The year 1961 began on a strange note. For the first time in Mays’s career, Stoneham did not offer him a raise. He sent Mays a contract for the same salary, $85,000, as he had the previous year. Mays thought he deserved an increase. “Any time I knock in a hundred runs and score another hundred, I think I’m entitled to get more money,” he said. But neither Mays nor any other player had any leverage. The reserve clause, which bound a player to the team that signed him, would remain intact for another fourteen years. Over time, some of the game’s superstars, including Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Joe DiMaggio, had engaged in bitter holdouts to extract more money or—in Mickey Mantle’s case in 1960—to reduce the size of his pay cut. Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax would hold out in 1966. Ruth’s demands in 1930, which resulted in his receiving an $80,000 salary ($5,000 more than President Hoover), prompted his most famous quip: “I had a better year.” Holding out usually affected the start of spring training, but DiMaggio actually missed the beginning of the regular season in 1938. He wanted $40,000; the Yankees offered him $25,000. After twelve games, DiMaggio settled for $25,000, and the New York fans booed him his first time at bat.
Mays didn’t like confrontation, so he had always been the dutiful son—the first Giant to sign his contract, often surrounded by reporters and photographers while he expressed his gratitude to Mr. Stoneham. But with no raise in 1961, Mays had reason to be less gracious. Not only did he post terrific numbers in 1960, but the Giants had their best year ever at the gate. Candlestick Park, for all its deficiencies, drew 1.7 million fans, a 26 percent increase from the year before and a 174 percent increase from their last year in New York. Stoneham received his taxpayer-funded stadium, which, in one year, generated more revenue than he had ever seen. To be sure, not all the business decisions had worked out. Stoneham had hoped to win a pay-for-view television contract, which envisioned putting actual coins in slots on TV sets to watch Giant games. That never happened, but Stoneham still had plenty of money. Among other things, he was building a $1.25 million baseball training facility near his winter home in Phoenix.
He could be generous with favorite players, particularly when hardship was involved, but Stoneham was usually stingy and occasionally petty, and after the 1960 season, he was piqued at his team’s rotten play. He decided to give some of the low-paid younger players, such as Felipe Alou and Juan Marichal, small raises and maintain others at the same level while cutting the salaries of the underperformers. Sam Jones, the club’s leading pitcher, was just grateful that his wages stayed the same—$35,000. Of Mays, Stoneham said, “He has had substantial raises in the past. Willie had a good year in 1960, but not a great one. And we finished fifth.”
This view was unusually peevish, not only because Mays was his best player but because he remained the team’s premier gate attraction. If Mays had ever had enough standing to hold out, 1961 would have been the year, but it didn’t happen. Whatever lingering resentments he may have had, Mays kept them to himself. He was now part of baseball’s establishment, and he would no more trigger a confrontation with the Giants, or denounce a corrupt system that turned ballplayers into chattel, than he would protest Jim Crow or any other injustice.
In the days leading up to spring training, an airline strike delayed some players, but Mays drove to Phoenix from San Francisco, arriving on time, his contract signed. He was eager to get started, for he was reuniting with an old friend.
As soon as Rigney was fired, speculation centered on the triumphant return of Leo Durocher to the Giants, and the rumors had some legitimacy. Stoneham had asked Durocher to evaluate the club early in 1960, in part to determine if dissension involving the black and Latin players was hindering the team. Durocher concluded that the team’s main problem was that it wasn’t as good as Stoneham thought it was, though he found room to criticize Rigney. (Durocher still believed Rig was too hard on Willie.) After Rigney was fired, Stoneham met Durocher in New York and asked if he was interested in returning. Durocher, who had been out of baseball since Stoneham had fired him, said he was quite interested. Certainly Mays would have celebrated his return, but given the bad blood between Durocher and Stoneham, it’s questionable whether Stoneham was ever serious. Besides, he could choose one of Durocher’s protégés, who could manage the club in the same aggressive fashion but without Leo’s baggage.
While the team was touring in Japan, Stoneham announced that Alvin Dark, who had played for the Giants for seven years, would be the team’s new manager. Dark had never managed before or even coached. In fact, he had just completed his thirteenth season as a player, and Stoneham had to trade Andre Rodgers to the Milwaukee Braves to get him. But Stoneham liked former Giant players serving in the front office or coaching. They knew the team’s history and contributed to Stoneham’s image as a patriarch whose club was part of his extended family. Even Durocher, who loved Dark’s tenacity on the field and had made him a co-captain, had to acknowledge it was a terrific choice.
