically came back the following year. At times, Russ Hodges inadvertently called the team “the New York Giants,” and sometimes even newspaper boys cried out that “the New York Giants” had won the game.
Meanwhile, the real New York Giant fans had not been completely abandoned. After the Giants and Dodgers left town, WINS in New York wanted to use Western Union ticker tape to re-create the games of one of the displaced teams. Announcer Les Keiter figured Willie Mays could attract the largest audience, so he chose the Giants, and for the next three years, the fans could maintain their connection to Willie through Keiter’s late-night broadcasts.
What most helped the Giants in San Francisco was their play on the field. Predicted to be a second-division team, the youthful squad got off to a hot start and at the end of May was tied for first place, with a 27–17 record. Even their losses won over fans. In a home game on May 5, the Giants were losing to the Pirates, 11–1, going into the bottom of the ninth. They then staged a remarkable rally, which included a pinch-hit double by pitcher Johnny Antonelli, and they had the bases loaded with the score 11–10 when the final out was recorded.
Leading the charge was Willie Mays, who was hitting .397 at the end of April. On May 13, in one game against the Dodgers at the Coliseum, he led the Giants to a 16–9 win with two home runs, two triples, a single, four RBIs, and four runs scored. The Coliseum itself was an odd baseball venue: it was so vast that fans brought transistor radios to help them follow the action. Mays was amused but not distracted. In the four-game series, he hit .709. To Rigney, Mays’s talents were no longer confined to the ball field. “Willie Mays is the world’s greatest athlete,” Rigney said. “His motions are so smooth. I even get a kick out of the silky way he puts on his coat.”
For the first time, Mays also played the role of peacemaker on the field, defusing a brawl that was spiraling out of control. Ruben Gomez, not surprisingly, was in the middle. In September of the previous year, Gomez had hit Pirate pitcher Vernon Law on the left ear with a pitch, rupturing his eardrum and knocking him out for the season. The first time Gomez pitched against the Pirates in 1958, he hit catcher Hank Foiles in the arm, forcing him to leave the game. A Pirate pitcher knocked down a Giant hitter the following day.
Tensions finally exploded the next time Gomez pitched against the Pirates, on May 25 in Pittsburgh. In the fourth inning, second baseman Bill Mazeroski crushed an 0–2 curveball over the fence but foul. The next pitch was a high, tight fastball, which Mazeroski deflected with his left hand; the Pirates later said the ball would have hit his head. Mazeroski began cursing Gomez while his manager, Danny Murtaugh, charged from the dugout to check on his hitter as well as to bark at Gomez. Umpire Frank Dascoli warned Gomez, which drew Rigney out of the dugout to protect his pitcher.
Gomez came to bat the next inning—against the recovered Vernon Law. Before he stepped in, Dascoli sent Gomez back to the bench for a helmet. It was the first game of a doubleheader, and the Sunday afternoon crowd of 35,797, the largest in two years, booed him noisily. Gomez stepped back into the box, and with a runner on first, he squared to bunt. A high fastball sent him sprawling. Now Dascoli marched out to warn Law, which prompted Murtaugh to race to the mound to protect his pitcher. But the fiery Irishman veered toward the plate, said something to Gomez, and pointed to his own forehead, apparently indicating that the ball would soon hit him there. Gomez yelled back at the manager, who wheeled and started for him. Third base coach Herman Franks ran down the line and intercepted Murtaugh while Gomez swung his bat. Murtaugh ducked, causing his hat to fall off and just eluding the bat. “This guy’s crazy!” he shouted.
Both benches emptied, some wild punches were thrown, and the players pushed and tugged at one another. But one player couldn’t be controlled—Orlando Cepeda. Both Cepeda and Gomez were from Puerto Rico, and while the veteran Gomez was a mentor to all of the young Latin players, he was a father figure to Cepeda. The young first baseman even lived with Gomez and his wife, Maria.
Cepeda became enraged when he saw his friend in trouble. “He was like a mad bull,” wrote the Examiner . “He tore his way out of one group and then another, finally dashing toward the Giant dugout where he had spied a bat.”
