It was all about the parking. Horace Stoneham didn’t have to build a new stadium. The $5 million in bond money already approved for a new park could have been used to give Seals Stadium a second level. The “double-decker” option had several strong advocates, including Lefty O’Doul and the popular columnist Herb Caen. It was a crime, they felt, to tear down America’s most beautiful ballpark. But Seals Stadium had very little parking, and Stoneham retained bitter memories of the Polo Grounds—its inability to accommodate cars assured its demise. In his negotiations with officials in San Francisco, Stoneham was promised a new stadium with ten thousand parking spaces. Even when it became clear that the project was going to cost more than $5 million, Stoneham insisted on getting his stadium and his parking.
The Giants’ new home, seven miles south of downtown, was on a tiny peninsula jutting into the San Francisco Bay. The land was called Candlestick Point, due to—take your pick—a bird of the same name that was once prevalent in the Bay Area or its rock formations, which loosely resembled candlesticks. Regardless, parking would not be a problem. What would be a problem was that the envisioned space was mostly underwater. The builder had to gouge more than 5 million cubic yards of dirt from adjacent Bayview Park Hill to create a sixty-acre landfill. “Taking down a mountain to fill a sea, a stupendous job,” marveled Westbrook Pegler, another columnist.
Stoneham got his parking spaces (about eighty-five hundred), and Candlestick Park, the second stadium built since the Great Depression, became the first of eight large ballparks constructed in the 1960s. The “Stick” appeared to have some promising features. The electronic scoreboard, powered by six thousand lamps, was the world’s largest; the seats, at twenty-one inches, were wider than usual and had comfortable wooden backs and armrests; a rounded shield at the top of the upper deck would block the wind. Those benefits paled in comparison to the most ambitious effort: radiant heating, in which hot water would flow from a central boiler through wrought-iron pipes in a concrete slab beneath the box seats. No outdoor site had ever tried such a thing. On frigid nights, fans would be able to watch the games in warmth and comfort. The architect, John Bolles, said the park was designed to endure “as long as the Coliseum in Rome.”
Best of all, Candlestick Park was going to be a boon for Willie Mays. So promised Bill Rigney, who never missed an opportunity to rouse expectations. “Willie should have his greatest year, both at bat and in the field,” he said. Candlestick had deeper fences—420 feet to center, 397 feet in the alleys—than those at Seals Stadium, so Mays would now have more room to make catches. “He’ll hit more doubles and triples,” Rigney promised. “A lot of Willie’s line drives to left center hit the Seals Stadium fence so hard that outfielders were able to hold him to a single.”
Mays agreed. “The new park will give me a chance to show what I can do.”
True enough. Mays played more games in Candlestick, almost nine hundred, than in any other ballpark. That alone deserves commendation, for Candlestick may have been the worst park in the history of Major League Baseball—it was certainly the most ridiculed—and right-handed hitters suffered more than lefties. The gale-force winds that swept left to right constantly knocked down long hits that should have been homers while the swirling gusts, bone-chilling cold, and damp grass complicated every aspect of the game. That Mays remained baseball’s finest player, despite those conditions, amazed his peers.
“Until I played at Candlestick,” Ozzie Smith said, “I never realized how great Willie Mays was. My god, what would he have done in a real ballpark?”
There were warnings before it was built. The Chronicle ’s outdoor columnist, Bud Boyd, said the site was a major source of pollution. “The area stinks, literally,” he wrote. Actually, the whole project smelled. The man who sold the city the land for $2.7 million, Charles Harney, was also the stadium’s contractor, and he was then made a director of a nonprofit organization to arrange additional financing. Public outcry forced him to step down. A grand jury investigated the stadium’s funding and million-dollar cost overruns; the Stick ultimately cost $15 million. A Teamsters’ strike delayed the installation of the seats. The City Fire Prevention Bureau called the park a “fire trap.”
Most of those problems could be fixed. What could not be changed was the weather. Stoneham had visited Candlestick Point on a calm summer morning in 1957, the story goes, and was impressed. Then construction began, and one afternoon Chub Feeney stopped by and saw cardboard boxes fly past him.
“Does the wind always blow like this?” he asked.
“Only between the hours of one and five,” said the worker.
