Ever since Orlando Cepeda joined the Giants, he and Mays formed the best power-hitting duo in baseball. Between 1958 and 1964 they hit 488 home runs, nine more than Hank Aaron and Eddie Mathews hit for the Braves during that span. On the Giants, Cepeda and Mays were also the most prominent Latin and black players, respectively, but their positions were not equal. Cepeda was the budding star in line to succeed Mays as the team’s MVP and perhaps the league’s. In 1959, Look magazine asked the question directly in its story, “Orlando Cepeda: Will He Pass Willie Mays?”
The notion of the temperamental prince usurping the proud king caused some stress. Cepeda later wrote: “It’s not a secret that Willie Mays and I didn’t get on that well.... Willie began to distance himself from me almost immediately.... Willie was a private person and a loner, so it was hard to figure out what he was thinking. I was hurt when he didn’t congratulate me on being named the Giants’ MVP and the National League Rookie of the Year.” In a subsequent interview, Cepeda says he now regards Mays as a friend. “That’s just the way Willie is—I don’t think he’s close to anybody. But most players are like that. I’m not close to McCovey either. That’s the way we are. Very seldom do you see good ballplayers close. I don’t know why.”
Mays has always denied any friction between him and Cepeda, and when they were teammates, he repeatedly commended him in the press. Asked in 1961 about an alleged beef with Cepeda, he said, “I’ve never had an argument with him about anything. I’ve tried to help him”—in playing the outfield and adjusting to the major leagues—“and I did help him, but I don’t want any credit for it, because he’s a wonderful ballplayer.”
Besides, Mays’s relationship with his teammates was the least of the Giants’ problems. For five years, the team had four future Hall of Famers on the field at one time: Cepeda, Marichal, Mays, and McCovey. A fifth, Gaylord Perry, pitched in his first game for the Giants in 1962. Having come so close to winning a World Series, the Giants should have been focused on finding that one missing piece to push them over. A championship? Hell, they should have had a dynasty. For Mays, the tragedy was not that he lacked close friends on the team but that he was drawn into an ethnic and racial maelstrom that undermined such a talented club.
Cepeda’s troubles with Alvin Dark resurfaced at the end of 1962, with the publication of an article in Look that Cepeda thought would describe him as the best right-handed hitter in baseball. The article, however, was called: ORLANDO CEPEDA: CAN HE SLUG HIS WAY OUT OF THE DOGHOUSE? In it, Dark described his heretofore secret grading system for players. Unhappy with such conventional measures as batting average, home runs, errors, and stolen bases, he wanted to evaluate more precisely how players contributed to winning games, so he devised his own system of pluses and minuses. Thus, a home run in the first inning might get one plus while a homer in the ninth that won a game might get four. There were pluses and minuses for everything. But the system was highly subjective, and no one besides Dark understood it. Regardless, he explained to Look that Mays graded out the best and Jim Davenport was second. But Cepeda? “He had more minuses than anybody,” Dark said.
Cepeda did slump during the stretch drive in 1962, but given his numbers (.306, 35 homers, 114 RBIs) as well as his track record (four consecutive All-Star games), Dark’s evaluation was hard to fathom. In 1966, when Mays testified in a libel suit that Cepeda brought against Look, he was asked if Cepeda was a team player. “When you hit over .300 and bat in over a hundred runs,” he said, “you have to be.”
Cepeda, meanwhile, was convinced that Dark was “trying to destroy [me] emotionally.” The hostilities escalated during spring training when Cepeda held out, which he had done in past years, but this time Dark held a press conference to reiterate his harsh views about Cepeda’s “productive value.” Cepeda ended his holdout after securing a $1,000 raise, but any hope for a reconciliation between him and Dark was gone.
By the start of the 1963 season, Mays had his new house, and his divorce proceedings were complete; but his personal problems were far from over. His finances were a mess, and personal bankruptcy loomed as a possibility. Plenty of athletes and entertainers have plunged themselves into debt without ever recovering, and black stars have suffered disproportionately. The most famous, and perhaps most tragic, was Joe Louis, who died in 1981 owing the federal government more than $2 million.
