In seven seasons, Mays had missed only eleven games, but he suffered his first serious injury during spring training in 1959. The circumstances were typical. In a lousy exhibition contest against the Red Sox, Mays, on second base, broke for third on an attempted steal. The batter hit a slow roller to the shortstop, who had no play, but Mays, instead of holding at third, rounded the bag and tried to score. The shortstop’s throw was off the line, forcing the catcher, Sammy White, to reach high, leaving his left leg dangling a few inches off the ground. At that moment, Mays’s sliding right leg crashed into the pointed end of White’s shin guard, which cut through Mays’s pant leg and ripped open his flesh to the bone. (He scored the run.)
Mays saw his bloody pant leg but didn’t say anything. He got up, shook off the dust, and jogged off the field. He thought he would be fine, but the trainer, Doc Bowman, told him he’d have to go to the hospital, and Curt Barclay, a pitcher, drove them to the emergency room in his own car. Bowman described it as a “ragged, ugly wound”: it required thirty-five stitches and a tetanus shot, and Mays was sidelined for two weeks.
The time off was a blessing. After the 1958 season, Willie and Marghuerite had adopted a five-day-old baby and named him Michael. The family was together during spring training in Phoenix, where they rented a house in the city’s Negro district; after the injury, Willie had extra time to spend with the baby. He enjoyed his duties. When Michael couldn’t fall asleep, Willie would put him in his car and drive around the block until he nodded off. He even learned how to change diapers.
Mays described this period as P.M.—post Michael—and he often spoke of the bond he had with his young son, which was confirmed by reporters. When Milton Gross interviewed Mays in Phoenix two years later for the Saturday Evening Post, he noted how Michael would “toddle” beside his father, chattering, “Michael go bye-bye,” as he was leaving with his mother. Gross wrote: “Willie fondled him lovingly. It’s obvious he adores the child.”
Mays was in the Opening Day lineup in 1959, but the spring training injury proved to be a bad omen, for both himself and opposing catchers. On June 1 in Milwaukee, trying to score from first on a double, Mays barreled into Del Rice, breaking the catcher’s left leg. Mays had to leave the game as well with badly bruised shins. The previous inning, the benches had emptied after Rice applied a hard tag to a sliding runner—too hard, in the Giants’ view. The umpires intervened before any blows could be thrown. After the game, several Braves believed Mays had “overdone” his slide to exact revenge. The play happened in the eighth inning in an 11–2 rout for the Giants; the game had already been decided when Mays broke Rice’s leg.
Rice, however, defended Mays. “It wasn’t his fault,” he said. “He’s got to slide. He was just trying to get home and I was trying to keep him from getting there. It’s all part of the game.” Mays said he tries to score every time he’s on base, regardless of the circumstances; on this play, he was safe.
Three days later, he injured his shoulder on another home plate collision in Milwaukee, this time with catcher Del Crandall. He played four more games in three days, including every inning of a doubleheader, before finally sitting out the start of a game on June 8. Called to pinch-hit in the eighth, he singled, stayed in, and singled again in the ninth. He then stole second, with the catcher’s throw hitting him flush on an existing bruise in his back. Now hobbling, Mays played until the game ended in eleven innings. The next five games, he was available only for pinch-hitting.
Even when Mays was supposed to rest, he often didn’t. On July 24 against the Cubs, a stiff neck kept him out of the starting lineup, but he pinch-hit in the eighth and, carrying the potential winning run, tried to score on a squeeze play. With his spikes high, he smashed into Earl Averill, tearing the catcher’s pants above the knee. Averill yelled at Mays, and the two had words, but home plate umpire Ken Burkhart averted a scuffle by shoving Mays toward the dugout. Mays, who was called out, ended up with a bruise on his thigh.
The Giants were supposed to be in their new ballpark in 1959, but construction delays kept them in Seals Stadium. The year was reminiscent of the previous season. The Giants again exceeded expectations—they were nineteen games over .500 on August 25—and they were again led by a young player who would win the Rookie of the Year. Willie McCovey, from Mobile, Alabama, was a quiet, leonine strongman whose left-handed swing generated as much power as any in baseball. Veteran baseball announcer Jack Buck said the hardest ball he ever saw hit was McCovey’s—he golfed a low fastball that was sinking on a line when it cleared the center field fence. His nickname was “Stretch,” for his long, 6-foot-4-inch reach at first base. He lacked Cepeda’s charisma and confidence, but the humble twenty-one-year-old had no trouble endearing himself to the fans. In his first game on July 30, he faced the Phillies’ Robin Roberts and went 4-for-4, with two singles and two triples. Major league pitchers were actually easier, he thought, because minor leaguers were so wild. He was another one of the team’s “kids,” an original San Francisco Giant, whom the fans could call their own.