Cepeda snared the bat and intended to beat the hell out of any Pirate who got in his way. “I was from a Puerto Rico slum,” he said, “and I was used to grabbing the nearest thing to protect myself.” He was ready to swing the bat, according to the Sporting News, “like a sugar cane machete.”
But Mays saw him, raced his way, and tackled his 210-pound teammate. Mays was thirty pounds lighter, but with Hank Sauer’s help, he pinned him down until order was restored. In all the chaos, Mays doubted that many people had even noticed, but they had. Mays’s next time at the plate, the fans gave him a big hand.
Mays was often cheered in opposing ballparks, but his flying tackle was something completely apart. His “quick thinking... probably averted a full-scale riot at Forbes Field,” Pittsburgh Press reporter Les Biederman wrote. Dascoli gave equal praise to the police and to Mays for “stopping the incipient riot.” Murtaugh was the only one thrown out; Gomez, despite swinging his bat at Murtaugh, pitched a complete game for the win. Rigney was pleased with the near-riot. “That thing woke up Gomez,” he said after the game. “He really pitched well after that.”
National League president Warren Giles wasn’t quite so forgiving of using a bat as a weapon. He fined Cepeda, Gomez, and Murtaugh $100 apiece but sent a telegram of commendation to Mays: “The umpires... report that your timely restraint of Cepeda prevented what might have become a very serious incident and I commend you for your clear thinking and quick action.”
Cepeda was indeed fortunate. Had he skulled another player, his season and even his career could have been in jeopardy. At a minimum, photographs of such an assault, with blood smeared across the victim’s head and uniform, the bat dangling in the perpetrator’s hand, would have overshadowed all the other accomplishments of what in fact was a Hall of Fame career. In saving Cepeda from himself—and in preventing a violent melee—Mays demonstrated familiar skills: excellent vision, unerring instincts, brute strength. “In the corner of my eye, I saw Cepeda charge out of the dugout with a bat,” he said. “I’m saying to myself, ‘No, no, that can’t happen,’ so I tackled him.” He also moved quickly, he said, because he knew if Cepeda had bashed an opponent, he’d be thrown out of the game, and he’d be useless to the team in the dugout.
One might take Mays’s actions for granted, as something any conscientious player would do. But no other player did do it. It was Mays who prevented the riot, and he played a similar role later in his career, on a larger stage and with higher stakes. Then and there, the full meaning of his peacemaking would be understood.
Mays’s torrid hitting continued. In five games in June, he went on a 15-for-22 tear, which on June 6 pushed his average to .433. Opposing pitchers tried to disrupt him by knocking him down, a common practice for years, and Mays was hitting the dirt once a game. His remarkable start renewed speculation about a record-breaking year. “If Babe Ruth’s home run record is broken, Mays is going to break it here,” Cincinnati manager Birdie Tebbetts told the Sporting News . The magazine said Mays’s feats belonged “on a higher adjective plateau—none but words like incomparable, breath-taking, electrifying, matchless, explosive, and dynamic will do.” For his part, Mays intentionally aimed for a high average, not homers, believing that getting on base frequently was the quickest way to win over fans. With the team playing well, his line drives falling in, and the crowds supporting him, he couldn’t have been happier. It was like a dream.
Then he stopped hitting. Mays had always hit in streaks, but in 1958 they were more exaggerated. Starting on June 7, he went 0-for-4, 0-for-4, 0-for-4, 1-for-4, 0-for-3, and 0-for-4. Always a free-swinger, he was now chasing pitches out of the strike zone while allowing good ones to pass by. The Giants lost five in a row, and the fans began to conclude that if Mays didn’t hit, the team would lose. Mays’s struggles continued, and in nineteen games, his average fell sixty-two points, to .371.