Dark, however, was not the most obvious selection for a team in San Francisco, whose fans still pined for Lefty O’Doul to take over the Giants. Dark was part of the New York Giants and, unlike Rigney, had never played or managed in the Pacific Coast League. In his first press conference, he explained that he was from Louisiana, a tithing Baptist who didn’t smoke, drink, or swear. Noted Don Sherwood, San Francisco’s leading disc jockey: “I’ve already counted eight insults to our city. There can’t be any left.”
Stoneham wanted to restore toughness and discipline, and Dark fit the bill. A former marine who served briefly in China at the end of the war, Dark was a star running back at Louisiana State University and was drafted by the Philadelphia Eagles, but he opted for baseball instead. Like Durocher, he was a middle infielder who was not afraid to use his fists; he once took out Jackie Robinson on a rolling slide, then popped up and was ready to tangle if Robinson wanted to. Durocher used to call him his “upside-down shortstop,” because that’s how he always seemed to end up. But Dark had talent as well. The Rookie of the Year in 1948, he amassed a career .289 average and twice hit more than twenty homers in a season, an anomaly for a shortstop. At 5-foot-11, he was more imposing than big. He had a shock of black hair, swarthy skin, and intense eyes; the sportswriter Leonard Koppett said he looked like a “Confederate army captain.” Dark described himself as an “aggressive Christian,” and his aggression could be destructive.
In his first year managing, after a 1–0 loss in which the Giants stranded twelve men, Dark stormed into the locker room. Two players who followed him in were chirping like a couple of hummingbirds, so Dark picked up a metal stool and threw it with all his strength against a wall. The chatter stopped. Dark then felt a twinge of pain in his finger. His pitching coach almost fainted. Dark looked down and saw that the tip of his little finger was lodged in the bottom of the stool. The bone was sticking out while blood spurted everywhere. The doctor stitched him up and assured him it wouldn’t affect his golf swing. The players rescued the fingertip and pickled it in a jar.
No matter the game or the circumstance, Dark simply hated to lose. One time, playing bridge on a team flight to Chicago, he looked at his cards, then the score, and said, “The only hope now is if we crash.” His players feared him. During his first spring training, three Giants (Jim Davenport, Harvey Kuenn, and Bob Schmidt) were out one night, and they were arrested and jailed on a drunk and disorderly charge after getting into an argument with a twenty-year-old. That they were drunk or disorderly was never firmly established, and they were allowed to leave the jailhouse after several hours. But according to their lawyer, they were reluctant to depart. When reporters asked why, the lawyer said, “They heard their manager was downstairs, and I think they’d just as soon stay up there.”
Dark publicly defended his wayward trio though privately fined each of them $100, if only to set a precedent.
Dark had played with Mays for all or parts of five seasons and knew how sensitive he was to his own failings and how Durocher had bolstered his confidence. “The only player on the team who doubted Willie Mays’s ability was Willie Mays,” Dark said. “He wore his heart on his sleeve, and every time he had a bad day, he despaired.” Dark was aghast when he went to San Francisco as a player and heard the crowd booing Mays. After he was named manager, one of his first acts was to write Mays a letter: “Just a note to say that knowing you will be playing for me is the greatest privilege any manager could ever hope to have.” During spring training, he repeatedly told reporters what an honor it was to manage Mays, and when the season began, he taped a radio program in which he always found something that his center fielder did to help them win a game. “Without Willie, the Giants are just an ordinary team,” he said on one show. “Willie’s the greatest ballplayer I’ve ever seen, greater than Ted Williams, Stan Musial, or Mickey Mantle.” Dark later claimed that he wasn’t trying to build up Willie. “I was trying to give him the credit he deserved,” he said. “Wake up San Francisco to the facts of life.”
With or without Dark, Mays was happiest at spring training. His reunion with teammates, the warm weather, the prospects of a new season—all were a balm for his self-imposed pressures. But his optimism seemed to get the better of him during Dark’s spring training debut. Mays predicted that the Giants were going to win the pennant, even though they had finished fifth the year before. Reporters asked why Mays was so confident.
“It’s hard to say,” he shrugged, “except there’s a feel in the air.”
