Walking into the batter’s box is an act of faith, for in no other sport does a player rely on the sufferance, the mercy, of another as a hitter relies on a pitcher. Dangers are embedded in other sports—the wayward punch in boxing, the late hit in football—but nothing compares to the life-or-death peril of a rising fastball. In 1920 at the Polo Grounds, in one of the most infamous moments in baseball history, the Cleveland Indians’ Ray Chapman faced Carl Mays, a submariner with the Yankees. An 0–1 fastball struck Chapman flush in the temple and fractured his skull, spilling blood out of his ears, nose, and mouth. He was rushed to a hospital and surgery was performed, but he died twelve hours later.
Beanballs and brushbacks were part of the game, but some of the dangers were lessened when batters began wearing helmets in 1952. By the early 1960s, most major leaguers wore the hard hat, which offered more safety but also had the perverse effect of increasing the number of knockdown pitches. After all, the hitter now had protection. But the pitchers were endangering so many batters that umpire Jocko Conlan commented that hitters should use some old Ty Cobb tricks—bunt the ball down the first base line and spike the pitcher as he fields it, or push a bunt to the right side, forcing the pitcher to cover first, then bulldoze him with a football block. “I don’t see these things being done nowadays,” Conlan told the Saturday Evening Post in 1961.
Willie Mays found the batting helmet uncomfortable and wouldn’t wear one. He thought he hit better without it and was certain he could elude any pitch to his head. His stubbornness infuriated the Giants, who feared for his safety as well as their investment. No one tracks knockdown pitches, but there was little doubt in San Francisco about which player dodged the most heaters each year and who took the greatest risk every time he stepped into the box.
“The man who was in the dirt more than any other was Willie Mays,” said Hobie Landrith, a catcher who played in the majors for fourteen years, three with the Giants. “He’s up and down like a yo-yo,” the Examiner wrote in 1962. “Nobody over a season is asked to eat more dirt.”
Mays was targeted because he was so good, and no one aimed at him more often than Don Drysdale. In his rookie season, 1956, the tall right-hander threw a high hard one that Mays easily ducked. But the next pitch was another fastball at his chin, and Mays, who had dug in, barely avoided getting hit. Drysdale’s teammate was Sal Maglie, who had instructed Drysdale on how to pitch Mays. “You have to throw at him twice,” he had said. The first time, Mays anticipates it. The second time, he doesn’t.
Drysdale’s excuses were not terribly convincing. In a game in 1960, he knocked Mays down in the first and hit him in sixth. Afterward, he told reporters, “I was just wild. The wind had something to do with carrying my pitches off line.” After Bill Rigney accused Maglie of throwing at Mays, Maglie said, “That’s a damn lie. I never threw at Willie. Maybe I brushed him back with a hard one under the chin once in a while, but I never tried to flatten him. I wouldn’t do a thing like that to Willie.”
Mays believed that the brushbacks were a sign of respect and even said that if he were pitching, he would knock himself down as well. However, he wanted his own pitchers to protect him, and he became incensed when they didn’t. On Opening Day 1966, a Cub pitcher threw at Mays’s head. (The Cubs were now managed by Leo Durocher, who presumably ordered the knockdown.) Mays wanted his pitcher, Juan Marichal, to retaliate against Cub star Ernie Banks, but Marichal would only throw a looper over his head.
After the game, a Giant radio announcer wanted to interview Mays and Marichal together, but Mays said, “Fuck it. Use Marichal.”
“You don’t want to go on?” the announcer asked.
“Not with him,” Mays said.
Marichal was coming off a suspension from the previous year and was in no position to start this one with a beanball. In time, Mays cooled down and apologized.
Mays never publicly accused other pitchers of throwing at him and would rarely yell at the pitcher or make a threatening gesture. Curley Grieve, the Examiner ’s sports editor, wrote in 1961: “He’s such a nice guy that he even refuses to complain when he spends half the game on the seat of his pants.” A photograph of Mays from a 1961 game shows him on his butt in the batter’s box, his cap off his head, his mouth wide open, as if he’s screaming in shock. A fastball by the Dodgers’ Larry Sherry had nearly brained him. The Chronicle ’s Art Rosenbaum wrote: “Normally when Willie is decked, he bounces right up. This time, he backed off, shook his head, talked to the umpire and the catcher, walked over to the on-deck circle to discuss it with Willie McCovey, rosined his hands, and finally took his place in the batter’s box. ‘I was leaning in when the ball came at me,’ Willie said later. ‘Man, that was as close as they come.’ ”
Rather than impugning the pitcher, he blamed himself.
For all his self-confidence, Mays was lucky he was never beaned or seriously injured by a pitch. He had plenty of close calls, and during spring training in 1962, Dark required that Mays wear a helmet. Mays reluctantly complied. “I’ll wear it until it falls off,” he said. (Major League Baseball did not mandate helmets until 1971, though most players wore them by then. Earflaps were required in 1983.) It may be just a coincidence, but the first year that Mays wore the helmet he was hit by four pitches, which equaled the most times he’d been hit in a season.
The 1960s saw the major leagues continue to expand, not just into new markets but also with completely new franchises. For almost sixty years, both leagues had had eight teams, with an eastern bias. By the end of the 1960s, each league had two divisions with six clubs apiece, the National League with squads from Atlanta to San Diego to Montreal, the American League with entries in Oakland and Seattle.
But for Willie Mays, the most meaningful addition was the New York Mets, created in 1962, which brought the National League back to New York and one of Mays’s most devoted fans back into the game. After Joan Whitney Payson, the heiress with a 9 percent stake in the Giants, failed to persuade Stoneham to sell her the team so she could keep it in New York, she promised to bring Willie back to New York. Just five years later, she was the principal owner of the New York Mets, whose uniforms paid homage to both the Dodgers and the Giants: the Mets’ blue lettering was Dodger blue, their orange trim was Giant orange, and their curling NY cap logo evoked that of the Giants. The Mets even played in the Polo Grounds until their new stadium was built.
Payson, whose first love was actually horse racing, had retained her equity interest in the Giants but was required to dispose of it after becoming the principal owner of the Mets. So she offered Stoneham her stock, valued at $680,000, and in return she wanted Willie Mays.
Payson was not supposed to be involved in personnel decisions, but Met president George Weiss didn’t object. “Who wouldn’t approve of a deal for Mays?” he said. “I felt it would have been a ten-strike had we been able to get him.”
Stoneham said no. The New York Hospital, on whose board of trustees Payson sat, got the stock instead, and San Francisco kept Mays.
• • •
It was fitting that in the year New York returned to the National League, the Giants and the Dodgers restaged their storied pennant clash of 1951, and just as that year was Mays’s debut in New York, 1962 was a breakthrough season for him with the San Francisco fans. But it was also a year when the pressures got the better of him.
Mays knocked a home run in his first at-bat but otherwise began the year tepidly, hitting under .270 when the day began on April 17. The Giants had a game at Candlestick against the Dodgers, but due to a court hearing for his divorce, Mays got to the stadium in the second inning. Dark decided to keep him on the bench. It was only the eighth game of the season, and the crowd had no idea why he wasn’t playing. He finally pinch-hit in the seventh inning with the bases loaded, and struck out. Then, with two outs in the ninth and the Dodgers ahead, 8–7, Mays batted with the tying run on base but popped out to end the game. The fans booed him with gusto.
Leo Durocher, now a bench coach for the Dodgers, said after the game, “I don’t want to manage Dark’s club for him, but I gotta say that if I’ve got Mays in the ballpark, I’ve gotta play him. There were two balls we hit for extra bases that Willie would have caught. What do you want him on the bench for? There are too many ways he can beat you.”
Asked why Mays was on the bench, Dark declined to comment. He knew that Mays was upset over the court proceedings, but, as Einstein noted, “If he had known how upset, he wouldn’t have used him even as a pinch hitter.”
The Giants then traveled to Milwaukee and Cincinnati, and in five games Mays went 3-for-18, dropping his average to .217. The pressure that Mays always put on himself was amplified, with his ongoing divorce and deteriorating finances. This was his fifth season in San Francisco, the equivalent of the time he had spent in New York, and the boos still cut him to the bone. He would dream about one of his most persistent hecklers, a guy who sat behind home plate who would always scream, “Hey, Pop-Up Mays!” On the road he roomed alone, and his solitude had always been a source of comfort. He could sleep late, avoid restaurants, invite in those he wanted to see, nap, revive. But after a game one night, he suddenly felt isolated and distraught. He thought about his son, his boy. How could he be a father to Michael as Cat had been to him? Maybe he should have fought for sole custody, but he was a ballplayer, on the road more than at home. What kind of life was that? Willie started to cry. He couldn’t sleep. He got out of bed and called Dark.
“I have the shakes,” Mays said.
Dark told him to come up to his room. When he arrived, Doc Bowman was there, and he gave Mays some sleeping pills. “Sleep here tonight in that other bed, Willie,” Dark said. They talked for a bit and he fell asleep.
Dark later said, “I thought the pressure on Mays was greater that year than ever before in his career, even more than 1954 when we won the pennant. I don’t think he felt like he was under much pressure then. We had other [leaders] on the club and he was much younger. But in 1962, he’s a more mature guy, and now he’s expected to carry the ball club.”