Mays knew he couldn’t hit .433 for the entire year, that eventually he’d taper off, but this slump was different. He began to feel tired, and his health worried him. He told Rigney on June 19, when the Giants were in Pittsburgh, that he felt poorly. At the time, he had had five hits in his last forty at-bats. The previous season, Mays had checked into Harkness Pavilion under similar circumstances, so he now returned there, where the same physician, Dr. Stewart Cosgriff, examined him. According to press reports, the doctor indicated there was nothing “organically” wrong, and Mays was given vitamins and told to rest. He missed two games and rejoined the team in Philadelphia on June 22.
San Francisco Giant games in Philadelphia would long draw the New York press as well as a fair number of New York fans. Mostly, they came to cheer Willie. On this night, he was in good spirits, smiling and laughing before the game, a familiar image of boyish fun. But when reporters asked him about his health, he went into a shell. The interview, as reported by Dick Young, put him under siege.
“All right now.”
“How did you feel when you went into the hospital?”
“Tired.”
“Did you feel any pain or anything?”
“No, jes tired.”
“Do you mean tired physically, or mentally, or what?”
“I don’t know. Tired, that’s all.”
“Have they given you any pills or medicine to take?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Whose idea was it that you go into the hospital—yours or the club’s?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you ask Rigney these questions? I don’t want to get into no trouble.”
Dick Young, known for his caustic opinions, was a fan of Mays’s, but he was highly offended by his answers. “Willie wasn’t examined,” Young wrote in a huff. “He was brainwashed.”
In an interview the following year, Mays emphatically denied that there was anything seriously wrong with him. “They ask me, am I physically tired or mentally tired, and I guess it’s a little of both,” he said. “In the hospital, the doctor tells me I’m run down, and he gives me those vitamin shots, and I rest for a day or two. That’s all I seem to need when it happens, one or two days off.”
But it wasn’t the medical care that Mays needed. It was the privacy. “When I’m in a slump, people ask me so many questions that I go into the hospital and nobody bothers me,” he said. “If I could get that same privacy somewhere else, just a complete rest, I wouldn’t go into the hospital.”
It was a rare acknowledgment of the stress that his own celebrity had created. All the hype created obvious pressures, but new ones emerged as well. At twenty-seven, he was now considered a team leader, even an elder statesman. He found himself bracketed by rookies in left and right—Felipe Alou, Willie Kirkland, and Leon Wagner, all of whom needed guidance both on and off the field. Wagner said that Mays showed him and Kirkland around town and introduced them to the right people. “Mays always looked out for us,” he said.
Mays had fun with the rookies. The first time he saw Wagner, he walked up to him. “So you’re Wagner, huh?”
“That’s right, that’s me,” Wagner said.
Mays sat down, looked at him, and then started to laugh. He walked over again.
“So you’re Wagner, huh?” Wagner nodded. Again Mays walked away. The rookie had no idea what was going on.
Mays came over one more time. “Watch me,” he told Wagner. “I’m the leader. You get outta line, I might have to trade you.”
“I ain’t like those other rookies,” Wagner said. “I can pole.”
“You can what?”
“I can pole. I can pole the ball.”
Mays, amused by the rookie’s brashness, keeled over with joy. Wagner recalled, “He laughed so hard he had tears in his eyes.”
Wagner returned the barbs by calling Mays names like “Square” or “Chump,” which Willie loved, and the veteran gave him clothes and watches. “He used to give me his best stuff,” Wagner said. “Man, he gave me three or four silk suits, eight or nine alpaca sweaters, $55 slacks. He’d get a batch of sweaters or something, and I’d say I wanted a particular one and he’d scream and say, ‘No, no, that’s the best one, that’s the one I want. Oh, no, you can’t have it.’ But he’d always end up giving it to me.”
The Giants were already using Mays as an example to young players, though their motives were not strictly to improve their play. In 1956, Willie Kirkland, still in the minors, threatened not to report to Minneapolis unless he was paid more than $600 a month. In a letter to Kirkland, the Giants’ director of the team’s farm system, Jack Schwarz, said he didn’t deserve more than $600 a month. He also told the twenty-two-year-old that he was a streak hitter. “Even Willie Mays is a streak hitter,” Schwarz wrote.