Charlie Einstein saw Mays in the clubhouse afterward. “Why’d you give that guy that stuff about ‘a feel in the air’?” he asked.
“Aw, he ain’t gonna print it,” Mays responded.
“The hell he ain’t.”
“Well, there is a feel in the air.”
“That’s what you said last year.”
“Was a feel in the air last year.”
“And the year before.”
“Feel in the air then too.”
“Matter of fact, you think this way every year around this time.”
“I know it,” Mays said.
“Well, why didn’t you explain that to the poor writer?”
“He only asked about this year.”
Mays felt he did have reason to be hopeful; the new manager was creating a different atmosphere. Dark was, in the tradition of Durocher, a strategist who thought he could outsmart the other teams and who tried mind games to help certain players. The previous season, Cepeda and McCovey each played about sixty games at first base, while Cepeda played another eighty-six games in left field. Dark anointed McCovey his full-time first baseman while deciding Cepeda would play right field . This appeared to make no sense, for Cepeda complained bitterly about playing left field, and left field was easier than right in Candlestick. Dark’s thinking was, by putting him in right field to start the season, fans would have low expectations because he was learning a new position. Errors would be forgiven, and a relaxed Cepeda would hit better and would also not resent his return to left field. The approach seemed to work. In 1961, Cepeda had one of his finest seasons (.311 average, 46 homers, 142 RBIs) and finished second in the MVP race.
More than anything, Dark instilled competitiveness, as seen in an exhibition game in Scottsdale, which ended in a near sandstorm. The Giants’ pitcher, a twenty-two-year-old rookie named Bobby Bolin, was on the mound in the ninth with the bases loaded and the score tied. A close pitch was called ball four, sending home the winning run. Grateful the game had ended, everyone ran off the field except for Dark, who was running in the opposite direction. He started arguing with the umpire, and there, on the empty field, amid the swirling dust and sand, Dark, his rookie pitcher, and the umpire stood yelling at one another about the final pitch. “Dark knew that Bolin was fighting to make the team,” Mays recalled, “and Dark was out there fighting with him. That showed us, very early, that he was a manager who would fight for his players.” (Bolin did make the team, appearing in thirty-seven games and posting a 3.19 ERA.)
Mays called Dark “Cap,” a reference to his former captaincy, and his comfort rose further with the addition of three new coaches—Whitey Lockman, Wes Westrum, and Larry Jansen. All had been Giants in 1951, and they, as well as Mays and Dark, had been in the lineup the day Bobby Thomson hit his famous home run. Together again, the five of them replayed that game over and over in camp. Their reminiscing fueled the nostalgia of the reporters from New York, who were eager to relive the glory of the Giants. This only antagonized the Bay Area writers. Dark’s refusal to drink with them, or anyone else, created further distance with the local press, who were also provoked when Dark made it clear that Lefty O’Doul was no longer welcome. O’Doul had been the Giants’ batting coach since the team moved to San Francisco, but with Dark at the helm, he stayed only a week or so.
Mays, who had felt the New York–California divide more deeply than anyone, lamented these developments. Though he was beginning his fourth year in San Francisco, he was not yet part of that city. “I had the feeling that I was on one side of the Golden Gate Bridge—the side closer to New York—and that the rest of the Giants, the new ones who had joined the team since the move in 1958—were on the other side, along with the local writers.”
That Willie and Marghuerite were having difficulties was hardly a surprise, but in January, the first concrete evidence of their growing estrangement was reported. Willie packed his clothes and his record player and left their home in New Rochelle. The house itself now held five people. In addition to Willie, Marghuerite, and Michael, Marghuerite’s daughter, Billy, was there. So too was one of Willie’s half-brothers, William McMorris, whom Willie and Marghuerite raised for a number of years.
After Willie left the house, Marghuerite conceded to reporters that there had been some “frictions” between them, but she would not say if they were divorcing. She had little information about her husband. “I don’t know where Willie is,” she said. “I don’t know where to tell you to look for him. If you want any details, ask him. I don’t expect to see him—at least not very soon.”
Mays had gone to Birmingham, where he lived in a hotel for a month, spent time with his friends, and tried to clear his head. He did not consult with his father, who had followed his son to San Francisco in 1958 and was living in an apartment there. Willie kept in touch with Marghuerite, and by spring training they decided to reunite, with Marghuerite and Michael traveling to Phoenix. Willie tried to defuse speculation about his marriage in a Saturday Evening Post interview.