Mays managed to avoid that fate. In 1962 he met a banker who played a central role in rescuing him. This relationship was one of several that he forged over the years with San Francisco businessmen who helped him gain access to country clubs and social clubs and win broader acceptance in the city. As the years passed and he approached retirement, Mays reached out to other businessmen to help with his life after baseball. These patrons were not entirely altruistic. Whether you ran a bank, a hotel, an insurance company, or a car dealership, your association with a sports legend was good for customer relations, and Mays helped the owners of all those businesses. But many of his advisers were also motivated by a genuine desire to help someone who needed both guidance and protection, and no one was more devoted than Jacob Shemano.
His was the classic immigrant success story. Jacob was two years old when his family moved to America from Russia. They settled in San Francisco, and his father worked as a barber on Golden Gate Avenue. Jacob attended San Francisco State College, pumping gas to the pay his tuition. After school, he got into the installment credit and finance business, married, had two sons, and became involved in civic activities. Mayor Christopher appointed him to the San Francisco Housing Authority in 1957. What Shemano really wanted was his own bank, but in the 1940s and ’50s, few if any Jews in California were given charters for state banks.
An opportunity, however, arose when John Kennedy entered the White House in 1961. Shemano had gone to high school with Kennedy’s press secretary, Pierre Salinger; in Washington on a business trip, he told his old friend about his struggles in getting a state-chartered bank. Before long, Shemano received a call from the White House: the president wanted to see him. Shemano met the president and was given a federal charter. At the age of forty-nine, he opened Golden Gate National Bank on Montgomery Street in San Francisco’s financial district. Shemano, according to one news account, looked “more like a Hollywood Buddha than a banker,” for he favored green velvet shirts and smoked English Ovals. But true to his roots, he kept the doors open on Saturdays so working-class customers could meet with bank officers. His friendship with the mayor also helped: the city deposited $1 million with the new bank, and the mayor himself purchased more than 1,600 shares of stock in the company.
One day in 1962, Jake Shemano’s teenage son, Gary, was invited to Candlestick Park to shag flies and pitch batting practice with the Giants. “The only guy who was nice to me in the clubhouse was Willie,” Gary recalls. “Amazingly enough. The superstar of all superstars.” His father came down to see Gary, and in the clubhouse he was introduced to Mays, and the two struck up a conversation. Shemano loved sports, and like many Jewish immigrants, he got along with African Americans; he took the unusual step, for example, of hiring black tellers for his bank. Mays thought he found a man he could trust and met with Shemano privately at the end of the year. “From a business standpoint,” Mays later said, “it was the most important single moment of my life.”
Mays told Shemano that he had been advised to declare for personal bankruptcy, which would protect him from his creditors. His advisers said it was his only way out.
Shemano, who hadn’t reviewed Mays’s finances yet, looked at him. “Well,” he said, “it’s good advice. It can be the way out for you. Except for one thing.”
“What’s the one thing?”
“If you file for bankruptcy, I will say again that it can be the sound and logical move in the shape you’re in—but if you do, then I want nothing to do with it.”
Shemano understood that while companies can file for bankruptcy protection, reorganize, and emerge as viable, a baseball player had to protect something besides his assets. He had to protect his image. Filing for personal bankruptcy carried a heavy stigma, and in Mays’s case, it would forever redefine him. “You’re a baseball player, not some slick corporate executive somewhere, living off of stock options and pension plans and all the other stunts,” Shemano said. “Kids look up to you.”
“I know that,” Mays said.
“Do you know it?” he said. “You made $90,000 last year. You’ll make better than $100,000 next year. What does it look like to a kid who finds out that Willie Mays, his idol, makes $100,000 and can’t pay his taxes?”