However, Willie is not a streak outfielder. He is a great outfielder all the time. When he makes a bad play in the outfield, it is so unusual that the writers are on him for ten days afterward. At times you make the exceptional plays in the outfield, and at times you do not look too good on the ordinary chances.... I have very high hopes for you, and think it would be a terrible mistake for you not to be in that Minneapolis camp in high gear.
And Kirkland was.
But while Mays had the star power and enjoyed the camaraderie, he was not a natural mentor. If asked, he would do anything for a teammate, but he didn’t impose himself on others, didn’t pry or invade. Never a cheerleader, he led by quiet example. “He was a laid-back guy,” recalled Billy O’Dell, who pitched for the Giants in the 1960s. “You’d have to look around sometimes to see he was there. What Mays had already done in his career, and how he still worked hard to accomplish more, was what inspired the other players.” Added Johnny Antonelli: “He didn’t get up in the clubhouse and make speeches. Willie always led by performance.”
What others didn’t appreciate was that Mays felt isolated in his new city with new teammates. The team was not only younger, but its New York bloodlines had been thinned out. During spring training of 1958, the Giants parted ways with New York stalwarts Don Mueller and Bobby Thomson, and Dusty Rhodes spent the year in Phoenix. In addition to Mays, only three players remained from the 1954 championship team. He roomed alone on the road, traveled to and from Seals Stadium by himself, and rarely socialized with his teammates. Moreover, he himself still craved a mentor, some older adult whom he trusted and—particularly now—who could help him with his batting stroke. His frustrations spilled out to Jimmy Cannon in an interview that ran in the New York Post a week after he left the hospital.
“I’ve been playing lousy ball for three weeks,” he said. “I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what to make of it. I’m just bad.”
He thought he knew what could help. “I need some older fellow to watch me. I mean, someone who knows me and knows all about me and what I did when I started and how I was when I came up.” He knew who that was. “The best thing would be to have Jackie Robinson for one year. I mean for Jackie to play with me for just one year and tell me things. He’d tell me.... He knew me when I came up and what I did.” Except for Hank Sauer, he said, none of his teammates had suggested how to end his hitting woes. “They’re afraid to tell me. Nobody tells me. What are they afraid of? They must think I would resent it.”
Cannon later wrote that Mays sounded as if “he were an obscure kid trying to hold on to a job he wasn’t certain he could fill.”
At the time, Mays was hitting .372 and leading the league. But that wasn’t good enough for him. “Some guys hit .350 but they don’t care,” Mays told Cannon. “But I love this game. I got so much to learn about it. That’s why I want some older fellow to tell me when I’m doing wrong.”
The comments incensed Rigney, who called a clubhouse meeting and asked Mays if he was trying to show up his teammates and coaches. Mays said he wasn’t.
• • •
That Mays sought a New York columnist to explain his difficulties was not coincidental. He would open up only to reporters he knew, such as Milton Gross, Roger Kahn, and Ed Linn, as well as Cannon. At his best, he could be engaging and insightful and was usually respectful, but in general he was a reluctant interview and instinctively wary of journalists he didn’t know. Some reporters didn’t like him. He would miss interview appointments, offer painfully short answers, and be dismissive or petulant toward those he believed—rightly or wrongly—were trying to embarrass him. But few professional athletes faced as much media attention as he did, and beyond baseball, he feared scrutiny.
Tensions emerged almost immediately between Mays and the West Coast journalists. “Some California sportswriters are not always finding him receptive,” the New York Times reported from spring training, “and Mays has irked a few already.” What bothered them was Mays’s spending time with the writers from New York instead of with them. “Do they want me to talk to them like I would to old friends?” Mays asked. “Well, first we got to become old friends.... I want to know how he writes before I answer some questions. I don’t like to be put on the spot.”
Mays also got ensnared in San Francisco’s newspaper rivalries. He agreed to publish a daily ghostwritten column in the Call-Bulletin, one of the four dailies. Immediately after a game, the newspaper’s beat reporter, Jim McGee, grabbed Mays, leaving the competing writers outraged. “That irritated the rest of us,” recalled Dan Hruby, who in 1958 was a first-year baseball writer in San Francisco. “I still believe most of the writers resented the column idea and, perhaps subconsciously, repeatedly threw digs into Mays in print.”