“Why is it every time my wife and I have a fight, rumors start we’re getting divorced?” he asked. “For four years, all I’ve read and heard is that our marriage is over, and I think these stories ought to stop. If married people don’t fight, they don’t love each other. I don’t even believe in separation. If you’re going to have a separation, get a divorce and get it over with.”
He said that he went to Birmingham only because Marghuerite’s family was spending so much time at the house; leaving was his way of conveying his desire to be with her. News reports suggested that Willie was upset at Marghuerite’s expensive tastes, so Willie was asked if she spent too much. “I think all wives do,” he said, “but in my case, it’s been my own fault. I would say I’m just growing up. I’ve always been the type of guy who would say, ‘Fine,’ whenever she said she wanted something. I was making money. It would come easy and go easy.”
Mays, who would turn thirty in a few months, said his free spending could no longer be sustained. “I’m beginning to realize that I’m only going to play maybe five, six more years. I’ve got to start accumulating money right now and begin adjusting myself to a lower bracket. A lot of money was wasted. I had people always trying to live off me.” He said his house in New Rochelle was part of the problem. “It’s too big for us,” he said. “It’s $150 a month just to get the grass cut on an acre and a half. Fifteen rooms and seven bedrooms for five people is too much.”
The surplus rooms were a metaphor for the marriage. Willie and Marghuerite liked watching television but different shows. He preferred Westerns and action; she, mysteries and love stories. So they watched on separate TVs in separate rooms. Their worlds rarely overlapped, and there was no reconciliation.
On July 10, Marghuerite filed a “maintenance suit” in Superior Court in San Francisco, seeking to live “separate and apart from William Howard Mays.” The separation would not come cheap. She asked for $3,500 a month to support herself and their son, plus $15,000 for lawyers’ fees, $3,000 for the cost of the suit and accounting expenses, and all community property, including their home in New Rochelle and their rented house on Spruce Street, where Willie lived during the season. She also wanted sole custody of Michael and a restraining order on the Giants’ paying Willie his salary. In her suit, she charged that Willie was “guilty of extreme cruelty and acted in an indifferent, hostile, and arrogant manner.” The suit said that Willie had “ignored her presence in the home and has spent almost all of his evenings away from home.”
Marghuerite talked to the press in her lawyer’s San Francisco office, where she complained that her well-tailored gray suit, red hat, and matching red gloves were three years old, and virtually all that Willie had given her for almost half of their marriage was food money—“when he’s home.”
“This has been building up almost from the time we were married on Valentine’s Day, 1955,” she said. Her lawsuit contended that she had been “a loyal and devoted wife but has been rebuffed on each occasion when she has attempted to talk to him.” Despite her years of suffering, she said, “I think I finally made up my mind last night” to take this action. She said she wanted “separate maintenance,” but she was not seeking a divorce because, according to the Los Angeles Examiner, that was “against her Catholic principles.”
The San Francisco Examiner, showing its capacity to turn a family tragedy into a clumsy joke, wrote in its front-page story: “Willie Mays, who scored the winning run in Tuesday’s All-Star game, was thrown out at home yesterday. Credit for the putout goes to his wife of five years.”
The following week, Willie appeared in court with his lawyer, Bergen Van Brunt, and during the hearing, the lawyer delivered some startling news. Willie was broke. Part of the problem, he said, was that Marghuerite “spends his money as fast as he earns it.... His wife is very extravagant. She orders things like $400 shoes and $8,000 mink coats and the like.” (Marghuerite denied the claim.) Van Brunt said he had spoken to the Giants’ treasurer, Edgar P. Feeley, who had reviewed Willie’s finances. “I don’t have the exact figures,” Feeley told Van Brunt, “but it looks to me as if [Willie] doesn’t have anything left.”
In addition to Mays’s salary, he was making about $15,000 in endorsements for such products as razors and syrup. How Mays could be broke on $100,000 a year was probably more newsworthy, and embarrassing, than the fracturing of his marriage.
Willie and Marghuerite agreed to certain temporary arrangements. The Giants would deduct $250 a week from Willie’s paycheck for Marghuerite; Marghuerite could use the couple’s 1961 Cadillac but would have to pay for the gas; Marghuerite, when in San Francisco, would occupy their home on Spruce Street, though Willie would pay the rent and the utilities. Marghuerite told reporters that Willie could stay in the house when he was in town, but in a separate bedroom. “This is a large house,” she said. “He and I have been occupying separate bedrooms at opposite ends of the house for months and months.”