Mays rebounded. After his average fell to .211 on April 27, he hit safely in ten straight games, ripping six home runs, two doubles, and a triple, with fourteen runs scored and fourteen RBIs. His average rose to .309. By May 26, the Giants were in first place with a record of 31–14. They were clearly a different team.
After Cepeda’s big season the previous year, Dark decided to have him play first base and switch McCovey to the outfield, which was not without risk. The running gag was that McCovey didn’t need a glove to play the outfield, just a blindfold and a cigarette. But even playing in only ninety-one games, he hit twenty home runs and was second on the club in slugging percentage (behind Mays); with the two Willies (Mays and McCovey), the Alou brothers (Felipe and Matty), and Harvey Kuenn, the Giants now had more lumber in the outfield than any team in baseball. Third baseman Jim Davenport, sportswriters said, was so quiet you forgot he was even there. A fifth-year starter, he had battled injuries throughout, from a broken collarbone to bleeding ulcers. But he stayed healthy in 1962, played in the All-Star Game, and won an overdue Gold Glove. The most frequent complaint of the Giants since moving to San Francisco was its lack of leadership, but the acquisitions of Kuenn and Ed Bailey in 1961, two veterans, eased that problem.
On the mound, Juan Marichal was trying to rebound from an injury-plagued sophomore season. During spring training, his homeland, the Dominican Republic, was in turmoil following the assassination of its ruler the previous year; among those in peril was Marichal’s fiancée, Alma Rosa, and her entire family. Marichal asked if he could leave camp to marry her so he could bring her back to America. Dark agreed, even giving him two plane tickets. When Marichal returned, he asked Mays what he could do to compensate Dark.
“Win,” Mays replied.
Marichal was the Giants’ ace for the rest of the decade.
If Mays wasn’t a vocal leader, he still provided a steadying hand, which he used to minimize the growing tensions between Dark and Cepeda. Cepeda had already clashed with Rigney, who after leaving the Giants had claimed that Cepeda’s reluctance to play the outfield had cost the Giants one or possibly two pennants. Cepeda said Rigney “lacked the guts to be a manager.”
When Dark took over, he made several moves that antagonized some of the black and Latin players. He believed the team’s three factions—whites, blacks, and Latins—needed to spend more time together, so in spring training he changed the lockers so there was more intermingling. But the social engineering didn’t go over well with the players, and Dark restored the previous locker assignments. Another idea of Dark’s was even less popular. He posted a sign at spring training that read: SPEAK ENGLISH, YOU’RE IN AMERICA. He called a meeting of the Latin players behind second base and said that the other Giants were complaining that they didn’t understand what the Latin players were saying. There were almost a dozen Latins, and many of them, including Cepeda, viewed the edict as an insult. The Alou brothers—there were now three in camp—thought it odd to speak among themselves in what was to them a foreign language. The rule was unenforceable, and Dark dropped that one as well.
Cepeda held out in spring training in 1962. He had earned $30,000 in 1961 and was demanding—the reports varied—either $50,000 or $60,000. He got $46,000. But the delay angered Dark, who, like other managers at the time, took holdouts personally. Cepeda, meanwhile, resented Dark’s refusal to allow players to bring music into the clubhouse, believing it targeted the Latin players.
The simmering feud came to a head in Milwaukee on August 19, a Sunday. The Giants were to leave the Pfister Hotel by bus at 11:15 A.M. Shortly after eleven, most of the players, including Cepeda and Dark, were on the bus. Then Cepeda was told that some friends, a Puerto Rican family with whom he had lived in Minneapolis, were here to see him. Cepeda got off the bus and, as he recalls it, embraced his friends and kissed the daughter, who had a light complexion.
That Dark didn’t approve of interracial dating or displays of affection was no secret to reporters. He openly threatened to separate such couples who were nuzzling on the street.
When Dark saw Cepeda kissing his friends’ daughter, he got angry, according to Cepeda, and told the driver, “Let’s go, bussy.”
According to an eyewitness: “The driver cranked up the motor and that’s when Willie Mays spoke up. He said, ‘It’s not time to leave yet. It’s still early.’ So the driver cut the engine, and Cepeda finally got back on. Most of the people on that bus didn’t even notice what happened.”
In his autobiography, Baby Bull, Cepeda criticized Mays for not speaking out on behalf of Latin players, but Mays’s only concern was keeping the Giants focused and together. In this case, had the bus left Cepeda behind, the division between Dark and Cepeda (and probably the other Latin players) would have widened, damaging the team in the midst of a pennant race. Later, Dark said he didn’t recall the bus incident. He did, however, scratch Cepeda from the starting lineup that day, which Cepeda viewed as retribution.
At thirty-one, Mays still weighed 185 pounds, with a thirty-two-inch waist and a finely honed body. “I’ve seen eight hundred guys with their shirts off,” says Tim McCarver, whose major league career began in 1959, “and the two people who stood out were Willie Mays and Stan Musial. What defined their backs were the groups of muscles around their shoulders. They looked like they worked in the mines.”
If Mays’s size hadn’t changed, he did look different. His face was no longer young, his Afro was longer. When he was happy, his eyes and smile still radiated joy, but when he was worried, every feature seemed to shift into a brooding, tight-lipped expression. Just as his mobile features exaggerated his innocence, they amplified his heartache. His high-pitched laughter could still pierce the air, but his glare could be intimidating.
To some in the press corps, Mays hadn’t changed at all. When he made his first trip to the Polo Grounds to face the Mets on June 2, 1962, a reporter asked him if he could speak with him. Mays didn’t understand the question.
“I used to have to ask Durocher if it was all right to ask you a question,” the reporter explained.
“I can talk for myself now,” Mays said.
His return to the Polo Grounds was an echo of the previous year’s exhibition at Yankee Stadium. The fans carried SAY HEY WILLIE signs and brought their bugles and horns to cheer him. The Giant players had begun to call Cepeda “Big Man,” so when Mays received a mighty roar before the game had even begun, Garry Schumacher, standing at the batting cage, nodded toward Cepeda and said, “The Big Man just discovered who the Big Man really is.”
Mays responded by hitting three home runs in a four-game sweep. He found the experience strange—he had never been in the visitors’ locker room before—but as Arthur Daley of the New York Times wrote: “The center field turf at the Polo Grounds looks normal this weekend for the first time in almost five years. Willie has come home. It matters not that he is in an alien uniform. Here is the unforgettable hero from the past, the darling of the gallery gods. They loved him then and that deep affection, smoldering during his absence, blazed into full flame at his return.”
The first time the Dodgers played the Mets, Duke Snider was asked how it felt to play again in the Polo Grounds.
“The place is full of ghosts,” he said.
Dead ghosts?
“Live ghosts,” Snider said. “I keep looking up and seeing Willie catching a long one.”
Mays got into one fight in his major league career. It occurred on May 27, 1962, at Candlestick, and it was over in seconds. It also could have ended his playing days.
The game was against the woebegone Mets. The day before, against the same team, Mays had three hits, including two homers, and three RBIs. In the first inning the following day, Met pitcher Roger Craig decked him twice. In the top of the seventh, Cepeda was playing first base when his throw to second for an attempted forceout hit the runner in the back of the head, sending him to the hospital for X-rays. In the bottom of the seventh, after Mays singled, Craig hit Cepeda with a pitch. Cepeda took several steps toward the mound, bat in hand, then stopped himself, threw the bat away, and headed for first, where Alvin Dark waited to calm him down. Cepeda and Craig continued to bait each other until Cepeda lit after him, but he was dragged down from behind by Dark, momentarily preventing a brawl.
When play resumed, Craig alternated throws to first and second, trying to pick off Cepeda or Mays. On his first throw to second, he rifled the ball right on the bag and narrowly missed Mays’s head. On the next throw to second, Mays slid hard into shortstop Elio Chacon. As he was getting off the ground, the infielder began punching him.
Mays, according to Chacon, had spiked him the year before, and he said Mays had done it again, so he started the fight. Unfortunately for Chacon, he was only 5-foot-9 and 163 pounds. Dark said that Mays “eats guys like Chacon for breakfast.” In this case, a four-photo sequence shows what happened. Mays was initially surprised by the punches, then the two men stood face-to-face as Mays clasped his right hand around Chacon’s back. Next, he lifted Chacon off the ground like a sack of flour as second baseman Felix Mantilla came over to help, and then he drove Chacon into Mantilla, landing on top of them both. As the Sporting News reported: “Chacon bounced on the ground like a rag doll, Mays sprawling on top, fists still flying.” Cepeda and Craig then began pummeling each other near second base as the dugouts and bullpens emptied. For triggering the donnybrook, Chacon was the only player ejected; he was also fined $100.
Mays said after the game: “Yeah, my first fight and I hope my last one. Heck, I didn’t want to hurt the kid.”
During the melee, however, somebody’s spikes ripped through Mays’s stockings and scraped across the Achilles tendon of the right heel.
“Willie,” Doc Bowman said, “is a lucky boy. He was wearing two pair of white sanitary stockings and perhaps they saved him. A little bit deeper cut and Willie’s Achilles tendon could have been severed. Those spikes had to be razor sharp to make that slash.”
Mays also suffered an abrasion over his left eye when the Mets’ Gil Hodges pulled him off Chacon. The game itself was the first of a doubleheader. Mays played in the nightcap and got two hits.