Mays was criticized on two points: he wasn’t worth his high salary, and he was responsible for the Giants’ losses. “Mays’s still-high batting average is a misleading thing,” wrote the Examiner ’s Prescott Sullivan in early August. “Willie got his hits in bunches at the start of the season.... For the greater part of the season, he has been hitting closer to the .200 pace and, moreover, most of his hits have been of the dribbler variety.... With so little assistance from their key man, the wonder of it is that the Giants have remained in contention this long [given that the team has] to ‘carry’ the one player it had counted on for its scoring punch.... As we figure it, [Mays] has about $50,000 more baseball to play in order to earn his 70 G’s.”
Some attacks evoked images of racial hostility. Bud Spencer, the sports editor of the San Francisco News, wrote that “the general press box appraisal” of Mays was that he was “an All American knothead.... Willie’s trouble is that he needs to be driven. Anybody got a whip?”
Actually, Mays had just as many admirers in the press who affirmed his supremacy on the field and his decency off. During his slump, Curley Grieve, the sports editor of the Examiner, wrote: “Possibly no one uses up as much energy in the course of a game as Willie. He goes all out every effort.... After every game, there’s a small handful of youngsters waiting for him at the dressing room door for his autograph. He never disappoints them. He’s such a gentle soul that he can’t even get angry at the pitchers who are trying to drill holes in his head.”
Bob Stevens of the Chronicle, disputing press accounts that Mays was selfish, recounted a game in which Mays came to bat in the ninth inning with the score tied and a man on second. He ripped a drive off the center field wall. As the winning run chugged home, Mays could have jogged to second for a double, which would have helped his slugging percentage. (He had led the league in slugging percentage in three of the four previous years; it was a coveted title.) But he stopped at first, sacrificing his double. “The Giants had won and that was good enough for Willie,” Stevens wrote.
Jack McDonald, a veteran sports editor in San Francisco, described Mays as one of the classiest gentlemen he’d ever met in sports. “Willie must know he’s a great ballplayer, but he never lets on,” McDonald wrote in the Sporting News in July 1958. “And when you gain his confidence, he’ll tell you everything—even though he may ask you not to print it.”
Jim Murray, the future Hall of Fame sportswriter for the Los Angeles Times, wrote in 1962: “So far as is known, [Mays] has never done an unkind thing in his career.”
In July, Mays hit .264, which would cause no alarm for any other player, but for him, the mere hint of mortality defied all expectations.
In one sense, Mays wasn’t the same ballplayer—something had been lost at Seals Stadium. For all its charm, it was still a minor league park, where high flies were lost in substandard lights, the crosswinds were tricky, and the grass was tall. “I got to learn to play center field all over again,” Mays said. What’s more, the close fences, while perhaps suitable for home runs, negated the most exciting part of Mays’s game—his defense. Compared to the expanse of the Polo Grounds, he had no place to roam. Balls that he once caught over his shoulder now sailed over the fence. Gone also was the unique visual drama caused by his shallow positioning. At the Polo Grounds, Mays tempted disaster by charging every hard ground ball or sinking drive; with the endless tundra behind him, a miscue meant the ball would roll forever. In Seals Stadium, it simply meant an extra base. Mays would never be mistaken for an ordinary player, but Seals Stadium confined his greatness.
Mays’s acceptance in his new city was complicated by his New York roots. While the Giants wanted to make him the showpiece of the franchise, San Francisco didn’t need a packaged icon from the East Coast. It wanted to find its own heroes. And it did, in “the Baby Bull.”
Orlando Cepeda knew something about legends. His father, Pedro Cepeda, was a baseball superstar in Puerto Rico. Nicknamed “the Bull,” Pedro gave his son both his strength and his temper (he was also called “the Babe Cobb of Puerto Rico”). Orlando Cepeda was so daunting physically that during spring training in 1958, Rigney gushed that he looked like “a bronze statue standing at dress parade.”