Despite Marghuerite’s criticism, Willie declined to return the attack or even to defend himself. “I wouldn’t want to say a thing to hurt her,” he said, “because she might want to get married in the future, and even if I did know something, I wouldn’t say anything about her.”
Mays did make it clear that he wanted a divorce. “I want a clean break. If we’re going to separate, then let’s separate.” His main concern was their son, now two and a half years old. “He’s growing up so fast, and soon now he’ll want to come to the ballpark to see me play. I want him to be proud of me, and I don’t want to spoil that by saying anything about his mother.” He added, “I just want to make sure I’ll be able to visit him and he’ll be able to spend some time with me. It’s very important for a growing boy to have a father around.”
Another hearing was set for August, and Superior Court Judge Joseph Karesh referred the parties to the Domestic Relations commissioner, Mary Malone, but both Marghuerite and Willie said they were not interested in reconciliation.
After the July hearing, Mays went to Candlestick Park and hit a home run in his first at-bat against the Phillies.
It turned out that Willie’s financial problems were worse than initially stated. In August, his lawyer and financial adviser in New York, Edward Rosiny, testified before Judge Karesh that Willie was deep in debt. Over the years, the Giants had been advancing him money against future income, so he currently owed the team $65,200; he was also $8,641 in debt to the federal government and to the states of New York and California.
Rosiny said that Mays had hired him in 1957 as his financial adviser, but, “My job was more like that of a scorekeeper.” For example, Rosiny said, in 1957 Mays had a gross income of $42,555 and expenditures of $34,234. (Presumably, that did not include the sale of Marghuerite’s home in New York and the purchase of the $37,500 house on Miraloma.) The following year, he more than doubled his income—to $90,537—while paying out $88,375. The increase in income, Rosiny said, resulted from an advance from the Giants. The pattern continued. In 1959, Mays earned $60,269 while spending $60,667; in 1960, his income was $108,582, outflow, $101,532.
Asked by Judge Karesh if the Mayses were living beyond their means, Rosiny said, “Way, way beyond their means.” He said the Giants were now paying Willie $1,900 a month, out of which he gives Marghuerite $1,000 while paying the rent on his San Francisco home and the mortgage on his New Rochelle residence. As the Examiner wrote: “This would seem to leave Willie with little more than money with which to buy the gum that he chews constantly while on the diamond.”
Granted, Willie’s lawyer and adviser were trying to paint the bleakest picture possible to minimize his own financial exposure, though Marghuerite’s lawyer apparently did not present any evidence to contradict the image of a man on the financial brink. Whatever the precise numbers, the hardship was real, and Willie held the unfortunate distinction of being the highest paid player in baseball while being in debt to his own team as well as the government.
If Marghuerite thought the public hearings and her charges would gain her support, she was wrong. Newspaper articles referred to her as “sultry” and “fashion-conscious”; she “purred” on the telephone, lived in a “posh” home in New Rochelle, and had two previous divorces. In photographs, she looked regal but icy. Nothing suggested deprivation. She was also erratic. In September, she told the Examiner that she was withdrawing the “maintenance suit” and instead hoped to “work something out with Willie.” Then, in January, she filed for a “Mexican divorce” in Juarez. These were popular at the time among celebrities, though their validity was always in dispute. Marghuerite appeared before the judge in Juarez wearing a full-length white mink coat and three diamond rings. She asked for a divorce on the grounds of “incompatibility of characters.”
Marghuerite’s jaunt to Mexico did little more than annoy Judge Karesh. Divorce papers were eventually filed in San Francisco. The maintenance suit was withdrawn, and a settlement was reached in May 1962. Under the agreement, Willie and Marghuerite would sell the house in New Rochelle to pay off debts. Willie would pay Marghuerite $15,000 a year—$10,000 in alimony and $5,000 in child support. (That figure was later reduced to $10,000 total when the judge gave Willie more time with Michael.) Willie absorbed other related costs, including more than $6,000 in fees and expenses for Marghuerite’s lawyer and $950 for her financial counsel. In addition, he would cover a bill of $1,696.70 for her private eye. Willie was paying for the man who spied on him. He initially lost custody of their son but eventually got him half the time.