If any club seemed like a team of destiny, it was the Los Angeles Dodgers of 1962. It was their first season in beautiful Dodger Stadium, drawing 2.7 million fans, a major league record. Shortstop Maury Wills stole 104 bases, shattering Ty Cobb’s 1915 single-season total of 96; the last time a National League player had swiped more than 50 a year was 1916. The Dodgers had the best young outfield in baseball—Tommy Davis, who (after Mays) was the league’s best all-around performer; Willie Davis, perhaps the game’s fastest runner; and Frank Howard, one of the game’s biggest players (6-foot-7, 250 pounds). Leading the pitching staff was Don Drysdale, who with twenty-five wins would capture the Cy Young Award, and Sandy Koufax, in the second season of his brilliant six-year run.
Starting on May 10, the Dodgers and Giants would be numbers 1 and 2 in the standings for the rest of the year, but the Dodgers, winning seventeen of nineteen games during one stretch that began in May, appeared unstoppable. And they probably wouldn’t have been stopped had Koufax not injured the index finger on his pitching hand on July 17. At the time, he was 14–4, with a 2.06 ERA, and was also leading the league in strikeouts, but he was lost for most of the rest of the year and didn’t win another game.
With no other teams in contention, the first real Giant-Dodger showdown in California drew national attention. Across the state, according to David Plaut’s definitive account of the race, the battle shared front-page headlines with the stock market’s worst drop since 1929, Israel’s execution of the Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann, and Project Mercury space flights. When the Giants swept three from the Dodgers in August—thanks in part to Alvin Dark’s watering down of the basepaths at Candlestick—San Francisco narrowed the lead to 2½ games.
While Mays’s average hovered around .300, his power numbers were on the rise. On September 10, he hit his forty-third home run and drove in his one hundred and twenty-third run. With seventeen games left, he had already exceeded his long-ball totals for all but one year and had equaled or exceeded his RBI numbers for all but one year. He was on his way to having one of his best seasons.
But the year was different in one respect. With expansion, Major League Baseball had added eight games, a total of 162, but the season began and ended at the same time. The extra games were therefore squeezed into the same number of days, and with New York and Houston joining the National League, the travel demands increased.
Mays never asked for a day off, and despite Dark’s promises of rest, he played in every game. The legal proceedings for his divorce were still ongoing, and that pressure, combined with the lengthy, feverish pennant race, weighed heavily on Mays. He had worn down in past seasons, but not quite like this.
“It was getting hot in the pennant race,” Mays said. “But none of us wanted to take a day off. I pushed myself as I always did. Then one day it got to me.”
There were warnings. In early August, Mays told Milton Gross, “I’ve never been so tired.” On Sunday, September 9, during a home game against the Cubs, he felt tired “every place in my body,” and that fatigue stayed with him the next two days. After winning on September 11, the Giants began an eleven-game road trip, a half game behind the Dodgers. On the flight to Cincinnati, Examiner reporter Harry Jupiter saw how drained Mays looked. Mays said, “Next year, I ain’t gonna play no more doubleheaders. I guess I need a day or two off from time to time now if I’m gonna keep playing another eight or nine years like I want to. All these games, with all this traveling, it takes something out of you, no matter how strong you may think you are.”
They landed in Cincinnati in the middle of a heat wave. “The trip from the West Coast was a jolt for everyone used to playing in the cooler air of San Francisco and Los Angeles,” rookie pitcher Gaylord Perry said. “I had to change shirts twice that night”—and he never even got into the game. “The sweat was pouring off me just sitting in the dugout before going out to the bullpen.”
Mays normally sat in the dugout before the game, but on this night he cut his batting practice short and headed to the clubhouse. When the game began, he was feeling dizzy, and in the first inning he struck out. He continued to feel as though he were in a haze, but he didn’t want to say anything. Finally, in the top of the third inning, he was sitting on the bench, waiting his turn to bat, when he slumped over, collapsed, and passed out. He was quickly surrounded by his teammates, and when Russ Hodges saw who it was from the radio booth, he had tears in his eyes. Mays was put on a stretcher and carried to the clubhouse, where Doc Bowman estimated that he was unconscious for “a few minutes.” Others said it was closer to twenty minutes. Bowman used smelling salts to revive him, and when Mays opened his eyes, Bowman asked, “Do you know me?”
Mays replied, “Sure.”
Bowman offered him some water.
“What’s wrong with me?” Mays asked.
“It’s all right, Buck. You just fainted. How do you feel now?”
“I just feel like I don’t want to move. I can move, but I don’t want to move.”
The Reds’ team physician, Dr. George Ballou, examined Mays and initially thought he just needed some rest, then decided he should go to Christ Hospital. Still, the doctor downplayed the severity of the incident. “Anybody who has played all these games would be tired,” he said. “The Reds are tired. The Giants are tired. The managers, the coaches, they’re all tired. I don’t think [Mays’s] condition is serious at all. I believe he’ll be all right and should be playing tomorrow night.”
But Mays didn’t play the next night, or the night after that, or even the following night. He stayed in the hospital, where he was photographed lying in bed, his face drawn, his eyes sagging, a white identification band around his wrist—an image of bewildered despair. (Another photograph, however, showed a relaxed Mays with a smile on his face.) One headline in the Chronicle asked: WHAT IS WRONG WITH WILLIE? Dr. Ballou didn’t help matters with his revised assessment. “It is not normal for a finely tuned athlete to black out for five or more minutes,” he said. “It is a cause for concern.”
Rumors flourished, some of which were printed. Mays had venereal disease, epilepsy, a heart attack, depression, a mental breakdown, or he drank a Mickey Finn. Herb Caen wrote that Mays had been punched by a teammate. Bigots used the incident to make racist jokes—one of “Dark’s darkies” taking some time off—while the Chronicle ’s Charles McCabe, a frequent critic, wrote: “It is an interesting speculation whether Mays’s annual collapses are physical, or neurotic, or even conceivably feigned.” (McCabe was not known for his light touch. He once compared Russ Hodges’s signature description of a Giant hitting a homer—“Bye-bye, baby!”—to the sound of the sportscaster’s having an orgasm.)
Pitcher Billy O’Dell described Mays “as friendly with everybody on the team,” but they respected his privacy. Few of the players asked about his personal life, and they were not about to ask about his hospitalization. “After it happened,” Billy Pierce later recalled, “nobody really discussed it.” He said Mays’s health issues were not “major.”
But Alvin Dark, who knew Mays far better, said the cumulative pressures on him were more than any one man could handle.
“Willie doesn’t know how tired he is,” Dark said. “There is nothing wrong with him physically. He’s simply exhausted mentally and doesn’t know it. He leads such an unnatural life. In every city in the league and at home, he has precious little privacy. On the road, he can’t open his door without having to fight his way through autograph seekers or writers scratching for a story. He can’t go out in public. He’s always in demand. Kids are always after him for autographs. Grown-ups are always calling him on the telephone. He has to eat in his room. He can’t go to a movie or a theater. Finally things mount until the pressure is unendurable and something snaps. You black out. That’s all that is wrong with Willie. He’s tired.”
While “exhaustion” may have seemed simplistic, Mays’s contemporaries recognized the unique pressures he was under. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, for example, recalls that when he was in the eighth grade, in 1960, he met Mays at a Harlem Globetrotter game at Madison Square Garden. Mays stopped by the locker room, and the reporters descended. “They just mobbed him, and they pushed him back until he fell backwards over some chairs,” Abdul-Jabbar says. “They knocked him over literally. I was just amazed that he had to deal with that type of mania. Willie was like, ‘Hey, you guys gotta back off and give me some space.’ He wasn’t there to do an interview. He got out of there in a hurry.”
Mays’s style on the field was another factor. His hell-bent approach, slamming into catchers or fences, exacted an obvious price, but what really took its toll was what happened in between pitches. Filled with nervous energy, Mays seemed incapable of relaxing in between the white lines. A Chicago White Sox scout named Charley Metro once spent an entire game looking at Mays through his binoculars. “You won’t believe what I saw,” Metro said afterward. “The man is never still out there.” Noting how he repositioned players every batter and sometimes every pitch, Metro said, Mays “looks like the signalman on the Yorktown .”
Yet to the casual fan, as well as to many reporters, Mays was forever described as a “natural” whose skills flowed effortlessly from his body. Hank Aaron says that “most African American players were jealous of Willie—they were jealous of his skills on the baseball field. Every day was a struggle to stay in the league, but things came easily to him.” Even his peers didn’t understand the stress Mays was under.
The day after he entered the hospital in Cincinnati, he was allowed to see three people, Dr. Ballou, Alvin Dark, and Harry Jupiter, all of whom had to walk past a police officer guarding the door because so many hospital employees had been interrupting the patient for his autograph. Fueled, perhaps, by the hospital photograph depicting Mays in such dire straits, some writers later speculated ominously that he suffered from depression or had a complete breakdown. But as Jupiter’s story in the Examiner made clear, the reality was different. The headline was: LIVELY DAY IN HOSPITAL WITH MAYS.
Jupiter’s first sight of Mays was alarming: he was being pushed to his room in a wheelchair after some X-rays. Then Mays grinned when he saw the reporter. “I don’t need this chair,” he said, “but my buddy”—he jerked his thumb at the hospital attendant—“told me he’d get in trouble if I didn’t ride in the chair.” Mays then walked into his room and sprawled on the bed in his hospital pajamas and looked at Jupiter with his chin on his left fist. “I’m feeling pretty good now,” he said, “but Harry, I was just plain scared last night. I don’t think it was indigestion. I just didn’t eat that much. But, man, I’ve been tired, real tired, ever since we went to Los Angeles.”