McCovey’s arrival gave the Giants two first basemen—McCovey and Cepeda—and trying to determine who to play where frustrated the team for years. At various times, both men would rotate through the outfield, forcing Mays to adjust his own play. In one of Cepeda’s first games in left field, at Wrigley Field on August 10, he called for a fly ball in left center but missed it. The batter reached third. Mays was asked after the game if he could have caught it. “I could have caught that, easy,” he said. Asked why he didn’t call off Cepeda, he said, “I don’t want to show anybody up. Orlando thought he could catch it. I don’t want to hurt anybody’s confidence.”
In other respects, the season was all too familiar for Mays. He was hitting .339 at the end of May and then cooled off—his average dipped to .291 in early August—and he again faced a disapproving press. Some reporters believed that Mays, now twenty-eight, was nearing the end of his career. “Wonderful Willie Mays is in a slump again—and there are some who believe it may become permanent,” wrote UPI on July 23. A fatal flaw had been discovered in his batting style: he stepped in the bucket, his front foot pointed toward third base, leaving him vulnerable to the breaking ball. Some stories sounded almost like a eulogy. “There was a growing solicitude today among S.F. writers... for Rigney because Willie Mays appears to be diminishing as a longball clutch slugger,” wrote the San Francisco News on July 15. “In sorrow rather than anger, this is what the Giants’ players say: ‘We’d be six, seven games out in front if Willie had been cracking the long ball when it counted as he did when the club was in New York.” At the time, he was hitting .307 with fifteen home runs.
Mays’s salary increasingly drew attention. Fans have always been interested in players’ salaries, and the incomes for such stars as Ruth and DiMaggio were staples for the press. But the fixation on Mays’s salary seemed extreme. Game stories that had nothing to do with player incomes routinely mentioned Mays’s income as if it were a defining part of his character; some broadcasts did as well. His high salary provided another justification for disapproval, and for some fans, his race surely intensified those resentments.
“There goes an $80,000 pop-up,” a broadcaster muttered early in the season.
Never mind that Mays was hardest on himself. During an exhibition game, he dropped a fly ball that was ruled a double; according to the official scorer, any ball that Mays didn’t catch was a hit. In between innings, Harry Jupiter, a reporter with the Examiner, saw Mays in the clubhouse.
“How can they call that a double when I dropped the ball?” he asked. Jupiter explained the reasoning. Then Mays asked, “Do you know anybody who wants this?” He threw Jupiter his glove. Angry about the play, Mays had ripped his mitt and now had no use for it. Jupiter kept it for himself.
For Mays, pleasing the San Francisco fans remained a struggle. The low point came on May 7 at home against the Dodgers. Mays was having a fine game, collecting a single, a double, and a triple, as well as two stolen bases and a run scored. Then he came up in the eighth with runners on second and third and one out, the Giants down by a run. The Dodgers decided to walk him intentionally, but on the fourth pitch Mays leaned over the plate, reached out, and swung. He popped out to the catcher, prompting a torrent of angry boos. The Giants didn’t score and lost the game.
“The boner of the year!” roared one newspaper. “The boo-boo of the decade,” said another. The play crystallized the view, already held by some critics, that Mays was more interested in his own success than the good of the team. “He is not entitled to be a law unto himself,” an Examiner columnist lectured. “It is something you can’t condone. I’ve known dozens of managers who would have punched Mays right on the ball field.” The columnist said the play was “sure to become part of the Giants’ San Francisco legend.”
After the game, Mays sat despondently in front of his locker. “What can I say?” he said in a whisper. “I wanted a hit—I wanted to get those runs home. But Rig said it was a bad play, so I guess it was. Who am I to argue with the boss? So I guess I’m a blankety-blank player again.”