When Rigney asked Whitey Lockman what he thought of the kid, Lockman said, “It’s too bad he’s a year away.”
“A year away from what?”
“The Hall of Fame.”
He was an immediate favorite in San Francisco. He hit for power and average, and with a broad smile and outgoing personality, he would joke and laugh with the fans and mill about the Mission District, near the park, which had a large Puerto Rican community. He liked to wear his sleeves high to expose his muscles, and he was visible on the nightclub circuit: the Copacabana for Latin music, the Blackhawk for jazz, and the Jazz Workshop, which initially wouldn’t let him in—he was too young—but soon capitulated to the town’s hottest new celebrity. Attracting dates was not a problem.
Cepeda was to San Francisco what Willie Mays, in his rookie season, had been to New York—young, accessible, and mesmerizing. Cepeda would also be Rookie of the Year and, like Mays, even carried around a portable record player. The rhetorical flourishes describing Cepeda had a familiar echo. “He is the very personification of power,” the Sporting News said in 1958, “as he stands at the plate with his bat cocked, a magnificent athletic specimen and a challenge to any pitcher. We never see him standing there with a bat in his hands without thinking that a great artist or sculptor, wishing to put the theme ‘Power at the Plate’ on canvas, or into bronze or marble, would need to look no further than Cepeda as the greatest living model for such a work.”
Cepeda also benefited by hitting fourth, behind Mays, whose .419 on-base percentage was the second highest of his career. Mays led the league with thirty-one steals as well, so Cepeda received an inordinate number of fastballs while Mays’s running also created holes in the defense. Cepeda later said, “I was in the right place at the right time.”
While Baby Bull heard the cheers, Mays, struggling to find his stroke, heard the boos. He had been booed once before, in the Polo Grounds, but that was for a single misplay. In this case, the Sporting News said, he had “been the target for more than just some isolated booing in the heretofore tolerant Seals Stadium. Fans just can’t conceive of Mays getting anything less than a single every time he comes to the plate.... Willie himself confided to friends that it would take a superman to live up to such laudatory clippings.”
Jim Murray wrote: “They didn’t expect Willie Mays to land there; they expected the waters of the Golden Gate to part and let him walk ashore.”
Some San Franciscans thought they deserved a new franchise, just as the 49ers had been new, and an American League franchise at that—the Yankees had been the most popular major league team in the Bay Area. The Giants were warmed-over National Leaguers, and Willie Mays, the most prominent among them, suffered one other demerit. His New York boosters insisted that he was every bit equal to, if not better than, Joe DiMaggio. But just as Mickey Mantle could never fill DiMaggio’s shoes in Yankee Stadium, neither could Mays in San Francisco.
All of these passions led to impetuous attacks. On August 11, Sports Illustrated published an article by Richard Pollard, identified as a “San Francisco fan” who traveled with the Giants for a week. Noting that Mays was a loner, he wrote: “This can be irritating, particularly when the star is not performing with distinction.” After the Giants were swept in four games, he wrote: “The weak hitting of Mr. Willie Mays, combined with inept relief pitching and a leaky infield, was too great a burden to carry into a decisive series.” Actually, the Giants scored only five runs in four games—nobody hit well—but only Mays was cited.
His teammates, including Cepeda, understood his untenable situation. “I didn’t have the disadvantage Willie Mays had,” Cepeda recalled. “When Willie came here, the press built him up so high. The fans figured that every time he came up to the plate, he’d hit a home run, or steal a base, and never make an error. And when he’d strike out or whatever, I was doing well.”
Mays’s teammates from New York were particularly sympathetic. “Willie is the one guy I felt a little sorry for because he was such an icon in New York,” Lockman says. “He, Mantle, Snider—they owned that place. Then he got to San Francisco, and he just wasn’t the same to Giant fans there as he was to those in New York.”