Another attendant knocked on the door, and Mays asked him to buy him a comb, toothbrush, toothpaste, and “a whole lot of magazines. All kinds of magazines. But don’t buy any of the ones with my picture on the cover. I’ve got all of them.”
He reached into the drawer of a small table next to the bed and handed the attendant a ten-dollar bill. When he left, Mays continued: “People think it’s funny when a ballplayer says he’s tired. I don’t complain much, but I’m real tired. I’m not as tired as I was last night. I took a sleeping pill and went right to sleep.” (Jupiter didn’t ask why someone so tired needed a sedative, though it appears Mays’s physicians were often eager to give him sleeping pills.)
He said he probably needed one more day of rest. “I ain’t no good to the team when I’m tired anyway,” he said. He wondered if he could have his contract changed so he didn’t have to play both games of a double-header—“they leave me pooped for four or five days after”—and complained about the extensive tests in the hospital. “They’ve even stuck pins in my head checking my brain,” he said. “Man, that stuff hurts. And they’re gonna do it again tomorrow too. They took blood from two places. They stuck a pin in my finger and they stuck a needle in my arm.”
Mays groaned when a nurse entered to give him a vitamin B12 shot. When she moved toward his right arm, he stopped her. “Not that one. Put it in the left arm.” Then he turned to Jupiter. “That’s all right, Harry. These vitamin shots are good for you.” Jupiter said he was still glad he wasn’t getting one. Mays called out, “Hey, nurse, give Harry a shot. Might pep him up a little bit.” Everyone laughed.
But Jupiter tried to turn the conversation to more serious matters. Was Willie concerned about his health?
“Ain’t nothing worrying me except maybe winning the pennant,” he said. He thought for a moment. “You know what I worry about? I worry about Stretch [McCovey]. He ought to get married. Do him good. I’ve been taking care of Stretch in the outfield. I tell him where to play and try to keep boostin’ his confidence. He’s done real nice. There are a lot of outfielders in the league that ain’t as good as Stretch.”
He also commended Felipe Alou and Harvey Kuenn. “Those guys made it easier for me in center field,” he said.
The attendant returned with the magazines and toiletries, and Mays tried to tip him another dollar. The young man declined the bill.
“Take it,” Mays said. “I gotta make a living and so do you.”
The attendant smiled, took the dollar, and turned at the door. “I’ll be back,” he said. “My girl said I had better get your autograph for her or not call her anymore.”
Mays waved. “Anytime. I’ll be here tomorrow.”
He was released from the hospital after two nights and three days. Whenever asked about these episodes—and there were more—Mays cited the relentless demands of the long season. But other players were not hospitalized for three days because of tired legs. Mays, however, needed the break: he pushed himself up to and beyond his physical and emotional limits. Sometimes, it seemed, the burden of being Willie Mays was too much even for Willie Mays. He did acknowledge, in an Associated Press interview three weeks after his collapse, that his penchant for bottling up his emotions, for refusing to reach out to others, had hurt him.
“I had a lot of trouble last year,” he said, referring to his divorce. “Everybody knows what it was, and I don’t want to get into it. The doctor told me those things can store up in a person, especially one like me who keeps it inside him. Then, all of a sudden, it busts out all at once. I really believe that’s what happened to me.”
He continued: “I try not to think of anything but what’s happening on the field. It’s when I’m off the field that I start to think—and then I get tired.”
Mays joined the team in Pittsburgh on September 14, but Dark scratched him from the lineup on that day as well as the following. He was clearly concerned. “Nobody, but nobody, wants to win a pennant more than I,” he said, “but I’m not going to do it at the risk of shattering somebody’s nerves, perhaps permanently.”
Dark’s caution was not simply humane but courageous. The Giants lost all four of the games that Mays missed, dropping from 1½ games behind the Dodgers to four, with only thirteen games left. It appeared that Mays’s collapse, combined with Dark’s concerns, would cost the Giants a chance at the pennant, but when pressed by reporters, Dark held his ground. “The tests taken of Willie in Cincinnati didn’t show anything wrong with him, and yet I won’t let him play,” he said. “How, tell me, can tests tell what goes on inside a Kuenn, a Davenport, a Sanford, an Alou, or a Mays in a pennant fight such as this?... These players are human beings. They’re individuals and no stethoscope or hypo needle or X-ray machine yet made can explore and detect that pressure.”
While the team was in Pittsburgh, a wire service photograph showed a sad Giant player, wearing a warm-up jacket, sitting in the dugout at Forbes Field. The caption said that Mays was “Aching to Play,” which was true, except the picture was of Carl Boles, a reserve outfielder who looked like Mays. Boles was accustomed to the confusion. The first time he walked onto the field at the Polo Grounds, the fans cheered. “Then when they saw my number, 14, they booed me,” he said. “Crazy, man. When Willie appeared, they cheered for several minutes and then turned on me, booing me again.”
Mulling on the importance of Mays, a reporter discovered that he had missed nineteen games in his career. The Giants lost each of those games. The Chronicle ’s Will Connolly wrote: “There is a big hole in center field when Willie Mays is out. Not only in the Giants’ lineup, but also in the National League and the whole of baseball.”
In his first game back, on Sunday, September 16, Mays came to bat in the eighth inning with two on and the Giants trailing, 4–1. He hit a three-run homer, but the Giants lost in extra innings. They lost the next day as well, extending their losing streak to six. That day, the Chronicle ’s Art Rosenbaum wrote: “Ticket applications for World Series seats at Candlestick went to season subscribers on Thursday last, the morning after Mays blacked out. Awkward timing to say the least. By now it seems a trifle late for miracles but the undying San Francisco fans will wait. Maybe a pennant was never intended anyway.”
Some fans reminisced about the furious comeback in 1951, but nostalgia gave way to reality. The Giants split their next four games, leaving them, on September 22, four behind the Dodgers, with only seven games remaining. The Dodgers had already won one hundred games, their final six games were at home, and Koufax was back in the rotation. Dark was one of the few optimists remaining. “Willie, the Dodgers could have taken charge and they haven’t,” he said. “I think something’s wrong down there in L.A.” Dark told the rest of the team the same thing and predicted that the Giants would catch the Dodgers and beat them in the playoffs. “Everybody thought he was nuts,” Carl Boles said.
He wasn’t. The Dodgers lost two of three at home against the Houston Colt .45s while the Giants were winning three of four. With three games left, the Dodgers were still leading by two games. They were to finish the season against the Cardinals; the Giants, against the Colt .45s.
On Friday, September 28, the Giants’ game was rained out, and the Dodgers lost in extra innings, cutting their lead to 1½. Before the Giants’ doubleheader the following day, Mays saw his old friend Joey Amalfitano, now playing for the Colt .45s, who had just won two out of three against the Dodgers. And Amalfitano said something strange to Mays: “Can you guys score a run? If you can score, you got the pennant. [The Dodgers] are never going to score another run.”
The Dodgers had indeed gone into a slump. Except for one thirteen-run outburst, they had averaged 2.8 runs over the past ten games. The Cardinals, meanwhile, were plenty loose. Long out of contention, they loved playing in Los Angeles for its late-night diversions. The Cardinals “were staying out until three or four o’clock in the morning for day games, and they didn’t care,” Ron Fairly of the Dodgers said. “They were as free and easy as you please.”
On the penultimate day of the regular season, the Giants won the first game of their doubleheader, 11–5, moving to one game out. In the nightcap, Juan Marichal, recovering from a twisted ankle, started his first game since September 5. He was still in pain but felt that Dark didn’t believe him. He took the ball and lasted only four innings, and the Giants lost. After the game, the Latin players, including Cepeda and Alou, gathered around Marichal’s locker and, according to one account, shot “wrathful glances over at Dark and the coaching staff,” apparently upset that the manager would risk Marichal’s career for one game. The following day, neither Cepeda nor Alou was in the starting lineup. It’s possible that Dark simply preferred left-handed bats against a right-handed starter, but the Latin players thought it was another act of Dark’s vengeance.
The Dodgers, in their second-to-last game, couldn’t score against the Cardinals and lost again, setting up the final day of the regular season with a one-game lead.
Willie Mays had had a terrible stretch run. In his last four games, he had gone 1-for-14 with one RBI. He also committed one of his most embarrassing gaffes. In the last game before their final series, the Giants were losing, 7–1, when Mays reached third base with one out in the sixth inning. Cepeda struck out, and Mays walked off the bag, thinking it was the third out. He was tagged to end the inning. He told reporters after the game: “I just didn’t realize how many outs there were. I guess it can happen to a guy, once in a lifetime.”
He received little forgiveness. As the Examiner ’s Curley Grieve wrote: “Because he makes more money than anyone in baseball ($90,000), Mays isn’t supposed to make mistakes. And this one was compounded by the fact that he fanned dismally for the last out with two on in the ninth.” On the final day of the regular season, with the Giants trailing by one game before a packed house of 41,327, Mays came to bat in the first inning and was met with loud boos. He drew a walk, pacifying some people.
The Giants faced Colt .45 pitcher Dick Farrell, a hard-throwing right-hander who had beaten the Dodgers earlier that week. But the Giants had nineteen-game-winner Billy O’Dell on the mound, and the two staged a classic pitcher’s duel. The Giants took a 1–0 lead on a home run by Ed Bailey in the fourth, but Houston tied it with a run in the seventh.