Opening Day, on April 12, 1960, was warm and bright, and the game drew a near-capacity crowd of 42,269. There were few mishaps, though the public address announcer did alert the crowd that someone’s boat was adrift. Ty Cobb, who lived in nearby Atherton, was in attendance, and Vice President Nixon, casting for votes in the coming presidential election, threw out the first pitch. In the clubhouse, veteran pitcher Billy Loes asked him, “Would you please take care of our fucking income taxes?”
The following night, however, turned cold, and the heaters in the stands were turned on. Only smoke came out. The pipes were too far away from the concrete slabs or the slabs were too thick, so the system was useless. The dugout was also supposed to be heated, but that didn’t work either. Rigney didn’t wear a jacket to persuade his team that it really wasn’t that cold. The players still froze. The reporters couldn’t see home plate from the press box, though the fans could see an exposed toilet in the dugout. (That was quickly fixed.) As predicted, the smell of sewage hung in the air. The stadium had parking spaces, but the fans were forced to climb a long hill to the front gates, and the hill was implicated in a rash of fatal heart attacks. The ballpark was not simply uncomfortable or unsightly, it was a serial killer. “Candlestick Park claimed its sixth heart attack fatality in 19 games,” the Sporting News intoned. “William Smith, a deputy sheriff, had just climbed up ‘Cardiac Hill.’... He was pronounced dead on arrival at the park’s emergency dispensary.” By 1962, Cardiac Hill had claimed sixteen victims.
The Stick’s most infamous feature was the howling winds that whipped off San Francisco Bay and struck the Bayview Park Hill, just beyond the park’s third base side. The ballpark’s designers believed the slope would deflect the gales away from the stadium. Instead, the winds came over the hill, swooped down into the park, rushed across the outfield, caught the overhang of the stands along the right field line, swung back toward home, and blew past third. Candlestick was not so much a capricious wind tunnel as a ruthless vortex. At times, a player’s shirt would be blowing one way and his pants the opposite. “You’d start the game and the wind would be in your face,” recalled pitcher Mike McCormick. “In the third or fourth inning, it would hit you from the third base side, and then, if you survived, later in the game it would come at you from behind. We’d all know it was the same wind, but how in the hell it would do all those kinds of crazy things, I never knew.”
The heavy grass added to the players’ woes. Dampness from the early-morning fog soaked the grass, so the players’ feet were wet and cold. Thick fog added surreal touches. One time, a high pop foul went into the fog, and the ball was never seen again. The sluggish air masses contributed to the bleak image of windswept badlands, the ground strewn with debris, the players blowing into their hands, the fans shivering beneath parkas. “I thought I was going to die,” Ruben Gomez said. To limit the dust swirls, the infield was doused with oil until the earth became so hard and rocky that ground balls became treacherous. Before games, McCormick would put his glove against the right field fence and let go. The glove stayed on the fence “for a couple of extra seconds” before falling. After games, Doc Bowman would say, “Well, the cleanup crew is gonna go out there and pick up those telephone books off the fence.” High over the scoreboard in right center was a large clock; on occasion, the minute hand, in its courageous push toward the 12, would find a gale-force wind, stop, quiver, and plunge back to the 6.
In 1961, San Francisco welcomed the All-Star Game to showcase the newest stadium. It did not go well. In the early innings, the heat caused nearly a hundred fans to seek medical attention. Then, without warning, the winds came, and one gust blew a pitcher off the mound, which wouldn’t have been so embarrassing except it was a Giant pitcher. Stu Miller was a little guy—when Eddie Stanky first saw him, he asked, “Who’s the stenographer?”—and that made him vulnerable. “The wind blew me off the mound,” he told reporters after the game. “It was the worst I’ve ever seen it here. I had taken my stretch and checked the runners when a gust moved me just before I made the pitch.” In fairness, Miller later insisted that the wind didn’t actually blow him off the mound; it simply nudged him. Regardless, this Midsummer Classic was all about the elements. “The wind, you have to feel it to believe it,” said Baltimore Oriole manager Paul Richards. “Conditions were as near impossible as anything I’ve seen.”
