Willie Mays took up golf after the 1963 season. At first he found it difficult to hit a stationary ball, but he became a diehard player who would crush his drives three hundred yards, practice his putting on his living room carpet—he’d line up twenty balls at a time—and carry a 4 handicap. Over the years, the game allowed him to break color barriers at country clubs while opening doors for himself socially and in business, and his skills on the links were as stupefying as they were on the diamond. Art Rosenbaum, a longtime San Francisco sportswriter and editor, once played with Mays in a foursome. “We came to a par-3 hole, about two hundred yards,” he recalled, “and he gets up and takes a terrific swing, but tops the ball. It skims along the ground and hits a tee box, and comes right back at him at about 110 miles an hour. He catches the ball, and with one, flowing motion puts it back on the tee and hits it onto the green. It was the most athletic feat I ever saw.”
When Mays had his finest start ever in 1964, Jake Shemano credited golf; according to his theory, Mays’s golf swing was smoothing out his stroke to right center. Mays could no more explain his streaks than he could his slumps, but after one month he was hitting .497, with a slugging percentage of over 1.000 (he had more total bases than at-bats).
His early-season success led to an important milestone for baseball and for race relations, and Mays, free of domestic concerns and his finances stabilized, should have had a triumphant season. Instead, he found himself in the middle of several controversies that were not of his making, altercations that would contribute to a chaotic season that would end with doubts about his supremacy as a player.
Mays’s torrid start left baseball fans turning on their radios in the morning to find out what he had done the night before. He hit six homers in his first six games and twenty by the middle of June while also amassing a twenty-game hitting streak. The hitting spree led to speculation that he would be the first .400 hitter since Ted Williams finished at .406 in 1941. Mays didn’t care for the added scrutiny in 1954, when he threatened Ruth’s record, and he tried to tamp down expectations ten years later, referring to .400 hitters as “extinct animals.” The game had simply changed too much—against hitters—to ever make it realistic. Thirteen players had hit .400, but only two since 1925, and by the early 1960s, barely a dozen players in each league were even hitting .300. The night games, the bigger gloves, the deeper pitching staffs, and the development of the slider were all part of the difference, but Mays, in a diary he kept for Sport, cited travel and scheduling as the biggest deterrents.
When Williams hit .406, Mays wrote, “there was no 162-game schedule and if you traveled overnight, you slept in a bed while you were doing it. The worst time-zone difference was a difference of one hour. Nobody ever heard of checking into a hotel in a new city at 3 A.M. (Nowadays, it seems like there isn’t any other check-in hour except 3 A.M.) Even on home stands, the hours are crazy. Here in San Francisco, we play night games Tuesdays and Fridays, with day games Wednesdays and Saturdays. Sit down with yourself and try to see how you’d schedule three meals a day at that rate.” Even days off weren’t days off, Mays wrote. After the Giants recently played a doubleheader in May at Candlestick, they flew to Tacoma, Washington, to play an exhibition game against a farm team, then flew all night on a chartered DC-7 to St. Louis, checking in at 8 A.M. They arrived at the ballpark and suited up, only to wait out a rain delay until the game was finally called. It was rescheduled for later in the year on what should have been an off day for travel.
Injury did not force Mays out either. In a game at Dodger Stadium, he pulled his hamstring chasing a fly ball. The next inning, he limped out of the dugout and stopped at first base, where he played the rest of the game. “A man doesn’t have to move around that much at first base,” Dark said. Mays got two hits, including a home run, had six putouts, an assist, and no errors. He said he enjoyed talking to the runners.
Doubleheaders depleted him, but on May 24 he played all eighteen innings of a doubleheader at Candlestick. A week later, on May 31, the Giants had a doubleheader in New York. Mays played nine innings in the first game, which the Giants won. They were leading, 6–1, in the second game, but the Mets tied it in the seventh, sending the contest into extra innings. And extra innings they played. Gaylord Perry took the mound in the twelfth and pitched ten shutout innings, but still the game went on. When the Giants ran out of infielders, Mays played three innings at shortstop, then returned to center field. Finally, in the top of the twenty-third, San Francisco scored two runs and held on to win, 8–6. Mays had played thirty-two innings in nine hours and fifty-two minutes—it was called “baseball’s longest day.” He was the only Giant to play every inning of both games.