A Dodger victory would have made the Giants’ game moot, but the Dodgers and Cardinals, whose game began an hour later, were locked in their own scoreless battle, which was monitored on the Giant scoreboard.
After Mays’s walk, he struck out and popped out and was zero for his last ten. No one had more at stake in this game than Mays: if the Giants lost, he would be blamed. The columnists had already said as much. So too did the jeers of the fans. Never mind that Mays led the league with 49 home runs, drove in 141, scored 130, and hit .304, and his slugging percentage of .615 was his fourth best in his career. Hitting in front of McCovey, he had reduced his attempted steals to keep the hole open on the right side, but he still led the team with eighteen stolen bases, and he led the team in every offensive category except average, hits, and triples. What seemed to matter most, however, was that Mays’s mysterious ailment had cost him and the Giants four games down the stretch.
The last time Farrell had pitched against the Giants, on July 24, Mays had nailed him for two home runs, both on fastballs, so today he was throwing mostly curves. Mays led off the eighth, and organist Lloyd Fox played a few bars of the Giants’ fight song, “Bye Bye Baby.” Mays took a big swing on the first pitch—a curve—and hit it far but foul into the right field stands. He guessed that on the next pitch, Farrell would try to slip a fastball by him, which is exactly what Farrell tried to do. Except the pitch didn’t get by him. Mays swung and, as the Chronicle ’s Bob Stevens wrote, the ball “became a blur of white, smashed through the noise of roaring throats, sailing high into the blue, and it gave San Francisco the best shot it has ever had at the long-awaited pennant.” In what may have been the most important home run of Mays’s career, the ball landed in the fourteenth row of the left field seats. Mays, restored as hero, had gone deep on his first swing of the regular season and his last. The Giants won the game.
Even Mays’s critics had to acknowledge him. “Willie Mays is salaried at $90,000 a year,” wrote the Chronicle ’s Prescott Sullivan. “At times he is worth it.”
But nothing yet had been won. Most of the crowd stayed at Candlestick—it was Fan Appreciation Day, and the Giants were giving away five cars. The fans could follow the Dodger game on the radio; Russ Hodges was using the Western Union tape to call the contest. The Giants clustered around their own radio in the locker room. The game remained scoreless until the top of the eighth, when Cardinal catcher Gene Oliver tagged Johnny Podres for a homer. Alvin Dark let out a soft “wahoo” while the crowd at Candlestick as well as Kezar Stadium in San Francisco—where the 49ers were playing the Vikings, but the fans were listening to baseball—went wild. The Dodgers lost, 1–0. After the final out, the fans at Candlestick threw seat cushions from the upper deck. Strangers hugged each other. Men and women danced. Everyone was yelling, and a long line had begun to form for playoff tickets.
The Dodgers had been shut out the last two games of the season and were scoreless in twenty-one consecutive innings. They had lost ten of their last thirteen, though the Giants had won only seven in that span. It was a far cry from the glorious run in 1951, but the San Francisco newspapers called it “a miracle.” The longest regular season in baseball history had decided nothing in the National League, which would now have a three-game playoff.
Duke Snider, thinking back to 1951, said, “We owe the Giants something.”
The playoff allowed the press to focus on baseball’s radical changes over the previous eleven years—the expansion to the West Coast, the increase in the number of teams, the longer season, the resurgence of the stolen base. What had also changed was Willie Mays, from the bubbling rookie to the world-weary veteran. “I think I’m a better ballplayer,” he said. “I’m older and wiser, but tireder.” Mays was the only Giant who had played in New York, and Duke Snider was the only Dodger who had played in the 1951 Series. Leo Durocher was the Dodgers’ third base coach, though he liked nothing more than ignoring Walter Alston’s “take” sign and signaling the hit-and-run.
The first game of the playoff was at Candlestick, where Dark was up to his old tricks, instructing the grounds crew to soak the left side of the infield to slow down ground balls. The field was in bad shape, but it probably didn’t matter, because everything went right for the Giants and for Mays. Koufax pitched for the Dodgers, but after his long layoff, he said he felt as though he were in the third week of spring training. In the first inning, Felipe Alou doubled, and Mays followed with a crushing blow over the right center field fence. Koufax lasted only one inning, giving up three, and was replaced by Ed Roebuck. In the third, Mays came up, and Roebuck threw one pitch behind him, then the next pitch knocked him down. Mays rapped the third pitch to left for a single. In the sixth, the Giants were still leading by only three, and the Dodgers again tried to rattle Mays. Larry Sherry fired a brushback. Mays dusted himself off and hit another homer, inspiring an even louder torrent of cheers. Asked after the game about the knockdown pitches, Mays said, “Maybe the ball got away—no trouble. I wasn’t hit. Sometimes those pitches make you mad and you just dig in and try harder.”
Giant pitcher Billy Pierce, who threw a shutout that day, detected a turning point for Mays with the second home run. “I think it was the moment where San Francisco fans finally took him to heart,” he said. “They believed he was doing something for San Francisco—not the Giants—but San Francisco. He was doing something to try to bring a winner to the city. Willie heard those cheers, and he liked it.”
The Giants won, 8–0, and Mays had a perfect day, going 3-for-3, with two homers, three runs scored, three RBIs, and a walk. “I think the fans are starting to warm up to me,” he said.
The Dodgers had now gone thirty straight innings without scoring. Durocher, who had always been superstitious, was so desperate that for the next game, he wore the same T-shirt he had on when Bobby Thomson hit his home run. At least that’s what he said. He also claimed to have the same underwear and socks. The Dodger fans, however, had lost confidence. Only 25,231 Angelinos, almost 30,000 short of capacity at Dodger Stadium, attended that game, and the city’s lack of faith appeared to be warranted. The Giants took a 5–0 lead against Drysdale and had their best pitcher, twenty-four-game-winner Jack Sanford, on the mound. But Sanford, battling a cold, tired in the sixth inning and was knocked out as the Dodgers took the lead, 7–5, in the eighth. Davenport and Mays led off the ninth inning with back-to-back singles. Then Ed Bailey singled to center. Davenport scored and Mays, his hat flying off, tried for third, but Tommy Davis’s throw arrived just as Mays’s foot slid in. The umpire’s arms appeared to signal safe, but Jocko Conlan called him out. Mays bounced off the ground in disbelief, jumped high in the air, and began to argue, joined by his equally animated third base coach, Whitey Lockman. It was the most emotion Mays had ever displayed over a call and was probably the closest he ever came to getting thrown out. He even complained, respectfully, after the game. “I let him know it was a bad call,” he said. “That would have been a big play for us. It would have meant at least one run, and probably changed the complexion of the game.” Lockman was less diplomatic, calling it “a joke decision. I doubt whether Conlan even saw the play. He just called it from memory.”
Even with the out, the Giants still tied the score that inning, but the Dodgers got a run in the bottom of the ninth to win, 8–7. Mays wondered if Leo’s underwear really did bring him luck.
The Dodgers’ victory set up the decisive game in Los Angeles, on October 3—eleven years to the day that the two teams had met in their historic clash at the Polo Grounds. A reporter asked Dark if he had any good luck charms from 1951, as Durocher had.
“Only Willie Mays,” Dark said.
On a sun-splashed day, the fans turned out wearing short sleeves and sundresses, with Doris Day, Rosalind Russell, and Frank Sinatra among the 45,693 in attendance. Marichal, rested but still nursing his ankle, pitched for the Giants while Johnny Podres, with only two days’ rest, started for the Dodgers.
The Giants grabbed a 2–0 lead in the third and could have had more, but Cepeda grounded into a double play with the bases loaded. Snider scored a run for the Dodgers in the fourth. In the top of the sixth, the Giants had the bases loaded with none out. Reliever Ed Roebuck was called into the game, and he induced two ground balls, including a double play, to keep it a one-run game. The momentum swung back to the Dodgers, who promptly took the lead on a two-run homer by Tommy Davis. In the seventh, Maury Wills singled, stole second base, and then stole third. The throw to third was wild, and Wills galloped home, with Durocher running with him down the line. When Wills slid, so did Durocher. Both men were safe. “Durocher got up laughing,” Felipe Alou recalled. “Right then he thought he had the game won.... I wanted to beat them after what Durocher did. Sliding. Like it was a show.” The Dodgers led, 4–2.
Roebuck, a thirty-year-old right-hander, had been a workhorse all year; he had a 10–1 record and had pitched masterfully in the game. But it was muggy, with smog hanging over the park, and after he retired the side in the eighth, he had gone three innings and was spent. In the bottom of the eighth, the Dodgers loaded the bases with two outs and the pitcher was due up. It seemed like a good time for Alston to pinch-hit to try to seal the win, then use a fresh arm for the ninth. The Dodgers’ Ron Perranoski, who led the team in saves, with twenty, was available. So was Don Drysdale, who had pitched only five innings the day before, or even Koufax. But Alston didn’t want to lift Roebuck, who dragged his bat to the plate and made the final out.
The Giants now came to bat in the top of ninth, still down, 4–2—very close to the bottom-of-the-ninth score from 1951 (the Giants were losing, 4–1). Dark offered no words of inspiration. He just said, “Matty, get your bat.” Matty Alou pinch-hit for the pitcher and ripped the second pitch for a single to right. The dugout suddenly stirred to life. The next batter, Harvey Kuenn, grounded into a forceout, leaving the Dodgers only two outs away from a pennant. Then Roebuck unraveled. He walked pinch hitter Willie McCovey, and he walked Felipe Alou to load the bases. The next hitter was Willie Mays. Alston went out to the mound to ask Roebuck how he felt.