The fans were no less miserable, so many enjoyed the spectacle of Melvin Belli, the flamboyant attorney known for his personal injury cases, suing Stoneham over the Stick’s tormented heating system. Belli argued that he had bought season tickets with the expectation of being warm, and a jury awarded him damages of $1,598. When Stoneham was slow to pay him, Belli demanded custody of Willie Mays and asked the sheriff to guard him as well as the “movable items” at the park, including the Scotch in the front office. Law enforcement officials said they were familiar with “attachment writs” on horses but not star baseball players. Belli said, “We’re not going to put Willie in the sheriff’s warehouse. Maybe we should. It’s a lot warmer than Candlestick.” Stoneham eventually paid Belli and then printed a legal waiver in the game program, disavowing responsibility for the heater.
Stoneham’s own haste to complete the park before the Dodgers built theirs was probably his greatest fault. A consulting firm, Medtronics Associates, later said that had the stadium been built only a few hundred yards in a different direction, the winds would not have been nearly as severe. Medtronics concluded that the weather conditions had not been checked before construction, and at this point, the best you could do at Candlestick is affect the direction of the wind but not the velocity. (That information cost Stoneham $55,000.)
Dodger Stadium, meanwhile, funded entirely with private money, opened in Chavez Ravine in 1962 and remains one of the major league’s best parks. It has sixteen thousand parking spaces.
The Stick was indeed a laughingstock. Herb Caen said that you couldn’t blame the architect for the ballpark—“after all, it was his first one.” Just two months after it opened, The Californian, a monthly magazine, published a story, “The Giants Ballpark: A $15 Million Swindle.” Harper’s published an article the following year: “How Not to Build a Ballpark.” Among players and coaches, there was no shortage of complaints.
“The Candlestick weather leaves you depressed,” Eddie Bressoud said.
Rocky Colavito, who played in the 1961 All-Star Game: “If I had to play here, I’d think seriously about quitting.”
Roger Maris: “The trouble with this ballpark is that they built it alongside the bay. They should have built it under the bay.”
Jim Wohlford: “The only difference between Candlestick and San Quentin is that at Candlestick they let you go home at night.”
When asked what would improve Candlestick, Jack Clark said, “Dynamite.”
Willie Mays began 1960 with renewed hopes and increased expectations. Signing for $85,000, he was now the highest paid player in the major leagues; both Stan Musial and Mickey Mantle, coming off subpar years, had taken pay cuts. Mays’s status as top wage earner was meaningful as a sign of respect, even if it gave his critics more ammunition against him. Also pleased the Giants were getting their new ballpark, Mays assumed that Candlestick would be built to take advantage of the team’s strength—its young, right-handed power hitters: Cepeda, Alou, and himself. Yankee Stadium had been built with a short right field porch for Babe Ruth, and Mays figured the Giants would do the same for their best players. He also believed a different stadium would be a fresh start for him. Seals Stadium now lay in rubble. Perhaps at the Stick, he would not have to compete with the ghost of Joe DiMaggio.
Mays entered Candlestick for the first time the day before the opener, and his first thought was: if Seals Stadium was too small, this is too big. His power was to the alleys, but the alleys at Candlestick were almost 400 feet away. He’ll always remember his first swing in batting practice. Leaning against the winds, he hit the ball and broke his bat. How does that happen in batting practice? He assumed the gale had something to do with it.
The conditions didn’t bother Mays much at Seals Stadium. Appearing on a Bob Hope show in 1958, he was asked about the weather. “It’s not bad,” Mays said, “when you can see it through the fog.”
But Candlestick was entirely different. How would he catch fly balls? A stadium architect told him that he’d have to use all his speed to track down routine flies that would twist and turn in the wind, and he soon saw that weird stuff happened on balls in the air. A high pop-up by McCovey that was called by the second baseman hit a jet stream and sailed over the fence. Other pop-ups that were called by the first baseman would be caught in foul territory behind third.
Mays thought he could dominate a park physically; he always felt in control. But one of his strengths—the ability to instantly determine the flight of the baseball—was now negated by hits that fluttered like Ping-Pong balls. He would call for hits in center that he would end up catching in right or close to the infield. One hit that he thought would be a home run fell in front of him for a single.
In his first year at the new stadium, Mays discovered the secret to playing fly balls, which he’d use for the rest of his career. When a ball was hit, he wouldn’t move. Instead, he would count to five, then he would give chase. Each day, he would also try to measure the wind, and he considered his efforts a science that even an airplane engineer could not have solved. In some instances, the weather conditions created opportunities for breathtaking catches. In 1961, Stan Musial blasted a ball more than four hundred feet into “the howlingest winds in Candlestick history.” Mays leaped high against the eight-foot fence, a wire gashing his left knee. Musial, in his twentieth year in the majors, was flabbergasted. “It was a great catch,” he said. “The greatest.”