“They told me afterward I played three innings at shortstop,” he wrote in his diary, “but I have trouble even remembering that. All I remember is that the bat kept getting heavier and heavier.”
He began the day batting .383. After going 2-for-13, he was at .364. Speculation about .400 was over.
In May, Jackie Robinson’s Baseball Has Done It was published, featuring lengthy interviews with players and coaches as part of a celebration of the sport’s role in civil rights. While Robinson later lashed out at baseball’s slow pace of integration, the book was mostly a tribute. Retired Dodger pitcher Carl Erskine, for example, said, “When you’re on a club with a Negro, you know the guy is flesh and blood, and eats and sleeps, rides a train with you, and sweats with you out there on the field, and he helps your club more than anybody else, and then you walk into a restaurant and they say everybody can eat but him, then you really understand what it’s like to be a Negro.”
Alvin Dark also weighed in on the subject. “Since I was born in the South,” he said,
I know that everyone thinks that Southerners dislike Negroes or even being with them. The majority of the people in the South, especially the Christian people that I have associated with, have really and truly liked the colored people. As for socializing with them on different levels, there is a line drawn in the South, and I think it’s going to be a number of years before this is corrected, or may never be corrected.
The way I feel, the colored boys who are baseball players are the ones I know best, and there isn’t any of them that I don’t like.... I never had any trouble with any of them. In fact, I felt that because I was from the South—and we from the South actually take care of the colored people, I think, better than they’re taken care of in the North—I felt when I was playing with them it was a responsibility for me. I liked the idea that I was pushed to take care of them and make them feel at home and to help them out any way possible that I could in playing baseball the way that you can win pennants.
Dark then offered his thoughts on integration:
I think it’s being handled a little wrong in that people in the South, and I think I know them because I’ve lived with them.... I feel too many people are trying to solve the Southerners’ problems in the North.... The majority of people in the South like colored people. They consider them as human beings, but right now it’s being rushed too fast.
The best thing that could be said for Dark was that his views reflected the majority opinion in the South, which was how Mays interpreted his views. While civil rights activists, reporters, and Horace Stoneham all denounced the comments, Mays kept quiet, but he later said, “I knew what Dark was saying. I was from the South, and so was he. I understood what he was talking about. But it seemed nobody else did.”
With the book controversy bubbling, Dark called Mays into his office at Candlestick on May 21 before a game against the Phillies.
“Willie, I’m making you captain of the Giants,” Dark said.
Mays stared at him.
“You deserve it,” Dark continued. “You should have had it long before this.”
Mays’s first feeling was admiration for Dark. The major leagues had never had a black captain, and if Mays accepted, it would be a meaningful breakthrough, placing an African American in a position of authority. Granted, a captain’s authority is largely symbolic, but a black captain would bring baseball one step closer to something truly monumental—a black manager. The issue riveted the sport in the 1960s: a black manager would mark baseball’s next step toward equality while sending a powerful message to the country at large:
Blacks could command whites.
Bench them.
Fine them.
Cut their white ass if they so dared to even look the wrong way—in front of television cameras, if need be. For many, a Negro manager would drastically invert long-held racial assumptions, and a Negro captain inched them closer to that possibility.
“Will you take the job?” Dark asked.
“Yes, Cap,” he said. “I will. But you don’t have to do it.”
“Never mind what I have to do. I’m doing it.”
Mays understood that the timing, on the heels of Dark’s controversial comments in Robinson’s book, would be seen as intended to give Dark cover. Naming a captain in the middle of the season was strange, and it wasn’t as if the Giants typically had one. Oddly enough, the last Giant captain, in 1956, had been Alvin Dark. But Mays had nothing to apologize for. He believed he got the job because he deserved to be captain, the quiet elder statesman who each year logged the most innings, positioned the players, gave away the sweaters, dress shirts, and neckties that companies sent him, and—as McCovey says—“laughed at our jokes even when they weren’t funny.” The previous year, Dark had established a players’ committee to help team members with issues they didn’t want to take to Dark. Mays was chairman of that committee.
This year, Mays was off to his big start, and the Giants were in first place. In that sense, the move did not smack of desperation. And if Dark was having problems communicating with the players, Mays believed he could help him. The appointment also paid him $500.