In later discussing the divorce, Mays said, “I don’t blame anybody but ourselves for what went wrong—basically, Marghuerite had trouble adjusting to my way of living, and I guess I didn’t adjust to hers—but being a celebrity is no help in either direction.”
Through it all, Willie never said an unkind word about Marghuerite. Not then, not ever. His friends, who had warned him from the outset, were not as forgiving. Even privately, Willie rarely mentions the experience, and when he does, he tries to find something positive, such as that Marghuerite broadened his world by showing him places that he would have never seen.
But the divorce left him alone and shaken. “When I was first divorced,” he said, “it was very lonely. The first two months, it was bad.” Already wary of outsiders, always skeptical of their motives, Mays now had more reason to retreat. “When you trust someone and all of a sudden that someone betrays you,” he says, “it leaves a bad taste in your mouth. It makes it hard for the next person to come along.”
For all the references to Mays as a loner, he actually wanted family or friends nearby. A year after his divorce, he spoke openly about his desire to marry again because, he said, “I like that kind of life. I’ve always had a big family around me. I love kids around.”
But the marriage had reinforced his insecurities about his own celebrity, raised doubts about why people actually liked him, and made him want to disassociate himself from his own fame. “Once I find the right kind of girl,” he said, “a girl who wants to be with me because I’m me, not because I play ball, I feel I’ll get married in a hurry.”
He found someone soon enough, but it was a long time before he would trust again.
Whatever was happening to Mays off the field, he never brought it inside the ballpark. Few of his teammates knew anything of his personal life unless they read it in the newspaper, and Mays’s performance was rarely impaired by the collapse of his marriage or his financial stress. “Lots of times,” he later said, “when things were the worst for me personally, playing hard helped take my mind off my troubles.”
In 1961, he was hoping for a blockbuster start to help Dark, but that caused him to press. At the end of April, the Giants traveled to Milwaukee for three games, and in the opener they faced Warren Spahn. Forty years old and in his nineteenth season, he was good as ever and threw a no-hitter. The Giants won the following game, rapping fifteen hits, but Mays took the collar and had struck out three times in the past two games. He was now in a 10-for-40 rut and was hitting .291. Whenever his batting average fell below .300, it was, in the eyes of some San Franciscans, a national emergency. He only had two home runs for the month.
Mays typically roomed alone, but Dark granted no favors, so he roomed with McCovey. After beating the Braves on a Saturday night, they took a walk and brought some barbecued spareribs back to the hotel, where they ate them for a midnight snack, watched some television, and turned in. But Mays woke up at 3 A.M., vomiting. He collapsed on the floor and briefly passed out. McCovey called Doc Bowman, who soon arrived. “I was really scared,” McCovey recalls. “I was pleading not to let him die.”
Bowman gave Mays some sleeping pills, and Willie made it through the night fitfully. When he went to County Stadium the next day, April 30, he felt horrible. Joe Amalfitano, the utility infielder for the Giants, saw how bad he looked.
“You going to play today?” he asked.
Mays said no. “I was up all night.”
“If you play at 75 percent,” Amalfitano said, “you’re better than most.”
“The way I’ve been playing, maybe I should take the day off.”
Amalfitano had an idea. Each player had his own bats, and Mays’s were thirty-four-ounce Adirondacks with a tapered handle and a thick barrel with the weight at the end. But Mays hadn’t been using them because he thought they were too light and had been swinging a thirty-five-ounce bat instead. Amalfitano had been using the thirty-four-ouncer in batting practice and thought the ball jumped off the wood. So he handed one to Mays.
“Will, why don’t you use this bat,” he said. “It’s got a lot of wood in it.”
Dark then came along and asked Mays how he felt. Mays said not so great, but as long as he had a bat in his hand, he decided to take his cuts in the cage.
It seemed everything he hit went into the stands. “You can always tell if a bat has good wood in it,” he later said. “It rings when you hit the ball well.” He decided he would play. The game would be the 1,234th of his career, on a sunny day before 13,114 people, and it would be televised on NBC’s Game of the Week (though blacked out in San Francisco).
Even if he’d been feeling well, Mays had no reason to believe he’d have a good day. In addition to his recent struggles at the plate, he’d never had much luck in County Stadium. Of the opposing ballparks that he’d played in at least six seasons through 1960, he had his second-worst home run total in Milwaukee. Only in Philadelphia had he hit fewer. And County Stadium, at 402 feet to center and 392 feet in the power alleys, was no bandbox.