Actually, Mays’s problems were even worse. Given his debt to the Giants, the club began deducting money from his paycheck. It was possible that his actual take-home pay would be less than his state and federal taxes, and he already owed the State of California and the federal government $8,641. He owed as well $15,000 a year in alimony and child support payments. Following bad advice, he had made costly investments in some real estate and restaurant deals, which he called “the quick way to find your way to the soup kitchen.” Yet he continued to spend money freely on his new home and its extravagant decor.
As far as Mays was concerned, a bankruptcy filing didn’t really matter. “I’m down here in the pit,” he told Shemano. “If I can’t climb out of it, I’m not much of an idol to the kids that way either, am I?”
Shemano was familiar with hard times, including some of his own making. “I can tell you one thing,” he said. “There was a time when I was in worse shape than you. And they weren’t even my own obligations. I’d underwritten some things for other people, and they went sour. I was three times worse off than you are now. But I came out of it.”
“Then come out of it with me,” Mays said.
“Not if you’re talking bankruptcy,” he responded. “If you are, you can clear out right now.”
Mays said he wasn’t talking bankruptcy, his adviser was. Shemano said he would help on one condition: he had to follow his advice to the letter. Mays agreed.
In 1963, Mays signed a contract for $105,000, making him the highest paid player in baseball. (Mickey Mantle earned $100,000.) But Shemano negotiated an installment plan with Stoneham that deferred income. Presumably the deferral, which allowed Stoneham to retain capital for his own purposes, was used to increase Mays’s ultimate payout. By 1966, when Mays’s finances had stabilized, more than half his income was deferred. According to his contract, Mays signed for $125,000, but only $50,000 was to be paid during the year. Some $30,000 would be paid in 1970; $30,000 more would be allocated in 1971; and the last $15,000, in 1972. By then Mays would be forty-one. Shemano not only wanted him to avoid squandering money but may also have been considering his retirement needs.
Mays had often had father figures, but Shemano was the first one not associated with baseball. In 1963 Mays agreed to deposit every dollar of his current income into the trust department of Shemano’s bank, which started paying off Mays’s debts while giving Mays an allowance. Shemano did not provide investment advice but found him a lawyer and an accountant. He also gave him an office on the fifth floor of his bank, down the hall from his own. He gave him some introductory books on finance and arranged for him to do some public relations work. Mays sat in on some customer meetings, signed baseballs, and spoke to groups of kids in the boardroom. Shemano set up lunch meetings with the likes of California’s attorney general, Stanley Mosk, and he reviewed business deals for Mays with Gillette and other sponsors. He and his wife also took Mays and a girlfriend to the theater.
Shemano told Sports Illustrated in 1964: “Willie has been taken in by more people that he had confidence in. He has a good searching mind, but he has never paid any attention. He cared only about being a ballplayer. When I took him on, I did it only with the understanding that he would also have the finest legal advice and the finest public accountant. I am not his financial adviser. I’m just the keeper of the keys. We’ve put Willie on a budget. We have made him prepare himself to live under a limited income, as he will have to do when he is through playing.”
Mays was always self-conscious about his lack of formal education, and Shemano noticed how quickly he seized on that with children. “He’ll meet a kid,” he said, “and the first thing he’ll say is, ‘What school do you go to and what grade are you in?’ And you know, now he talks about saving money too. When his son was out here this winter, he was playing catch one day, and I asked him what he wanted to do when he grew up. Right away, like most kids, he said he wanted to be a ballplayer. Willie came over and patted him on the head. ‘No, Michael,’ he said. ‘Be a doctor. We need them.’ What has happened is that he has changed from Willie Mays the young man to Willie Mays the man.”
Mays said in 1964, “If I had met Jake ten years ago, I’d be a millionaire today. He and his family are the best friends I’ve ever had in my life. They’re wonderful people.”