Mays didn’t ridicule Candlestick, as others did, but when asked about it, he said, “The people who built the ballpark just didn’t know what they were doing, but we had to play there, so what could we do?” He made adjustments at the plate. Unable to consistently pull the ball over the fence, he tried hitting to right center, which reinstated the stroke he had used earlier at Durocher’s request. When he went on the road, he returned to his natural swing, but the adjustments were tricky. “I had to stay on the road a week or two before I got my timing back again,” he said. “Then the road trip was over and I had to go back to Candlestick and start hitting to right again. This messed me up.” Of Mays’s twenty-nine homers his first year at the Stick, only twelve came at home.
Over the years, those numbers evened out, but each season he still hit long balls to left that were knocked down by the wind. National League umpire Doug Harvey, who began his career in 1962 and worked about a dozen games a year at Candlestick, says he saw many balls hit by Mays in which the left fielder would turn and run back, then have to run forward to make the catch. “Willie was always swinging to hit the long ball,” Harvey says. “He never choked up. What was hard on Willie was Candlestick.”
Estimates vary on how much Candlestick affected Mays’s home run totals over the twelve years he played there. Some statisticians have calculated that the winds cost him some 165 home runs; others say it was half that. Mays places the number somewhere in between. What is clear is that he made the adjustments, often hitting the ball to the opposite field, and accumulated 202 homers at the Stick, compared to 193 on the road. He also led the league in homers three times during that period.
What may have hurt Mays even more at Candlestick was how much room the fielders had to catch foul balls. That cost him an unknown number of at-bats every year. All of the new parks in the 1960s—and seven were in the National League—moved the fans farther away from the field, giving fielders more room for pop fouls.
These are important factors when considering Mays’s career numbers, particularly when compared to the likes of Babe Ruth or Barry Bonds. He did not play in home ballparks, nor in an era, that favored hitters. Hitting had been in decline since the 1930s, but the trend accelerated in the 1960s. In addition to the larger ballparks, the strike zone was expanded in 1963 in response to Maris’s breaking of Ruth’s single-season home run record in 1961. The consequences were dramatic. In 1963, home runs dropped by 10 percent while batting averages fell by twelve points. Other trends—bigger gloves for fielders, a more sophisticated use of the bullpen, the emergence of the “slider”—all favored the pitchers. The New York Times’ Arthur Daley contended that modern baseball—night games and cross-country flights—had cursed the hitters who had to play every day: “Baseball was once a leisurely, delightful pastime that permitted athletes to stick to the set routine that afternoon play provided. Their lives are now totally disrupted with violent switches from afternoon to night to twilight-night games and other atrocities. On top of this, expansion to the Pacific Coast has introduced time zones as much as three hours apart. The players eat at crazy hours, sleep at crazy hours and live on a catch-as-catch-can basis. Their finely tuned physical condition is jolted repeatedly. Sharpness disappears.”
The 1960s saw some of the finest pitching performances in history: Sandy Koufax’s four no-hitters (including one perfect game), Bob Gibson’s 1.12 ERA in 1968, Denny McLain’s 31–6 record in 1968, Juan Marichal’s seven consecutive seasons in which his ERA did not exceed 2.76.
Willie Mays, in short, had to play more than half of his career in what Bill James calls “baseball’s second dead-ball era,” and the Stick was one more headwind to overcome.
The Giants were favored to the win the pennant in 1960, and they notched fifteen victories in their first twenty-two games. Mays, still adjusting to Candlestick, only had two home runs in the first month but was hitting .425. Then, before a home game on June 18, a grim and pale Chub Feeney approached Rigney on the field. The manager smiled weakly. “It looks like you’ve got something to tell me you don’t want to tell me,” he said. Feeney said that Stoneham had just fired him. Rigney, misty-eyed, headed for the clubhouse.