Hank Sauer, Mays’s closest friend on the team, said, “Nobody feels worse about it than Willie does. He’s different from a lot of guys. He’ll do anything to win. I thought he was going to cry for a minute when he came into the locker room.”
While Mays didn’t drive in the run, it was not an unreasonable play. Hitting behind Mays was Willie Kirkland, who was batting .200 and had already failed in three opportunities that day with runners in scoring position. Also, while superior batsmen like Stan Musial and Ted Williams looked for pitches in certain zones, Mays hacked at anything he could reach, often getting hits on pitches out of the strike zone. His chances of driving in a run by swinging at ball four were probably no worse than Kirkland’s chance of driving in a run with the bases loaded. (After Mays popped out, Kirkland ended the inning on a tap back to the mound.)
Mays was also criticized for his reluctance to bunt, even though he had never been a bunter, nor should he have. It made no sense to take the bat out of the hands of the team’s best power hitter. But in San Francisco, the fans and reporters were used to the Pacific Coast League, where speed, bunting, and “small ball” were all emphasized. Home runs, hard to come by, were individual accomplishments, but games were ultimately won through teamwork. Hence Mays’s aversion to bunting bespoke a deeper flaw in his character: he didn’t like to “sacrifice.”
“The fans here boo him on occasion—and Willie bruises easily,” UPI wrote. “Mays seems to hit better when on the road than he does... at Seals Stadium.”
Mays later said, “[The boos] were hard to understand, but I never let on that they hurt me.”
Others were puzzled as well. Frank Coniff, an editor for the Hearst newspapers, visited San Francisco in September, the same month that the city welcomed the premier of the Soviet Union. “This is the damnedest city I ever saw in my life,” Coniff said. “They cheer Khrushchev and boo Willie Mays.”
The ballpark wasn’t the only place Mays experienced problems. A far more frightening moment occurred at one-thirty in the morning on June 22, when a Coke bottle was hurled through the 6-by-8-foot window at his house on Miraloma Drive. Mays was asleep; also in the house was his visiting brother-in-law. Marghuerite had taken Michael to New York to attend her daughter’s graduation from parochial school. According to the police, it appeared that one or more perpetrators drove up to the house, flung the bottle through the window, and raced off. Mays told the police that the bottle contained a note with a racist message, but he threw it out. The incident received little attention, which was how Mays wanted it. He told reporters that he didn’t believe the attack reflected badly on the neighborhood because he assumed the perpetrators were from another part of town. In two subsequent autobiographies, he makes only one fleeting reference to the attack.
Mays, of course, was desperate to stay out of the headlines for anything controversial, even when he had been victimized. Given the media frenzy surrounding the purchase of the house, the last thing he wanted was to draw attention to his residence. Perhaps his lack of complaint explains why there was no public outcry and why the media were so cavalier. The act itself was designed to intimidate, to spread terror, to send a message—literally and figuratively—to one black family and, by extension, to all blacks who would dare to live in a white neighborhood. That the bottle was thrown into a home where a baby lived made it all the more reprehensible. Yet the Examiner blithely wrote: “An incensed Giants fan threw a Coke bottle through Willie Mays’ front window early yesterday.... The tosser’s aim would have done credit to a major league center fielder. From the street, it took a throw of about 60 feet and deeply uphill to smash the middle pane of a plate glass picture window.... [The note] made a reference to his race and demanded that the Giants regain first place in the National League by beating the Braves, the police said. Not even this helped the Giants, who were pasted by Milwaukee yesterday, 13 to 3.”
Whether the Examiner would have been similarly amused had the victims been white is unclear, but in this case, a criminal act had the same standing as a baseball game.
For Mays, the injuries continued to pile up. On August 7, in a home game against Cincinnati, he took a wide turn on a single and had to dive back into first base. His pinkie on his right hand hit the bag, and—he later said—“this one hurt.” He stayed in the game. Later, the finger swelled up, and Bowman figured it was broken. Mays knew it was broken, but he refused to get it X-rayed. He assumed the doctors would put it in a splint or cast and keep him out of the lineup. Telling reporters that his finger was only a little sore, he didn’t want the severity of the injury disclosed. If pitchers knew of it, they would jam him with inside fastballs. Mays was used as a pinch hitter in the next two games, then Rigney returned him to the starting lineup.