Mays developed a strong rapport with Jake’s two sons, Richard and Gary. When Richard decided to get married, the first person he told was Mays. Gary played football for Lowell High School, and Mays was a surprise visitor at one of his rallies; he would also go out to Kezar Stadium to root for him. When Gary missed an extra point in a game against St. Ignatius, he was heartbroken. Mays cheered him up with a gift: his autographed bat from the 1962 World Series. Gary went on to the University of Southern California, and when Mays was in Los Angeles to play the Dodgers, Gary would go with Mays and his friends to the city’s black neighborhoods, or Mays would stop by his dorm room.
When Gary took a girl to a ball game at Candlestick, he would devise a plan with Mays to impress his guest. Before the game, Mays would jog past their seats behind the Giants’ dugout and yell, “Hey, Gary! Hey, Gary!”
“Hi, Willie!” he’d respond.
“I got something for you.” Mays would throw him a baseball, and Gary would hand it to his date. The ball was inscribed: “Julie, Gary’s friend. Willie Mays.”
Gary recalls, “You can’t put a price tag on that.”
For all their closeness, the relationship between Mays and the Shemanos was not entirely about family love, nor was it altogether reciprocal. Jake Shemano never charged Mays for his services, but he recognized Mays’s commercial value as the ambassador for his fledgling bank. Other businessmen who befriended Mays, such as the hotelier Mel Swig, the insurance executive Richard Goldman, and the architect who designed his house, Al Maisin, were all drawn to Mays by his personal appeal as well as his star power. “If Willie wasn’t the greatest ballplayer in the world, would they have felt the same way about him? Probably not,” Gary Shemano says. “But they felt Willie was vulnerable, and they wanted to protect him.”
Mays welcomed their friendship, but he always kept a certain distance, even with the Shemanos. It was usually Jake or his sons who called Willie, and while Willie would share a laugh with them and help in any way, he would never reveal his fears, his dreams, or his soul. “I don’t think I ever had a serious conversation with Willie,” Gary says. “He never opened up.” The reserve was evident not just in conversation. “I come from a hugging family,” he says, “and I would give Willie a hug. It was not comfortable for him.”
Over the years, Mays developed a habit of promising to show up at a dinner or a function and fail to appear. Rhoda Shemano used to complain to her husband, but Jake defended him. Mays didn’t like the spotlight. He’s always traveling. He was tired. And he never had a better friend than Jacob Shemano. “My father’s life,” Gary says, “was dedicated to his family, to his religion, to his shareholders, and to Willie Mays.”
Pitching dominated 1963, with the Giants involved in some memorable duels. Sandy Koufax threw a no-hitter against them on May 11 and had a perfect game into the eighth; the lefty threw eleven shutouts in the year, which no pitcher except Bob Gibson has matched. Juan Marichal also threw a no-hitter in 1963—two walks shy of a perfect game—against the Houston Colt .45s. But the finest pitching showcase occurred at Candlestick Park on July 2, when Marichal faced Warren Spahn of the Milwaukee Braves. Neither team could score through nine innings, and both Marichal and Spahn continued working. In that era, clubs paid little concern to overusing a pitcher, and going the distance was expected, particularly from an ace. On this day, Dark wanted to lift Marichal, who refused. “In the twelfth or thirteenth, he wanted to take me out, and I said, ‘Please, please. Let me stay,’ ” Marichal recalled. “Then in the fourteenth, he said, ‘No more for you.’ And I said, ‘Do you see that man on the mound?’ And I was pointing to Warren. ‘That man is forty-two, and I’m twenty-five. I’m not ready for you to take me out.’ ”
By the time Mays came to bat in the bottom of the sixteenth with one out, he had gone 0-for-5, with a walk. But Spahn, after 276 pitches, finally made a mistake—a screwball that “didn’t break worth a damn”—and Mays hit it over the left field fence, ending the four-hour, ten-minute marathon. He says it was one of his biggest homers: it allowed Marichal to win a historic duel. (Among his other all-time homers, Mays counts his very first, also off Spahn, and his four in one day in Milwaukee in 1961.)