Starting for the Braves was Lew Burdette, one of the league’s better right-handed starters, who had averaged twenty wins over the past three seasons. He was a control pitcher who could throw a fastball, a curve, and a slider. He also had a spitter.
Mays, batting third, faced Burdette in the first inning with the bases empty. Burdette threw a slider, and Mays socked it 420 feet to dead center for a home run. In the bottom of the first, Hank Aaron, the Braves’ center fielder, outdid his counterpart with a three-run homer. In the top of the fourth, shortstop Jose Pagan hit his first homer of the year; then Mays came to bat with a runner on first. This time, Burdette threw a hard sinker, and Mays scorched it 400 feet to left center for a two-run homer, which also gave the Giants the lead.
The Giants’ pitcher, Billy Loes, settled down and retired fourteen in a row before giving up another hit—a second homer by Aaron. A player who hits two homers in one game might have merited attention, but not on this day.
The Giants went on a long-ball binge in the fourth inning. Orlando Cepeda and Felipe Alou both hit homers while Pagan knocked his second. Mays led off the fifth against Moe Drabowsky and lined out to center. But in the sixth, he came to the plate with runners on first and third, with Seth Morehead now on the mound. The lefty tried to jam Mays with a slider, but the ball caught too much of the plate. Mays turned, and his thirty-four-ounce bat flashed across the strike zone— crack! It did indeed have good wood. The ball traveled over the highest row of the left field bleachers and landed in a picnic area beyond. The estimated distance: 480 feet. In his game story, Einstein breathlessly described it as “one of the longest home runs any human ever hit.” Mays could remember only one other hit, in St. Louis, that might have gone farther.
Mays felt as though he were getting stronger as the day progressed. In the eighth, the Braves inserted Don McMahon, a right-hander, and Mays came to the plate with a runner on third. Three years before, when the front-running Giants came to Milwaukee in July, the Braves swept the series, and McMahon had struck out Mays with men on base to help secure one of the wins. He may have been thinking of that at-bat when first baseman Joe Adcock called time. “I walked to the mound,” Adcock later recalled, “and I told McMahon, ‘Don’t let this guy hit the ball this time.’ McMahon said, ‘Don’t worry. I got him.’ So I got back to first base and on the next pitch, Mays hits the darnedest screaming line drive you ever saw.” The ball sailed 430 feet into the top row of the bleachers. The Milwaukee fans cheered as Mays circled the bases.
An announcement came over the loudspeaker that with four home runs in one game, Mays had tied a major league record. Eight other players, including Lou Gehrig, had reached that mark. Mays knew that he was now part of baseball history, but if he got one more chance, he could hold the record by himself.
Mays was due up fifth in the top of the ninth, and George Brunet was pitching. The leadoff hitter, Pagan, singled, but the next two hitters were retired. Jim Davenport needed to reach base, but with Mays on deck, he grounded out. The crowd booed.
The Giants won, 14–4. They hit eight home runs, tying the major league record. Including Aaron’s, there were ten in all, tying a National League record. The lead of the Milwaukee Journal ’s game story read: “The best thing that could be said about the Braves Sunday was that none of them got hurt.” The previous game, the Giants had hit five long balls in scoring seven runs. It was as if the Giants were avenging Spahn’s no-hitter to start the series.
Mays’s hitting line was 4-for-5, with four homers, four runs scored, and eight RBIs. He also made the best catch of the game. That it was seen on national television added to the moment. In interviews after the game, he could barely contain his joy. “Man, after you get two in a game, you don’t start looking for a third one,” he said. “I’ve hit two in a game before, and three once, but that was in an exhibition.... Sure, this was my best game and it was my biggest thrill in baseball too.... The biggest day for me before this? What difference does it make. Second best don’t mean anything.... No, [my best game] wasn’t one of those catches I made in the World Series because I don’t count fielding. That’s always been easy for me.”
Asked about his near-opportunity in the ninth inning, Mays offered a revealing answer. “Honestly,” he said, “I might not have done a thing. I knew what I had done. I heard it over the loudspeakers. I had the greatest day of my career. I probably will never have another like it. If I’d gone up again, I might have pressed—gone for the home run. And when you press, you’re dead.”