On September 11, the Chronicle wrote that Mays might be playing with a broken finger, which he had refused to have X-rayed. “I want no alibis,” he said. “The finger is still a little sore and at times bothers me when I swing, but it’s been that way for a month.” And not a bad month either: he had pounded eleven home runs.
The boos. The injuries. The bottle through his window. Fatherhood. The pressures were changing Mays’s outlook on baseball, and life. The work ethic was the same, but the context was different. “He invariably is among the first to arrive at the ballpark and among the last to leave,” Sports Illustrated wrote in April 1959. “Sportswriters who follow the Giants around are agreed that Willie is one of the hardest working players they have ever seen. [But] Willie rarely clowns in pepper games. He loftily eschews gleeful locker-room pranks. It’s unusual for him to provide a spirited and jeering exchange with one of his teammates.... He hustles as energetically as any of his teammates and bustles more thrillingly than most of them put together. The big difference is that Willie is now the star instead of the fondly regarded mascot.”
Vin Scully, who’d seen Mays in all his youthful exuberance, interviewed him after a game in Los Angeles on August 28. Mays had just finished a bravura performance. The previous day, he had played all eighteen innings of a doubleheader in Philadelphia. The Giants then flew across the country, woke up in Los Angeles, and straggled onto the field against the Dodgers. Mays hit a double in the first inning and a home run in the second, knocking out Don Drysdale. He later notched a single and drove in three and scored two for the day. He also chased down a deep fly ball in left center by Wally Moon and, with a man on second, trapped a sinking drive so cleanly that the runner barely beat the throw to third. The Giants won, 5–0.
So, Vin Scully asked Willie on his radio show afterward, is baseball still just a game, or is it more of a business?
Asked about baseball over the years, Mays had always expressed his undiluted love, the game being his source of fulfillment and renewal. But now, jet-lagged from the road trip, bruised from various collisions, depleted by the long season, he said, “It’s a business, Vin. When you’ve got a family, you’ve got to think of other things.”
It was easy to grow nostalgic for the Say Hey Kid who happily pledged that he would play the game for free. But it was an expectation of eternal innocence, and the public begrudged its passing. At the season’s end, the Sporting News voted Mays the most exciting player in baseball for the second year in a row, but in an editorial it said, “Willie Mays was once a carefree young ballplayer [but] of late, Mays doesn’t seem quite as happy about it all. There are times when he seems to be brooding. Many factors enter into this. Whatever it is, one hopes that Willie some way, somehow can return to his carefree days.”
The Saturday Evening Post soon suggested that he had outgrown his name: “Maybe it’s about time to call him Bill.”
During the season, the newspapers reported that Mays had had a fight with Giant outfielder Jackie Brandt, though the stories did not identify their sources and both Mays and Brandt denied the accounts. But according to Lon Simmons, the Giants’ radio announcer, there were tensions. “Brandt was outspoken, and he was always criticizing Mays,” Simmons says. “Willie was always willing to help others, but Brandt always thought Willie was trying to help him to make Willie look better.” After the season, Brandt was traded to the Baltimore Orioles. “He wasn’t good enough to stick around and bitch about Willie all the time,” Simmons says. Brandt disputes that account.
In 1959, one of the better lines written about Mays appeared. In the All-Star Game in Pittsburgh, he hit a game-winning triple in the eighth inning. Bob Stevens, who had followed Mays the previous two years for the Chronicle, wrote: “Harvey Kuenn gave it honest pursuit, but the only center fielder in baseball who could have caught it hit it.”
With the addition of two veteran starting pitchers—Sam Jones and Jack Sanford—and the midseason promotion of McCovey, the Giants assumed first place in early July and remained there, but could not stretch the lead to more than 3½ games. On September 17, they played the Braves at home and were one game ahead of the defending champions. The Giants faced Warren Spahn, a nineteen-game winner who had already beaten the Giants four times that year. Billed as the biggest game in the Giants’ brief tenure in San Francisco, it proved to be Mays’s finest performance to date in his new town. He singled in the first and second innings; in the fourth, with two men on base, he hit a tremendous home run high into the left field pavilion seats; he walked in the sixth and capped a clinching three-run rally with another RBI single in the seventh. He drove in five runs, and his four hits in four official at-bats put him over the .300 mark, to .303. The Giants won, 13–6.