At the time, the Giants were 33–25, in second place and only four games behind. Mays was shocked and saddened. For all of their early problems, he had gotten along fine with Rigney in recent years, and he couldn’t believe a manager would be fired in June when the team had a good record. But the Giants had just lost three straight home games to the first-place Pirates, which gave Stoneham the excuse he needed. The owner held Rigney responsible for the previous year’s collapse, and Rigney was balking at Stoneham’s demands to change the lineup. Moreover, the fans had begun to pillory Stoneham for Candlestick and the public funds that had been squandered, and they booed the team during its recent losses. Change was needed.
“It was Rig’s job to arouse the players,” Stoneham said. “This he did not do.”
Mays knew better. “Horace felt pressured into making a decision that he thought would make everyone else happy,” he said, “when actually the only thing necessary was to keep going as we were.”
Most of the players were angered by the change, though Rigney gained some vindication. He managed the Los Angeles Angels in their first year, 1961, and, after finishing a surprising third, was named manager of the year.
Replacing Rigney was Tom Sheehan, a massive, bespectacled old-timer who had played his first game in the majors in 1915 and now, at sixty-six, would be making his debut as a manager. Stoneham wouldn’t say if Sheehan was a permanent replacement, an interim, or what. His official title had been chief scout, though his unofficial role was Stoneham’s loyal drinking buddy, a lively raconteur whose stint with the Yankees had given him a trove of stories about Babe Ruth’s sexual adventures. Perhaps because Sheehan had once been the house detective for a hotel, his unlikely move to the dugout fueled suspicions that he had been Stoneham’s clubhouse spy and had engineered Rigney’s ouster.
It was clear that Sheehan was unfit for the job in every sense. He was so overweight that he didn’t have a uniform for four days. “I think Omar the tentmaker had to make it,” Stu Miller quipped. The players called him “Santa”—not a compliment. He was capable of denouncing his players’ late-night card games while tolerating undisciplined play on the field. He couldn’t motivate his players or win their respect. Once, when he went to replace Jack Sanford, the pitcher bolted from the mound before the manager could get there. Sanford was fined $200. Sheehan had few friends in the press and didn’t help his image by conducting interviews in his underwear in his hotel room. Dick Young called him “an engaging old windbag.”
Mays felt a measure of sympathy for him but was frustrated by his passivity and ineptitude. “He was in uniform in body only,” he said. Sheehan, for example, would use his left-handed starters, Mike McCormick and Billy O’Dell, in Los Angeles, even though the Coliseum had a short left field fence and the Dodgers had a long lineup of right-handed hitters. Mays urged Sheehan to go with his right-handed starters, but he refused. “If a guy can pitch, he can pitch anywhere,” he told Mays. The Giants lost five of eight in Los Angeles.
Mays had a more serious dispute with Sheehan late in the season, after the Giants had been eliminated from the pennant race. On September 13, after a game in Pittsburgh, Mays asked Sheehan for the next night off, in Philadelphia, so he could visit his family in New Rochelle. Sheehan said he could visit his family but had to return in time for the game. An angry Mays stormed out and threatened not to return at all. Sheehan said he would fine him heavily if he missed the game.
No one knew if Mays was going to be at Connie Mack Stadium the next evening. Was it actually possible that he would quit the team? But when the team bus rolled up at 6:30 P.M., Mays was in the clubhouse, waiting. He had gotten home at 2 A.M. and left for Philadelphia that afternoon. He was still upset, but after the game—in which he picked up two hits and an RBI in a losing effort—he had settled down. Reporters asked if he’d really considered quitting, and Mays spoke, for him, at unusual length about his dedication to the game and the financial imperatives that he faced.
“I guess the old man wants me to play every game, so I play every game,” he said. “That’s all there is to it. What’s this talk about quitting? That doesn’t make sense. I’m happy playing here. Everybody on this club has been very good to me—Mr. Stoneham, Chub Feeney, everybody—and I want to keep on playing. I’m getting good money. I can’t afford to quit. It’s my life. If they want me to quit, they’ll have to pull the uniform off me.”
Mays acknowledged the stress of renting a house in San Francisco during the season while his family was in New York, but said, “I’m getting paid good money to play ball, so I’ll play ball.” Asked if he was worried about his standing with the Giants, he said, “When you start worrying, it’s time to get out. I just want to do the best I can. We’ve still got twelve games—that’s all I’m thinking about.”