Mays believes his reception primarily reflected San Francisco’s resentment of anyone who could be compared to the Yankee Clipper. “This was Joe DiMaggio’s town,” he later said. “Joe was great. He was one of my idols. I didn’t come out here to show him up. I only hoped I could prove to San Francisco that I could play ball.” The boos were jarring for a player who, with rare exception, had heard nothing but cheers at home and on the road. “On the road,” he said, “you expect boos. But I think all players want to feel the hometown fan is his friend.”
If Mays was supposed to get more rest, he got little help from Rigney. The Giants played doubleheaders on July 27 in Pittsburgh and July 28 in Philadelphia. Two cities; two days; four games. Mays played every inning. On Labor Day, September 1, the Giants and Dodgers played a split doubleheader at Seals Stadium. The first game, at 10 A.M., lasted two hours and thirty-four minutes. The crowd then left, new fans entered, and the second game began around 2:30. That one lasted sixteen innings and took four hours and thirty-five minutes. All told, the players were at the park for eleven hours and fifteen minutes. Mays never sat out. With the exception of the two games he missed when he was hospitalized, he played in all other 152 games, more than anyone else. If he was around, he was on the field.
Mays’s marriage had always been fodder for the gossip columnists, but the attention grew sharper, and less welcome, his first year in San Francisco. Marghuerite cut a striking image about town. At a fundraiser for an educational television station, she modeled a pink fox stole over a pink satin evening gown. When she tried on a $12,000 fur coat, she murmured to Willie, “I wish I could have it, it’s so beautiful.” A photograph captured Willie’s petrified look. In September, Ebony placed Willie and Marghuerite on its cover, he wearing an open pea-green sweater and yellow cotton shirt while holding their white poodle, she in a high-collared pink flowered dress, pink heels, and pearls, both of them leaning against the broad front fender of a shiny pink Thunderbird with a pink steering wheel. Other photographs showed the couple viewing the ocean from their large living room windows and cuddling in a tender embrace on their white sofa.
But behind the blissful image were rumors about dissension and divorce. Newspaper reporters from as far as Chicago, Pittsburgh, and New York, as well as San Francisco, were asking so many questions that the couple’s lawyer, Terry Francois, issued a statement in September that there was “absolutely no basis for Willie Mays divorce rumors.” Francois had recently spoken to Marghuerite, and “she was shocked and amazed at such rumors.” Willie, asked before a game in St. Louis about his marriage, said, “What is all the fuss about anyway? What do you want me to say?” He denied the rumors but noted that “every marriage isn’t peaches and cream.”
When a hospital treated Marghuerite for a bruised forehead and a cut finger, a newspaper suggested that Willie may have struck her. “He hit her like he owned her,” quipped one newspaper. Both parties vehemently denied it. “My wife slipped and fell down the stairs of our home in Frisco,” Willie said. “That’s the truth, but I know people don’t like to believe it because it’s more interesting to believe the other thing. They say I knocked her down, and everything. She just tripped and fell. It was a nasty fall. She went down head first. Her face and her side and her back were all sore.”
Marghuerite said, “That rumor was started by a so-called friend of Willie’s. If anybody, even my father, beat me up, I wouldn’t live with him. I’d know he didn’t love me, and I’d leave him.”
Reporters seemed less inclined to ask Mays about his marriage when he was hitting .400, but now they connected his slump to his domestic life. Asked if she was responsible, Marghuerite said, “When Willie is going good, how come they never blame that on me?”
The Giants’ unlikely playoff hopes effectively ended the first week of August, when they lost ten out of eleven games, giving them a 55–53 record, nine games behind the Braves. Poor pitching and inexperience had caught up with them. In one game three rookies, Alou, Cepeda, and Wagner, ignored Herman Franks’s stop signs at third base and ran into outs. The crowd booed Franks, who then blasted the fans for having “no conception of the game.”
But midway through the losing streak, on August 4 at Wrigley Field, Mays broke his slump with three hits, including his first home run since July 2 and his first RBI in sixteen games. And he kept hitting. In one four-game stretch against the Dodgers, he went 10-for-16 (.625), including seven consecutive hits, four homers (one in each game), two doubles, a triple, nine RBIs, and eight runs scored.