The blast also helped Mays secure a record that will never be challenged. By the time he retired, he had hit a homer in every inning from one to sixteen. It’s such a freakish mark—how many players even have a hit in every inning from one to sixteen? how many players even have an at-bat?—that not much is made of it, but it’s an achievement that defines Mays’s essential qualities: his durability, his power, and his clutch hitting.
Notwithstanding his sixteenth-inning long ball, Mays got off to a miserable start in 1963, hitting .233 in April and .257 in May. Jose Pagan sought divine intervention. “In the dugout, every time Willie comes up, I pray for him,” he said in early June. “He is a good fellow. He laughs and he jokes, but I know inside him he is dying because he is not hitting.” Dark and Feeney worried about his eyesight but, fearing his wrath, were unwilling to ask if he had had his eyes examined during his physical. So they asked Charlie Einstein.
“You could just mention it in passing,” Feeney told him in Dark’s office before a game. “You know, just in passing.”
“Kind of like an idle question,” Dark said. “It’s like if it comes from you, it’s not official. It’s like that he won’t know you’ve been talking to us.”
Einstein went through the tunnel, walked onto the field, and fell in alongside Mays at the batting cage. “Say, Buck,” he said. “You notice how many players are wearing glasses this year?”
“Like who?” he said.
“Well, Howard—Frank Howard. He’s got glasses.”
“He ain’t hitting either,” Mays said.
Mays, in fact, did have his eyes checked and was told they were fine. He never had any explanation for his streaks, though in this case, one of his longtime chroniclers, Arnold Hano, had a theory. In spring training, he watched the Giants play the Cleveland Indians, and after McCovey hit a homer, pitcher Jim Perry (brother of Gaylord) threw a thunderbolt at Mays’s head, flattening him. Mays cautiously stood up, got back into the box, and was immediately decked on the next pitch. A few innings later, McCovey hit another home run, and Perry again threw a fastball at Mays’s left ear. “It is the closest I’ve seen a man come to being killed, without actually being touched,” Hano wrote. “Mays got up again, took a toehold, and swung furiously at the next pitch. He missed because he was swinging out of anger, and he was overswinging.”
Mays, of course, had been thrown at for years, but Hano believed that word had spread among the pitchers that Mays could be intimidated. Now he said, “Every game you knew that some pitch would come flying in at his ear and send him spinning to the ground.” There was a grain of truth in Met relief pitcher Larry Bearnarth’s comment that the “only way to get Willie out is to hit him in the back, then pick him off first base.” In Lee Mendelson’s documentary, Mays acknowledged that no batter hits as well when he’s been thrown at or expects to be thrown at. Perhaps all the knockdown pitches were taking their toll, though at least Mays’s reflexes remained sharp—he was hit only twice during the season.
His slump also renewed concerns about his age, a source of quiet rumblings for several years. On May 6, he turned thirty-two. Conventional wisdom held that a batter peaks between twenty-eight and thirty-two, but some players’ skills begin to erode before then. After Willie had endured an 0-for-18 stretch in May, an unnamed Giant executive suggested in the press that he was through. Mays was too proud, too sensitive, to ignore the slight, which offended him as deeply as the boos. “Here we go again,” he said. “It just seems that some guys wait until me or somebody else goes bad and they knock us down and kick us. Believe me, nobody knows better than me that my batting average is low. I sleep with it.... It hurts when we don’t win, and it hurts when I don’t help.”
Retirement terrified Mays. Baseball was his life, and few observers believed his career was truly winding down. He still had a thirty-two-inch waist, and while he may have lost a step, he was still one of the better runners in the game. Bob Stevens wrote: “The 32-year-old superstar is about as washed up as General Motors.”