Mays played in 153 out of 154 games that year, and under the circumstances it was an exceptional season. The Giants had had worse teams in his career, but perhaps none that were more disappointing. They went 46–50 under Sheehan and finished in fifth place, sixteen games out of first. The players, knowing that the hapless manager would soon be gone, routinely broke curfew and played in all-night card games (Mays was not among them); the team’s motto was supposedly “Shut up and deal.” Meanwhile, they performed with listless detachment on the field. In one inning alone, in a game against the Dodgers, their five errors led to eight unearned runs.
It cannot be said that Mays hustled on every play during the year, but his individual effort was memorable. Twice in 1960, for example, he scored from first base on a single, though neither time was he running on the pitch. The Giants won both games by a single run. In one instance, against Chicago, Mays took advantage of the right fielder’s lackadaisical throw into second base to score in the ninth. The right fielder, Bob Will, said he wanted to hold the runner on first to set up the double play. Strictly speaking, that was the right decision, but Mays didn’t go by the book. “I made up my mind if the throw went to second,” he said defiantly afterward, “I was going home.” In that same series, Mays made a catch, on a sinking, tailing line drive in right center off the bat of Ed Bouchee, that was considered one of his finest. A photograph shows Mays stretched out, reaching for the ball, his glove halfway off his hand. The catch demonstrated a basic difference between Mays and his peers. Most outfielders, as they try to close on a ball after a long run, tend to lose control, resulting in sloppy dives. Mays rarely lost control, usually kept his feet, and seemed to generate more momentum, more power, as he lunged for the catch. In this case, the San Francisco crowd gave him a standing ovation.
In one game in Cincinnati, he hit two home runs and a single, stole home, and recorded ten putouts, two shy of the record, and in an eleven-inning game in Philadelphia, he tied another record by hitting three triples. Perhaps most remarkable, at least for some of his critics in San Francisco, Mays bunted safely three times, which won him a necktie from Russ Hodges; the announcer had wagered that Mays couldn’t get three bunt hits in one year. All told, Mays was the team’s only player to hit over .300 (.319), and he led the squad in every offensive category except doubles. That included home runs (29), RBIs (103), and runs scored (107).
Sheehan’s dismissal was announced while he was touring with the team in Japan. He took the news in stride. “General Douglas MacArthur and me have something in common,” he said. “We were both relieved of command in Japan.”
The disappointing year brought into focus the racial tensions on the club, though the tensions may have involved the white reporters who covered the team as much as the players themselves. The relatively high number of black and Latin Giants always made race and ethnicity a subtext. While most San Franciscans welcomed the nonwhite players, others wrote hate mail to the Giants complaining about “Rig’s jigs” and then “Sheehan’s shines.” Rigney himself stopped opening his mail because of the bigoted comments.
As long as the team was competitive, race was not a public issue, but that ended in 1960. After the season, the publisher of the Sporting News, J. G. Taylor Spink, visited San Francisco to conduct an autopsy on what had happened to the squad. After his interviews, his story enumerated the problems, which included “too many Negroes.” Spink cited other issues, such as the lack of leadership, the players’ resentment of Candlestick, and the bullpen. But according to him, the problem “most frequently mentioned as the cause of the Giants’ downfall [was] too many Negro players.” Spink’s sources, presumably other writers and Giants executives, didn’t say that the Negroes had performed badly. There were just too many of them. Spink himself made no effort to verify or disprove the claim.
Sports Illustrated, on September 26, elaborated on this theme. “In private,” the article said:
there are several dozen players, coaches, managers, writers and executives who will tell you what is really wrong with the Giants: too many Negroes. They said it last year and they are saying it now, out of the corners of their mouths, after looking warily around. Sometimes half a dozen people will be looking around and speaking out of the corners of their mouths in one small room at the same time. “That’s the real reason the Giants are losing,” they will say, “but, of course, you can’t print it.”
Even a cursory assessment of the Giants would reveal the claim as false. In 1960, the Giants had five African Americans, including Mays. The pitcher with the most wins, Sam Jones, was also black; he went 18–14, with a 3.19 ERA. Starting outfielder Willie Kirkland had the third-most hits, and his .252 average was twelve points higher than his career average. The one African American who had a poor season was Willie McCovey, whose sophomore swoon resulted in a brief return to the minors. The fans booed him mercilessly, and he finished the year with a .238 average and thirteen home runs. The Giants also had a black player from the Bahamas, Andre Rodgers, and four Latins, including Juan Marichal, who was called up in July and went 6–2, with a 2.66 ERA.