Roebuck, who had kept Mays in check that year, wanted to finish the game one way or the other. He told Alston he felt fine.
As Mays watched the inning unfold, he recalled the rally from 1951, and as he waited in the on-deck circle, he thought about one thing: this time, he wanted to be at the plate. He was still embarrassed by the memory of his quivering fears in the on-deck circle with Bobby Thomson in the batter’s box. History had repeated itself so he could prove himself in the clutch. With the bases loaded and down by two runs, a long hit could give the Giants the lead, though a double play would give the Dodgers the pennant. The stunned crowd was so quiet that the national television audience could hear the Giants calling out encouragement.
Roebuck, who normally had a good sinker, was hoping for a ground ball. He threw a pitch down on the inside part of the plate—a tough pitch to handle—and Mays swung, smashing a line drive toward the pitcher. Bob Broeg, the veteran sports columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, wrote seventeen years later: “Even the most famous player of his day might top that sinker into a double play. Instead, hitting straight away, Mays drove a torrid shot through the box, as hard as I ever saw.” Accounts vary on whether the ball hit Roebuck’s bare hand, his glove, or his leg—Durocher said the ball actually ripped the glove off Roebuck’s hand—but what’s known is that Mays’s cannon shot bounced off the pitcher and rolled away. A run scored as Mays reached first on the single, and the bases remained loaded with the Dodgers still leading, 4–3.
Belatedly, Alston removed Roebuck, but instead of calling in Perranoski or Drysdale, he summoned starting pitcher Stan Williams, who had pitched effectively in 1⅔ innings of relief the day before but could be wild. He averaged one walk every two innings. “To be truthful,” Roebuck said, “I was surprised to see Stanley coming in.” Durocher thought Alston had lost his mind.
Except for the Giant fans, the rest of the inning was painful to watch. Cepeda hit a sacrifice fly to tie the score, Felipe Alou moving to third. Williams threw a wild pitch, allowing Mays to move to second. After intentionally walking Ed Bailey, Williams walked Jim Davenport, forcing in the go-ahead run. Perranoski finally replaced Williams, and he got Pagan to hit a grounder, but rookie second baseman Larry Burright kicked it, allowing another run to score. The inning ended with a strikeout, but the Giants had plated four runs on only two singles. “Worst inning I ever saw in my life,” Durocher said.
The Giants led, 6–4, and Dark brought in Billy Pierce, the starting pitcher who had shut out the Dodgers only two days before. He hadn’t recorded a save all year, but as Mays said, “Dark wasn’t taking any chances.” The first batter, Maury Wills, grounded out. Jim Gilliam then flew out to right field. The Dodgers’ final hope was pinch hitter Lee Walls, and on a 1–1 pitch he hit a soft liner into right center. At first it appeared it might fall, which would bring up the tying run, but the ball hung up, and Mays was closing fast. When he pounded the pocket of his glove with his fist, his teammates knew the game was over. Mays caught the ball, but not with his usual basket catch. He grabbed it chest high. Asked why in the locker room, Mays laughed. “You crazy?” he squealed. “That was $15,000 a man!”
Before the final out, Mays had thought to himself that if he caught the ball, he would give it to Pierce, but in all the excitement, he flung it into the stands—a rare display of celebration. Throughout his career, Mays avoided the boisterous screams, hugs, and dances or—after winning a pennant or World Series—the spraying of champagne. On this occasion, the stadium crew had to wheel the victory champagne from one clubhouse to the next three different times, until finally settling in the Giants’ clubhouse. Amid the crush of reporters and bulky television cameras and hot lights and joyous, rowdy teammates who were imbibing voraciously after their longest season, someone offered Mays a glass of champagne. He declined.
In the Dodger clubhouse, a black rage had taken over—players smashed beer bottles, ripped their uniforms, cursed Alston, and wept. They had won 102 games and had nothing to show for it. The World Series money—at least $12,000 a person—would have doubled the annual salary of some players. Podres accused Alston of stealing it. A Dodger passed around bottles of whiskey to every player, some of whom literally dropped to the floor, drunk. “I don’t like to be around drunks,” Johnny Roseboro recalled. “So I got dressed and left. It was the worst scene I ever saw with the Dodgers.”
There was little time to celebrate—the World Series against the Yankees would begin the next day—but that didn’t stop San Franciscans from enjoying the moment. In the financial district, ticker tape, torn telephone books, and papers were thrown from office buildings. Cable cars clanged, horns blared. Some streetcars were rocked, and trolleys were pulled off wires. Market Street was jammed until long past midnight. The police barred vehicles from Third to Eighth streets, and in North Beach howling fans demonstrated. The Yankees were already in town, staying at a town house on Market Street. Had the Dodgers won, the Yankees would have flown to Los Angeles that night, which might have been safer. Some unruly fans, according to the Sporting News, “burst into the town house and threw furniture around, but police finally restored order.”
The city’s delirious throng headed for San Francisco International Airport, where the Giants were due to arrive. No one on the plane could have predicted what happened next. The pilot, Orv Schmidt, made the announcement: “Fellows, there is a little disturbance down below. We’re told that there are at least twenty-five thousand people down there—maybe it’s seventy-five thousand—and they’ve blocked off the runway. They thought we were coming in on an earlier jet and they ran out on the landing strip to meet it. Then they ran to another jet. The police can’t get them back out of the entranceways. We don’t know if we can land. We may have to land in Oakland.”
Groans were heard in the cabin, with someone saying, “What a way to end the day. First we win the pennant, and then we go up in flames.”
The DC-7 banked east for Oakland, then turned around and continued to circle as the chaos unfolded below. Cars were jammed for miles along the Bayshore Freeway; some people simply abandoned their vehicles to join the crowd—later estimated at fifty thousand—at the airport. The police could not clear the runways. Almost forty minutes after the first announcement, Schmidt took the microphone again: “We can’t go in. Two big jets are stalled down there. We’ll have to land at the west runway.”
The pilot had received clearance to land at an old United Air Lines maintenance base behind locked gates. Finally, the National League champions reached the ground to the polite cheers of the hangar police, maintenance men, switchboard attendants, and a bus driver. But their night wasn’t over.
The bus was available; some players, however, simply started walking for the highway in search of a ride. According to Cepeda, “A lot of us ended up hitchhiking—Matty and Felipe Alou, Pierce, Marichal. People we’d never met in our lives pulled up, offered us rides, and we jumped in.”
The others boarded the bus and headed to the main concourse, where the mob was waiting. Any hope of making an inconspicuous exit was quickly dashed. The fans, some of whom were waving signs and banners, broke through the police barricades and circled the vehicle. “Those folks meant well,” Dark said, “but they really shook us up.” The horde pushed ahead, rocked the bus, and shattered windows. “I really thought they were going to turn the thing over and crush some of the people,” Billy O’Dell said. Added Ed Bailey, “That was as scared as I’ve ever been.”
Fortunately, no one was hurt, and an episode that could have turned tragic was remembered as a defining moment of the Giants in San Francisco, the moment when the team and city became one. “Hysteria is not a Bay Area trait,” wrote Art Rosenbaum and Bob Stevens. “Sedate enthusiasm is the proper role for a proper San Franciscan. The sophisticates would never have the bad taste to lose their heads over a baseball team [but] when the fans were trying to break through the windows, the Giants knew they were home.”
And with the fans surrounding the bus, a chant could be heard, softer and then more loudly, a chant that echoed from the last game in the Polo Grounds to the runways of San Francisco: “We want Willie!”
At last—after five years, after a season of turmoil, after the booing and the sniping and the cold shoulders of a city that wouldn’t quite accept him—they wanted Willie.
But Willie was gone. After the plane landed, one cab was at the maintenance base. It had been called from the airplane by Russ Hodges, for himself, but Mays found it first and took it. The man who always took pride in separating himself from the masses had once again struck out on his own. Under the circumstances, no one complained. When the crowd continued to call for Willie, Bob Nieman, a utility outfielder, spied Mays’s look-alike and said, “Let’s throw them Boles and get the hell out of here!”
The bus eventually left, and everyone made it home safely. When Mays reached his house, he answered some calls from friends who wanted World Series tickets, then went to sleep.
For the Giants, the World Series in 1962, as in 1951, felt like an anticlimax. They had the same opponent as before, and the Series began the day after the last playoff game. There was no time to rejuvenate. After their harrowing return to San Francisco, most of the players didn’t get home until after midnight, and the first pitch of Game One was in the afternoon. Two hours before game time, Mays sat motionless at his locker. “Willie,” a reporter asked, “are you as tense before this game as you were in 1951 and 1954?”
“Man,” Mays said, “after that playoff in Los Angeles, I’m all out of tense.”
Mays was actually in good shape physically compared to some of his teammates. Second baseman Chuck Hiller, spiked twice in the past week, had raw welts on his left shin, and his bruised right ankle was nearly black. Both Jack Sanford and Jim Davenport were battling colds. Davenport’s ulcers were also flaring; he was supposed to avoid cigarettes, but by the start of the Series, he was smoking more than a pack a day. Tom Haller, the catcher, had been spiked in the second playoff game and had six inches of stitches in his left forearm. Jose Pagan’s legs were completely bandaged, and in the first game, Felipe Alou had scraped his arm on the fence while trying to make a catch, leaving a four-inch welt.