New York continued its romancing of its long-lost center fielder. With the Giants in town, May 3 was declared Willie Mays Night at the Polo Grounds. He was given a gold key to the city and a wide assortment of gifts, including a bicycle, a year’s supply of coffee, and—from the New York Chapter of the Baseball Writers’ Association—a typewriter. Mays donated the gifts to the New York City Police Athletic Association. Bill Shea, the lawyer who helped bring the National League back to New York, told the crowd: “We want to know, Mr. Stoneham, Horace Stoneham, president of the Giants—when are you going to give us back our Willie Mays?”
Just before taking the field, Mays received a telegram from the White House. It read:
I would like to join the many loyal fans at the Polo Grounds tonight honoring your achievements in the world of baseball. This honor is well deserved and I know we can look forward to many years of the exciting spectacle of Willie Mays at bat and in the field. My very best wishes to all of your friends tonight. (Signed) John F. Kennedy
The players were still selecting the starters for the 1963 All-Star Game, and when Mays received his ballot, two weeks before the July 9 contest, he voted for Vada Pinson in center field. Though he wanted to start, Pinson was having the better year. Mays’s peers, however, voted for him, giving him his eleventh consecutive start in an All-Star Game and returning him to Cleveland Stadium, where he had made his All-Star debut in 1954. Mays always reveled in the Midsummer Classic’s attention and drama as well as the camaraderie. When he arrived, he found a message for him, in heavy black crayon, from Whitey Ford, who had been in Cleveland two days earlier with the Yankees. “Willie: Sorry I didn’t make the team, but [manager Ralph Houk] didn’t want me to make you look bad. Whitey.” Mays had had six hits in seven at-bats against Ford in previous All-Star games.
This year’s contest was different in one respect. Reporters asked Mays if he thought he was getting too old. Mays left his answer on the field. He collected a single, which tied Stan Musial’s All-Star record of twenty hits while lifting his average to .417 in fourteen All-Star games. He also walked, stole two bases, scored two runs, and drove in two runs (one on the single, one on an infield out). He made the defensive play of the game as well. In the eighth inning, with the National League up by a run, he raced back on a long drive by Joe Pepitone, snaring the ball just before his right foot got caught beneath the wire fence. Mays did a brief war dance of pain and hobbled off, but the play snuffed a possible rally, and the Nationals won, 5–3.
His performance was so complete, so flawless, that Pittsburgh Press reporter Les Biederman was moved to write: “He’s a once in a lifetime ball player, and we may never see his equal in this generation. Whatever he does, he does to perfection.”
Mays said, “I just play the game.”
Mays entered the All-Star break hitting .276. Soon, he went on a tear as if he were making up for lost time. He hit .322 in July, .387 in August, and .378 in September. During one fifteen-game span from July 21 to August 6, he scored twenty-two runs, knocked in twenty, and smacked nine homers. During one week in August, he hit four balls that struck the top of the center field fence in Candlestick, giving him four doubles instead of four more home runs.
He also turned in some of his finest single-day performances, few better than his game against the Braves on August 22. It began with a first-inning walk, which kept the inning alive and allowed Cepeda to drive home two runs. In the third, the Braves’ Lee Maye hit a line drive into right center. The ball was actually past Mays when he reached out and gloved it as he tumbled to the ground. He broke his fall with his glove hand, dug his left shoulder into the ground, then flipped on his back. “It was such a spectacular spill the worst was feared,” the Examiner reported. “The players, Dark, the trainer—all rushed out. The crowd in the stands would have been there too except for the gate.” The game was delayed for ten minutes, but Mays stayed in the game. On base again in the bottom of the inning, he broke up a sure double play with a rolling block into the shortstop, which allowed Felipe Alou to bat, and he hit a three-run homer. Mays later drove in what proved to be the winning run with a single, and after advancing to third, he bolted for home plate on a ball that rolled four or five feet behind catcher Del Crandall. Mays slid in just beneath the throw.
Reporters stopped asking him if was too old to play.