While the Giants won only ten of twenty-two in September, Mays roared to the finish line, batting .445, and was named National League player of the month. He started the final game in San Francisco, on September 28, batting .3445, close behind league leader Richie Ashburn, at .3469.
Before the game, a ceremony was held to award the Giants’ MVP, as determined in a poll sponsored by the Examiner . Mays finished the season as the team leader in batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, runs, hits, total bases, triples, home runs, and stolen bases. He won the Gold Glove and tied Orlando Cepeda for RBIs.
But the fans voted Cepeda the MVP, giving him 18,701 votes to 11,510 for Mays. Cepeda had had a wonderful year (.312 average, 25 homers, 96 RBIs), but he was not the team’s most valuable player.
It was, for Mays, a fitting last snub to a tumultuous year. But if he couldn’t win the hearts of fans in San Francisco, he might be able to win the batting crown.
Ashburn didn’t cooperate. He went 3-for-4, all singles, and finished the year at .350. The Phillies had completed their game by the time the Giants began theirs against the Cardinals. Mays needed to go 5-for-5 to tie Ashburn, so Rigney had him lead off for extra at-bats. Fearing he would be undone by the added pressure, the Giants instructed the public address announcer not to reveal Ashburn’s batting line, but someone told Mays anyway. He got off to a good start, hitting a double, but he flied out his next time up. He then hit a homer, his twenty-ninth, made another out, and then beat out an infield hit. His 3-for-5 day gave him a .347 average, the highest of his career, two points better than the year he won the batting title.
The Giants won the game, 7–2, ending the season in third place, twelve games behind the Braves but with eighty wins, an improvement by ten from the previous year. The more dramatic improvement was at the gate: the Giants drew 1,272,625 fans, almost double their last year’s attendance in New York and the most since 1948. To show their appreciation, the Giants gave “the millionth fan,” a photo engraver named Vaughn Santoian, an all-expense trip to Reno, a down payment on a Thunderbird, television and radio sets, free dinners, and a lady’s nightgown.
The Giants were a success in San Francisco, but for all the change, the man who still defined the team—who still inspired reverence and awe—was their center fielder from New York. The most spectacular moment of the year, according to the Call-Bulletin, occurred at Wrigley Field, with Mays flanked by Wagner and Kirkland. As Wagner described the play:
Willie told both of us to guard the line, so here’s Mays playing practically the entire outfield. Man, he had two blocks to cover! Then Ernie Banks unloads a real blast, and I start going back toward the wall. I figure I’m gonna run into the ivy and that the ball is going into the seats. Then I hear footsteps, and here comes Willie! He came running up to me, full speed, and leaped on me. His feet went off my chest, and he shot straight up and caught that ball! And he did it without spiking me. I still can’t figure out how I didn’t get cut. He ran right up me and scared me to death. He made the damndest catch I’ve ever seen, and I still don’t know how he did it. I couldn’t believe it. I told him I didn’t know if he was good, or just crazy.
The Sporting News said Mays missed Wagner by “the margin of a honey bee’s stinger.”
For all the anxiety over his hitting—the Examiner concluded that his “was the most prolonged slump for a name player in modern history”—Mays had for him a typical, which is to say brilliant, season. He led the league in runs scored (121), stolen bases (31), and OPS (on-base plus slugging percentage, 1.002). His only regret was not having gone for home runs; twenty-nine marked his lowest total to date for a full season.
Theories to explain his midseason doldrums percolated for months, even years—his wife, his physical condition, the pressure to satisfy impatient fans—but the most obvious answer was often ignored. Baseball is a game of failure, with even its best hitters failing close to 70 percent of the time. Mays’s slump was the evening of a long season—his average hit bottom at .327 on August 27—yet somehow he was supposed to defy the sport’s brutal arithmetic.
Mays himself kept perspective. After the last game, he sent Richie Ashburn a telegram to congratulate him on the batting title. When reporters asked Mays if he was disappointed, he said, “No, I’m not disappointed. If I hit .347 every year, I’ll be satisfied.”