The Yankees, despite winning nine fewer games than the Giants, were heavy favorites, having won nine out of the last fourteen World Series and thirteen out of the last fifteen pennants. The year 1962 featured the famed “M&M Boys,” Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris. The previous year had been one of the most memorable in Yankee history, with Maris’s sixty-one homers breaking Babe Ruth’s record; the team had won 109 games and defeated the Reds in the World Series in five games. In 1962, their record wasn’t as good (94–68), but they led the league in hitting, had six All-Stars across a deep veteran lineup, and Mantle won his third MVP award. The Yankees, having won the pennant by five games, were also rested.
Second-year Yankee manager Ralph Houk could barely hide his contempt for the Giants. Asked whether they impressed him, he had to take a long pause. Then he said, “Well, naturally—they have men—they have several players who naturally impress you.”
The Series did bring the Fall Classic to San Francisco for the first time, which, according to Herb Caen, briefly put the city’s much-maligned ballpark in a better light. “Even Candlestick Park,” he wrote, “which sometimes gives the uncomfortable impression that a giant had taken the Embarcadero Freeway and bent it into a horseshoe, looked brighter than usual. Flags, banners, and splashy clothes on the overflow crowd, which included both people and politicians, gave the place the touches of color it too often lacks.” Caen, however, was underwhelmed by the opponents. “The Yankees have twice as many prima donnas as the S. F. Opera Company.”
With veteran Whitey Ford pitching—he had not allowed a run in his last thirty-one World Series innings—the Yankees won the first game, 6–2. Mays, who had had six hits in seven at-bats in All-Star games against Ford, stroked three singles, but the game validated expectations of a Yankee romp. The next day, however, Jack Sanford shut out the Yankees, 2–0, which included a McCovey home run off Ralph Terry. The victory revived the Giants. “If we lose now,” Felipe Alou said after the game, “it’s because they are the better team.”
When the Series shifted to New York, the win-loss pattern continued: the Yankees won Game Three, lost Game Four, won Game Five. For the most part, the contests were close and low-scoring, with the heavy artillery on both teams kept mostly in check. Mantle hit .120, Maris, .174, Cepeda, .158. An unlikely hitting star emerged in Game Four, when Chuck Hiller cracked the first World Series grand slam ever by a National Leaguer, pacing the Giants to a 7–3 victory.
In New York, Mays chipped in only two singles in three games, and he vented his frustration during batting practice before Game Five. After the regulars completed their swings, catcher Ed Bailey, who was not starting that day, stepped in and took a practice swing. Unknown to Bailey, Mays came in behind him, hoping for a couple of extra swings, and Bailey’s bat almost hit him. Mays yelled at Bailey, then stepped in the batter’s box while Bailey stood in the opposite box waiting for the pitch. For a few seconds, neither man moved until Bailey finally deferred. The pitcher, however, threw the ball in the dirt. Mays picked it up, and as he fungoed it, he cursed the pitcher and walked away. “It was the one ugly moment in the Series, and a minor one at that,” Arnold Hano wrote, “and you have to remember that all through the Series, Willie Mays kept saying, ‘I’m so tired, I can’t wait for this thing to end.’ ”
The 1962 Series is known less for any specific play than for the rain. A downpour delayed Game Five for one day, then, as the teams traveled back to San Francisco, a huge storm with gale-force winds swept across the northern California coast, causing five deaths. San Francisco absorbed nearly two inches of rain in less than one day before two more days of rain. It finally stopped, but the conditions exposed another liability of Candlestick—poor drainage. Stoneham hired three helicopters to dry the fields, but that didn’t work. The Series experienced three rainouts and two travel days, and by October 14, everyone thought Commissioner Ford Frick would declare the field ready to play, if only because the delays had forced him to delay a trip to Japan. But he said the stadium needed another day to dry out.
NBC, which was broadcasting the Series, was apparently short on backup programming. During one delay, Mel Allen spoke on the air for an hour and a half. One journalist, desperate for copy, asked Willie Mays, “How do you feel about the nation’s economy?”
Mays looked at him in disbelief. “You must be kidding,” he said. “I don’t even know how much money I got sitting in my pants.”
Another reporter asked Mays what he’d had for breakfast that day. “I didn’t eat breakfast this morning,” he said. “Why? Number one, I ain’t got a maid. Number two, I ain’t got a wife anymore, and number three, I can’t cook.”
Play finally resumed on October 15. Orlando Cepeda had been 0-for-12 in the Series, 0-for-29 including All-Star games, leading to the criticism that he couldn’t hit in big games. But the days off allowed him to regain his strength and move to a heavier bat, and against Whitey Ford in Game Six, he got a scratch hit his first time up. That seemed to relax him. He got two more hits, including a double, drove in two runs, scored a run, and led the Giants to a 5–2 win behind Billy Pierce’s three-hitter.
That set up the seventh game. No team in major league history had ever had a more grueling season than the Giants—172 games, with a World Series that spanned twelve days and included two cross-country flights. Thus far, Mays’s most significant contributions were on the sodden outfield turf. As Hano wrote:
Once he had gone into left center and, as he made a catch, hurdled Felipe Alou so that Alou slid under him. It was breathless, perfect synchronization. A second time he had gone into left centerfield, and this time Matty Alou had come over and made the catch, and Mays slid under Alou. They never touched; they never brushed. The Yankee outfielders played well all Series, but countless times they were banging together, committing last minute lunges, fighting wind, and looking a bit like novices. As did Kuenn, McCovey, and at times Felipe Alou, of the Giants. Only Mays was magnificent in the outfield all Series long.
Game Seven was another duel between Sanford and Terry, both of whom had pitched superbly in Game Two. Terry offered a compelling subplot. In the seventh game of the 1960 World Series, he had surrendered the game-winning home run to Bill Mazeroski in the ninth inning. In 1962, he went 23–12, with the most victories in the American League, but he was still haunted by his previous failure. He told a writer before Game Seven at Candlestick, “After that Mazeroski home run in 1960, the fact that this team is letting me pitch the seventh game is like a tonic to me.”
The game was scoreless until the fifth inning, when the Yankees pushed across a run on a bases-loaded double play. The Giants didn’t even get their first baserunner until the sixth, when Sanford singled. Mays had bad luck in the seventh: he hit the ball long and hard into left but right into the teeth of the wind. The ball stayed in the park, and left fielder Tom Tresh made a running one-handed “snow cone” catch. McCovey followed with his own moon blast that stayed in the park and fell for a triple; he was stranded when Cepeda struck out.
The Yankees appeared ready to break the game open in the eighth when they loaded the bases with nobody out and had Maris at the plate. Relief pitcher Billy O’Dell took over and promptly induced Maris to hit into a forceout at the plate and Elston Howard to rap into a double play. Two ground balls, and the Giants still had life.
Their bats, however, remained silent, and they trailed, 1–0, going into the bottom of the ninth. Terry, working on a two-hitter, stayed in the game. Dark needed a pinch hitter and chose Matty Alou, just as he had in the last playoff game when the Giants trailed in the ninth. Alou once again came through, this time dragging a bunt past Terry for a single. The crowd of 43,943, quiet for most of the afternoon, began to make noise. Houk peered nervously out of a silent dugout while Dark paced his own. The next hitter, Felipe Alou, tried to bunt his brother over, failed, and struck out.
With one out, Hiller was the batter. Dark was sometimes accused of “overmanaging,” of not allowing his squad to simply play. In this case, he took the bat out of Hiller’s hands and asked him to bunt as well. Even if he was successful, the Giants would be down to their last out. But Hiller couldn’t get the bunt down and, with one swing left, also struck out.
The season came down to one hitter—Willie Mays. And he had one thing on his mind. “I was going for the bomb,” he later said. “We needed a home run. I was going for it.” Terry jammed him on two inside pitches, then blazed one on the outside part of the plate, knee high. “I felt I had real good stuff on it,” Terry later said.
Mays was hoping for a pitch to pull. He didn’t have time to adjust his stride but, just using his wrists, flicked his bat through the strike zone and hit the ball squarely. A line drive went down the right field line for an extra-base hit. The crowd roared as Alou, a speedy runner, put his head down, rounded second, headed for third, and looked for the signal from third base coach Whitey Lockman.
Right fielder Roger Maris was playing Mays to pull. At the crack of the bat, it appeared the ball would reach the fence, which would have scored Alou while giving Mays a triple. But the soggy outfield slowed the ball down. Though known as a slugger, Maris had also won a Gold Glove; he got a good jump on this hit and closed on it. A right-handed thrower, he was able to cut the ball off just shy of the warning track, pivot in one sweeping motion, and fire toward second baseman Bobby Richardson. Lockman saw the play, threw up his arms, and stopped Alou, with Mays pulling in at second.
Reporters and fans alike instantly questioned whether Lockman should have sent Alou, but the argument had to wait. The next hitter was Willie McCovey, who had already homered off Terry in Game Two and tripled off him today. Houk went to the mound to talk to his right-hander; most of the Giants assumed he was instructing Terry to walk McCovey to get to the next hitter, the right-handed Cepeda. The conference was brief; Terry later acknowledged flashbacks to 1960 and the hope for redemption. “A man,” he said, “rarely gets a second chance like I did.”