The Giants played better than .500 ball all year but couldn’t close the gap with the Dodgers, and Dark’s frustrations showed, his temper also marked by pettiness. He once gave Pagan a fifty-dollar bill and told him to “take the boys to supper,” which meant the Latin players. Several days later, Dark told Pagan that he was being fined for his failure to hustle.
“How much?” Pagan asked.
“Fifty dollars,” Dark said.
McCovey later said, “Alvin managed percentages, not people.”
During losing streaks, Dark would call clubhouse meetings and sprinkle his lectures with political references and biblical injunctions. He shared his admiration of Barry Goldwater and once said that Jesus was the only man in the history of the world who was perfect. Dark was accustomed to giving “Christian testimonies,” mostly about tithing, for church groups and other gatherings, and he carried that spirit into the clubhouse.
But the clubhouse was a baseball sanctum, and the players had little interest in Dark’s views beyond the ball field. A married man, Dark may have had more authority if he hadn’t been having an affair with a flight attendant, which he later wrote about in his autobiography. “Perhaps if we had not been Christians, with strong beliefs about right and wrong, it would have been easy,” he wrote of his trysts. “We didn’t want to be found out. We didn’t want anyone to know. On the road, we were prisoners in our hotel rooms.” Imprisoned or otherwise, he could not keep the affair a secret, which made his moralizing all the more ridiculous. Mays said, “He didn’t convert anyone to his politics or his religion, and, actually, no one took him seriously when he started to talk like that.”
Mays himself had his first confrontation with Dark on August 2, in Chicago. With the Giants leading, 11–5, in the eighth, a Cub hit a ball to deep center that Mays failed to chase. It went off the wall for a hit, and the Cubs rallied to win. After the game, Dark snapped at Mays: “You laid down on me.”
“I didn’t cost you no seven runs,” Mays yelled back. He knew he was wrong for not hustling but didn’t think he should be reprimanded in front of his teammates. He and Dark didn’t speak for several days, then all was forgotten.
While Mays never took criticism well, he rarely shirked responsibility. In a game against the Dodgers on September 7, he dropped a fly ball. While he averaged eight or nine errors a year, most were on overthrows or booting grounders. His misplay against the Dodgers was his first dropped fly in four years. Afterward, he explained that he lost the ball in the sun and couldn’t find it no matter how many times he flipped his sunglasses up and down. A reporter asked, “Could Felipe Alou have come across in time to catch it if you hollered to tell him you couldn’t see it?”
Mays responded quickly: “Listen, the ball was in my territory. Don’t go trying to give another man my error.”
Thanks to his furious rush in the final months of the season, Mays finished with a .314 average, his highest in three years. For the first time since 1954, he did not lead the league in any major offensive categories, but that didn’t bother him. He was second in slugging average (.582) and runs scored (115), and his 38 home runs was third best. He also drove in 115. What did decline was his stolen bases—he had 8, the first time since 1954 that he was in single digits.
The Giants won eleven fewer games than they had the previous year and finished eleven games behind the Dodgers. Despite missing four games after his collapse on September 2, Mays played in 157, which meant he was otherwise given one day off the rest of the season. He led the team in games played.
And 1963 also marked the last games at the Polo Grounds. Shea Stadium opened the following year. Just before Opening Day, a huge crane rumbled beneath Coogan’s Bluff and took aim at the condemned edifice with a two-ton iron ball. In time, a low-rent housing project stood on the turf where McGraw had snarled at umpires, Ott had lifted his leg, and Mays had made the Catch. With the scoreboard clock frozen at 10:24, there was only the swirl of dust and debris and memory, and as the iron ball crashed against the concrete wall to make its first gaping hole, the workmen doffed their steel helmets in silent tribute. The back of their shirts read: WRECKING CORP. OF AMERICA. The front: GIANTS.
By the time the last piece of steel had slowly fallen from a light tower and sheets of tin flapped gently in the breeze, the wrecking company’s vice president, Harry Avirom, could only admire what once had been.
“Very well built,” he said. “It could have lasted forever.”