The fans went crazy for Mays, his performance all the more heroic in light of his physical condition. The Sporting News said, “Willie was playing while virtually patched together with adhesive tape. The day before, in the series opener, he slammed into the right field cement barrier to make a spectacular catch of Ed Mathews’s long drive. He paid for his leap with sore ribs. His left shoulder was already sore and he had a three-inch square abrasion on his left thigh, the results of previous collisions with the fences. Additionally, a swollen little finger on his right hand may be broken. But Mays refuses to have it X-rayed. ‘I don’t want them to take me out of the lineup until we clinch the pennant,’ he said.”
The Giants had a two-game lead with eight to go, and a World Series seemed likely, though it would have been a mixed blessing for San Francisco. The new ballpark still wasn’t complete, so the games would be played in Seals Stadium, which would draw scorn from the national press. Even more troubling, the American Medical Association had scheduled its annual convention in San Francisco at that time, and the major hotels were booked solid.
Alas, the Giants promptly lost the next three games at home to the Dodgers, who took over first. Mays went 3-for-10, which drew a smattering of boos. The Giants then went on the road for their final five games, but they were spent—except for Mays. First in Chicago and then St. Louis, he pounded ten hits in eighteen at-bats, including three homers and two doubles. The Giants still lost four of five and finished in third place, three games behind the Dodgers and Braves.
The Dodgers won the playoff and went on to prevail in the World Series, making them the first major league team in California to win a championship.
Mays’s second season in San Francisco was like his first, though he believed, given his injuries, that 1959 was superior. His batting average fell 34 points, to .313, but he had more home runs (34) and RBIs (104). His 125 runs scored were a career high, and he again led the league in stolen bases. He won the Gold Glove and led the Giants in home runs, runs, steals, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage. He played in all but three games, and in the last fourteen games, he hit .460. The fans voted Sam Jones (21–15) the team’s MVP.
After the season, Willie and Marghuerite decided to sell their house on Miraloma Drive and move back to New York; Willie would rent a small house during the season. After all the hurdles in buying the home, they stayed for less than two years. Neither of them cited the Coke bottle incident, though that was a factor. Weighing heavily on Marghuerite was a feeling of isolation. By her own admission, she was never that social, but she still felt removed and concluded that this wasn’t the place to raise their son. “I didn’t know any of my neighbors,” Marghuerite said.
Willie was resigned to events. He wasn’t bitter; after all, Negroes couldn’t live wherever they wanted in New York, so why should San Francisco be different? What’s more, he wasn’t particularly attached to the Miraloma house when they decided to buy it, but once he faced resistance, he had to go through with the purchase or be seen as weak. It was no different than baseball. If a pitcher knocks you down, you don’t go back to the dugout—you stay at the plate and try to hit a home run. So they lived at the house and integrated the neighborhood; now it was time to go. Asked several years later about projections of plunging property values if he bought the house, Willie said dryly, “They ran sightseeing buses to point out where I lived, and the value went up.”
The Mayses’ move to New York attracted little attention in the press. Edward Howden, who had played such a main role in helping them buy the house, didn’t even know they had moved until many years later. He was also unaware of the bottle incident. That’s what happens, he says, when you don’t read the sports pages.
No one imputed any larger significance to the family’s leaving the city. The Sporting News, which published stories by the beat reporters in San Francisco, noted that some residents had protested Willie’s buying the house: “However, the only incident since then occurred when a bottle containing a note was thrown through a window of Mays’s home”—as if it were a mere inconvenience.
Willie and Marghuerite bought a rambling, Normandy-style stone house for $75,000 in New Rochelle. A definite step up, the home included seven bedrooms, five bathrooms, a solarium of rare tropical plants, and servants’ quarters over a four-car garage. New Rochelle is a fashionable part of Westchester County, and the house was in a quiet, predominantly white neighborhood, where the UN ambassadors of Indonesia and Ghana also lived. The Mayses moved in without incident, but Willie himself was no more visible in his new neighborhood than in his old.
His neighbors shouldn’t have been surprised. Willie was once asked why he didn’t reach out more to friends, relatives, reporters, and fans. He pondered the question, shrugged, and said, “I don’t pursue people.”