Whether the consensus that the Giants had “too many Negroes” was shorthand for all nonwhite players or just African Americans is unclear, but Sports Illustrated repudiated the spurious charge that the Negroes had done the team in. “What the Giants lack is leadership—and the responsibility here must be shouldered by the whites. The best ballplayers on the club are Negroes, yet the Negroes, even if they chose to, could not lead because the whites would refuse to follow.”
Mays was asked directly about the issue during spring training the following year. “When baseball people were asked what was wrong with the Giants,” Milton Gross said, “they’d answer, ‘Too many Negroes.’ ”
“If that was the case,” Mays said, “why is everybody looking for colored boys? Mr. Stoneham, he doesn’t care what color you are if you can play ball. Every year, Mr. Stoneham brings up four or five colored boys from our farm system.”
Mays also discounted the claim that Sheehan had failed to inspire the Negroes and that dissension existed among the colored players. “It happens with every club,” he said. “Everybody has different hangouts, but I don’t think we had cliques. We played cards a lot together, but nothing you could make a big thing about.”
Mays’s view that “everybody” was “looking for colored boys” was probably an overstatement. Only the smart teams were looking for them. By 1960, fifty-seven blacks were in the major leagues, and they had become a dominant force. In the previous decade, they had won eight MVP awards, six Rookie of the Year trophies, three batting championships, and nine base-stealing titles. Mays, along with Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks, and Frank Robinson, were four of the best players in the game, all under thirty, and a wave of younger black stars was right behind them. Every team should have been stricken with “too many Negroes.”
A more accurate assessment was that too many bigots complained about too many Negroes and then relied on too many reporters to protect them.
Charles Einstein was a talented sportswriter, novelist, and screenwriter whose father was a radio comedian and whose half-brother was the actor Albert Brooks. Charlie’s own prose was infused with a droll wit; he once described Doc Bowman as “so short-legged that when he sits down he looks like a comma.” Einstein first covered Mays in New York and continued his reportage when he took a job in San Francisco for the Examiner . He was the ghostwriter for two of Mays’s autobiographies and, more than any other journalist, dedicated his news columns to celebrating “a man named Mays” (one of his favorite phrases).
One late night in Philadelphia, Einstein walked into a hotel bar and heard three white Giant players making racist comments about Mays as part of a larger argument that he was overrated. Outraged, Einstein tried to defend Mays but failed. Said one of the players: “That’s what you think. And don’t go putting this in the paper, you son of a bitch.”
The conversation took a different turn when another player pointed to a black man in the bar. “Who’s the nigger?”
“A writer,” Einstein said.
“Nigger paper?”
“He writes for the New York Times. ”
“I’ll be a dirty bastard,” said the player, who had heard the Times had sympathetic views on race. “It figures.”
Einstein recounted the exchange two years later in his book about the Giants, A Flag for San Francisco . However, he didn’t name the bigots and never wrote a newspaper story about the incident or anything specific about the racial climate on the team. Such an article might have shed light on why the Negroes were roundly implicated for the Giants’ misfortunes, why unnamed sources freely disparaged their mere presence, and why Mays himself, as the most prominent minority, was held to a different standard than all the other players.
But it was a different era. The teams typically paid for the reporters’ travel expenses, food, and booze; the Giants would leave a bottle of whiskey in the writers’ hotel rooms. Across the league, reporters and players rode together on the same trains and planes; played cards together, drank together, caroused together, and drank some more. The cozy relationship ensured that the players’ misdeeds off the field would stay out of print. “I wasn’t going to squeal,” said San Diego sportswriter Phil Collier, who began his career around 1950. “I rode in the back of the plane and the bus with the guys. I went out and drank with them every night. I always said I was going to write a book and call it, The Bases Are Loaded and So Was I. ”
Einstein was a product of that era, and even his fierce loyalty to Mays was not enough to expose the team’s racists, including those in the hotel bar. He knew that he had betrayed his hero and his friend, not to mention his readers. “I don’t take these guys on,” he lamented in his book. “I tell myself I’m not going to change them nohow.... I got no guts in me.”