The day produced two memorable photographs, both from the Giants’ locker room. One featured Mays, a huge smile on his face, holding four baseballs in his massive right hand. The other showed him eating his postgame meal—barbecued spareribs.
Mays used the magic bat in the next series in Chicago, but he broke it on a single. Amalfitano grabbed it and put it in his locker, but after the game it was gone. A search yielded nothing. Someone had stolen the historic bat. Amalfitano blamed himself, though Mays didn’t hold him responsible. He was just glad that his teammate had helped him.
More than thirty years later, the two men saw each other at spring training, and while watching a game, Amalfitano reminded Mays of the mishap.
“I feel terrible about that bat,” he said.
“That’s okay,” Mays said.
“Hey, what were you going to do with it anyway? Give it to the Hall of Fame?”
“No, I was going to give it to you.”
Maybe it was the return of Alvin Dark and the other New York Giants or the increased presence of the New York writers, but Mays made several plays in 1961 that stirred memories of his earlier years. There was another big throw, like the peg ten years before that nailed Billy Cox at the plate, but this one, from three hundred feet, gunned down the Dodgers’ Maury Wills, who was trying to score on a sacrifice. There was another over-the-shoulder catch, this one at Candlestick. A photograph shows Mays closing in on the fence, his number 24 facing home plate, his glove outstretched, in almost the exact same position as in 1954. Dark said this catch was better, and Mays, noting the wind, agreed (though no throw was necessary).
But the most poignant memories of yesteryear occurred when the Giants actually went to New York to play an exhibition game against the Yankees. Four years after they left for California, their return was hailed as a homecoming, but in truth it was a rekindling of a baseball love affair. New Yorkers had tried to follow their Giants by listening to Les Keiter on the radio or by watching the occasional televised game. But now, finally, they could see Willie in person.
Fog rolled across New York on the night that the Giants were to fly in from Cincinnati, diverting their landing to Idlewild Airport (later named John F. Kennedy International Airport). They didn’t reach their hotel until after 4 A.M., and they woke up on July 24 to a driving summer rainstorm. Mays assumed the weather would limit the crowd; further, the game was going to be televised. He was also uncertain about his reception. New York, he believed, was now Mickey’s town. San Francisco wasn’t Siberia, but he felt far removed from the country’s media mecca, and he would be playing in Yankee Stadium, not the Polo Grounds.
The Yankees had scheduled a home run contest before the game—Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris against Cepeda and Mays. It might have been a dramatic way for Mays to reintroduce himself, but the rain canceled it, and the game itself, to start at 7:55 P.M., appeared in doubt. A delay had already been announced, and the club waited in the locker room.
“We’ll never play tonight,” Dark said. Someone told him if he stepped outside, he would change his mind, so he walked down the runway into the visiting dugout and looked. “Wow.” He saw the people in the stands—there would be 47,346.
The rain finally turned to mist, and the game began an hour late. But first came the starting lineups.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said the Yankee announcer, “for the Giants at second base, number 14, Joe Amalfitano.” The cheering started. “Number 7, Harvey Kuenn, right field.” It got louder. “Number 41, Matty Alou, left field.” And louder.
“Number 24, Wil—” The crowd stood and roared, drowning out the rest of the order. Einstein wrote: “An unbroken, throat-swelling peal of adulation sprang from the hearts of Giant-starved New Yorkers. It rolled and volleyed off the great tiering of this triple-decked palace and against the vague outline of the Bronx County courthouse, looming in the gray black mist out beyond the huge scoreboard in right center field.
“They rocked and tottered and shouted and stamped and sang. It was joy and love and welcome, and you never heard a cascade of sound quite like it.”
Mays was frozen, overwhelmed, and in tears.
In the record books, 1961 is the year of Mays’s four homers in one game, of leading the league in runs scored with 129, of his best home run (40) and RBI (123) totals in six seasons, of two All-Star games[11] and one Gold Glove and of helping Alvin Dark restore credibility to the Giants (85–69, for third place). It is also the year of the caustic fallout from a bad marriage, Mays’s name ridiculed in newspapers and in court, his tongue forever silent. And it’s the year that Willie Mays returned to New York, where he led the Giants to a 4–1 victory with a game-winning single. He “drew what amounted to a continuous ovation whenever he was on the field,” the Sporting News wrote, “and at times it thundered louder than the turbulent storms which almost had washed away the game.”
It was a glorious moment. “New York,” Willie later said, “hadn’t forgotten me.”