Surprisingly, Terry pitched to McCovey, who swung at the first pitch, a curve, and fouled it down the right field line. The second pitch was a fastball, and McCovey uncoiled his massive arms, swung ferociously, and sent a tracer to the right side. Mays took off with the expectation of scoring the winning run. The fans screamed. But the ball, a sinking line drive, sailed right to Richardson, who snared it, staggered, but held on. The Yankees won the World Series.
“A few inches,” Alvin Dark muttered after the game. “That was twice as hard a line drive as any man can hit.” When a reporter said that McCovey hit the ball so hard he doubted Mays would have scored, Dark said, “By the time they got the ball home, Mays would have been dressed.”
McCovey, who was even more media-shy than Mays, spoke with pride. “A man hits the ball as hard as he can,” he said. “He can’t feel bad about what he does. Of course you want to win. Of course you’d rather hit one off the fists and break your bat and have it drop in, but if you hit it hard, that’s all you can do.... We are a great team, and the Yankees know it too.”
Mays didn’t get the ring, but he laid to rest any doubt about his ability to deliver under pressure. In his last at-bat in the regular season, his homer had won the game. In his last at-bat in the playoff, his single drove in a run and extended the rally. And in his last at-bat in the World Series, his double nearly tied the game.
His double also generated the most controversy—should Lockman have sent Alou? Both Lockman and Dark defended the decision, as did Houk. “Matty would have been out by a mile,” he said. Art Rosenbaum later wrote: “Most Yankees and Giants who had a clear look at the flight of Maris’s throw and the advancement of Alou later agreed: it would have been suicide to send Matty home.”
Mays was not among those “Yankees and Giants.” He has never specifically criticized Lockman but reframes the argument by saying what he would have done had he been the runner. He notes all of the things that the Yankees had to do to make the out: Maris had to field the ball cleanly and throw it accurately, Richardson had to catch it and throw it on target, and Elston Howard had to catch it and make the tag. Each step in the sequence increased the possibility of a mishap, and indeed, Richardson’s throw was up the line. McCovey’s final out was a reminder of how deeply the odds are stacked against the hitter. For most batters, the probability of getting a hit is less than 30 percent, and even a scorching line drive doesn’t guarantee success.
Mays’s regret was not that Alou was held at third but that he had not been the runner. He would have ignored Lockman and sped for the plate. The prospect of a furious collision with a two-hundred-pound catcher didn’t bother him one bit.
“Elston Howard and I,” Mays said, “would have had some fun at home.”
The Most Valuable Player Award stimulates a perennial debate: should it go to the best player on the best team—his value enhanced by virtue of his leading his team to a pennant—or should it simply go to the best player in the league? In 1962, the sportswriters who voted for the award tended to favor pennant-winners. Over the previous twelve years ending in 1961, eight of the MVPs in both leagues had also won pennant championships. In 1962, Mantle won the award while his teammate Bobby Richardson came in second place.
By those standards, it appeared that Mays would scoop up his second MVP in 1962. He led the league in homers (49), total bases (382), and putouts by an outfielder (425); was second in RBIs (141) and runs (130); third in slugging percentage (.615); and he hit .303. The only player with comparable numbers was Dodger Tommy Davis (.346, 153 RBIs, 120 runs, 27 home runs). They each had 18 stolen bases, though Mays won the Gold Glove. Even if Davis had a slight statistical edge, Mays’s contributions in winning the championship should have put him over.
Davis’s teammate Maury Wills, however, won the MVP, with Mays coming in second and Davis third. Wills hit only .299, with 6 homers and 48 RBIs, and he scored the same number of runs as Mays, but his 104 stolen bases carried the day. The vote was close. Twenty writers cast ballots, and each was allowed to choose up to ten players, ranked 1 to 10, with number 1 receiving 14 points, number 2 receiving 9 points, and so on. Wills’s point total was 209; Mays’s was 202. (Mantle, by contrast, won 234–152.)
No one would dispute that Wills’s 104 stolen bases was a magnificent achievement as well as unexpected: the previous year he had stolen 35. What’s harder to defend is that out of twenty writers, Mays received five votes for third place and four for fourth place. Almost half the voters, in other words, did not believe that Mays was among the top two players in the league, while four writers inexplicably judged him fourth best.
In a column for the Sporting News, Dan Daniel noted that Maury Wills wasn’t the best player in the league. He wasn’t even the best player on the Dodgers. “I have the highest regard for Wills... but the Dodgers failed [to win the pennant]. The Giants won because they had, among them, one Willie Mays.”
Why was Mays snubbed? His relationship with the men who did the voting, the writers, is the most plausible explanation. By any reading of the record, most reporters and columnists across the country, and by now in San Francisco, thought highly of Mays. In 1962, the Los Angeles Times’ Jim Murray wrote that Mays “doesn’t drink or smoke and scandal has never touched his life. He is a credit not to his race but to the human race.” In 1964, the New York Times’ Arthur Daley said that Mays “was unquestionably one of the best-liked men in baseball.”
But Mays always had his critics. He rarely disclosed much except to his favorite reporters; he could be snappish if he didn’t like a question or would stand up interviewers entirely. He was always his worst publicist. Some reporters took offense, and the possibility that several aggrieved writers cost Mays the league’s top honor was given credence when a similar MVP race unfolded twelve years later. In 1974, the Cardinals’ Lou Brock broke Wills’s record with 118 steals, but the MVP went to the Dodgers’ Steve Garvey, who won on the grounds that he was a more complete player than Brock and was the best performer on a pennant-winner. Granted, the stolen base might have been devalued by 1974; but by the criteria that elected Garvey, Mays should also have won.
Mays was gracious in defeat. “I was glad to see Maury Wills get it,” he told the Sporting News in December 1962. “He deserved it for having beaten Ty Cobb’s long-standing stolen-base record.” That Mays and Wills were good friends no doubt made the outcome easier for Mays, though he has always insisted that individual awards didn’t matter to him, nor did records. Asked in 1968 about his goals, he said, “I never set goals. If I did, I might think I had to make them and then I’d be playing for myself, not the team.” He was also asked about his biggest thrill. “I don’t try to peg them either. The thrill that satisfies me most is hearing those fans happy in the stands after I do something [special], catch a ball, throw a man out, get a hit, or take an extra base.
“That makes me happiest,” Mays said, “thinking I’ve made the fans happy.”
Mays had little time to worry about the MVP after the 1962 season. Earlier in the year, he had agreed to go on one more barnstorming tour provided the Giants didn’t win the pennant. When the Dodgers seemed comfortably ahead in the final two weeks, Mays allowed the promoters to book him on the ten-day tour. That was a mistake. “I committed myself to make the trip,” he said after the season, “and now I wish I hadn’t.”
Before it began, the Giants insisted that Mays undergo another round of tests at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco. They confirmed that “simple exhaustion” had caused Mays’s blackout, but his three days in the hospital allowed the staff and patients to form the Willie Mays Fan Club, which presented him, on his final day, with a two-layer cake with number 24 on top. On his way to the press room, Mays walked down the hallway of the pediatrics ward, which was lined with nurses and patients. Rolling the cake with him, Mays stopped and gave pieces to his friends. He spoke briefly to reporters, and “on his way out,” the Examiner wrote, “baseball’s highest salaried star stopped at virtually every bed to give a disabled kid a pat or a hug and a few cheering words.” With regular news bulletins about his release, a huge crowd was waiting for him outside.
Mays caught up with the barnstormers in Wichita, Kansas. There had been no tour the year before, so this was one last effort to see if barnstorming was still viable. A backbreaking schedule was planned—ten games in seven states in nine days, all covered by car. Thirty major leaguers participated, including Tommy Davis, Willie McCovey, and Vada Pinson, but after Mays, the biggest name was Satchel Paige. Buck O’Neil managed one of the teams. Every player was supposed to get $100 a game except for Mays, who would get more.
The tour fizzled quickly. The first game in Wichita drew a decent crowd, 6,500, but the next game was supposed to be the following day in Monroe, Louisiana—a 650-mile all-night trip. The players, informed of the schedule, canceled that trip and headed for Kansas City, 200 miles away. That game drew fewer than a thousand fans. The next contest, in Little Rock, Arkansas, was also poorly attended, and the tour was finally canceled. BARNSTORM TOUR FLOPPO AT GATE, FOLDS EN ROUTE, reported the Sporting News . Mays, long accustomed to traveling in comfort and still trying to recover from the long season, was through with all forms of winter ball. He still needed the money, but his body needed the rest.
It was the final barnstorming tour. Fans in remote communities didn’t need it anymore, with television bringing the major leagues into their homes. Expansion into new cities and the emergence of the Instructional Leagues in Florida also increased access to the best players. As Thomas Barthel describes in Baseball Barnstorming and Exhibition Games, the tours were doomed as well by the slow death of semipro teams and the Negro Leagues, whose players had provided opposition. With minor league teams also in decline, professional baseball was increasingly becoming a big-city attraction.
Willie Mays was one of the few players who straddled baseball’s different eras, cultures, and communities. He was there in the glory days of the Negro Leagues, he was there at the height of the barnstorming tours, he was there in the trenches of the minor leagues, he was there in the exotica of foreign lands, and he was there in the golden age of New York, the sunshine of California, and the bright lights of the World Series, carving a legacy of depth and scope that few would rival.