Dark called a meeting before the game to tell the players, and in comments to reporters, he noted that Mays was “managerial material.” Then Mays executed his first chore as captain, taking the lineup card to the umpires. Ed Sudol was working the plate.
“Okay, twenty-four, let’s go over the ground rules,” he said. “If the ball hits the scoreboard and sticks in one of the slots, what do we give the batter?”
Mays laughed. “Give him the scoreboard,” he said.
Once the game started, the captain hit two homers, drove home three, and scored three in the Giants’ 9–4 win.
Several days later, the Chronicle ’s Charles McCabe, who was not a sports columnist but still found time to criticize Mays regularly, was in high dudgeon. “I had not intended to make any comment on Mr. Alvin Dark’s comments on the Negro in baseball,” he wrote,
believing that every man is entitled to one really huge goof a year in his public life. Mr. Dark’s views are those of an educated, committed Christian Southerner. They are terrible.
The only reason I bring them up is that the manager of the San Francisco Giants, a largely Negro ball club, recently named Willie Mays to be “captain” of his club. And “managerial material.”
Willie Mays has as much reason to be captain of the Giants, even if in name only, as I have to be placed in charge of our space program. His naming to a fictitious job was, apparently, a public relations gimmick to becalm the Negroes of this area, many of whom are rightly enraged by Mr. Dark’s odd views on the race question.
McCabe’s valid criticism of Dark’s racial views was obscured by his own regrettable views. The Giants were not a “largely Negro ball club,” with only three blacks among the twenty-four players that Dark mostly used (unless McCabe was including the five Latins). And his disparagement of Mays, with no evidence, reeked of condescension and was as offensive as anything Dark had said.
But McCabe’s article brought to the fore what others were saying privately—Dark was using Mays—and the two men discussed the matter.
“I told you something like this might happen,” Mays said, referring to the column.
“Just so long as you don’t believe it,” Dark said.
Mays continued to trust Dark. He remained noncommittal about his managerial aspirations. “It’s too early to think about managing,” he told reporters. “I hope to have four or five more years of playing before I think about managing.” In September Argosy, a men’s magazine, published a story, “Will Willie Super-Mays Be Baseball’s First Negro Manager?” Both Monte Irvin and Roy Campanella thought he would be a good skipper. “He knows the game and is a keen student,” Campanella said. “I think if he wanted to manage, he’d be successful because he’d have harmony among his players.”
Taking a very different view was Jackie Robinson, who until that year appears not to have criticized Mays in public. But by 1964 Robinson, at forty-five, had become increasingly bitter about disappointments in his own life and in the country. His position at Chock full o’ Nuts was coming to a close, and he did not have a similar job lined up. In the coming years, his efforts in banking, public relations, life insurance, real estate, and broadcasting were met with limited success. He had become more active politically, and he supported for president New York’s governor, Nelson Rockefeller, who headed the liberal wing of the Republican Party. (He had supported Richard Nixon in 1960.) Rockefeller lost the nomination to Barry Goldwater, the conservative Arizona senator, whom Robinson described as “a bigot, an advocate of white supremacy.”
Robinson was mired in a jumble of contradictions. He feared a white backlash against the growing Negro militancy—witness the June murders in Mississippi of three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—while he also sympathized with the growing resentment among young blacks. He believed the new leaders of the movement, Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X, were divisive figures, but he was also frustrated by the slow rate of progress engineered by mainstream spokesmen. The landmark Civil Rights Act was passed into law in July 1964, but in March Robinson expressed his view that no Negro would have it made until “the last Negro in the Deep South has it made.” Where Robinson should have remained a revered figure—with the Dodgers—he had become isolated; his relationship with the team began to deteriorate after Branch Rickey left the organization in 1950. Finally, at home, Robinson had become estranged from his son, Jackie Jr., and in 1961 he was devastated by the death of Branch Rickey’s son, Branch Jr., who died from diabetic complications at the age of forty-seven. This event seemed to foreshadow Robinson’s own fate. Robinson’s poorly controlled diabetes was destroying his vision, imperiling every organ, and hastening his decline.
In that context, his remarks about Mays were tinged with the mordancy of a man whose life, health, and dreams had all been thrown into doubt. In his book, he lashed out at both Mays and Maury Wills for declining to be interviewed. “Both might have contributed revealing facts and offered helpful suggestions,” Robinson wrote.
No doubt they did not wish to stir things up. But there’s no escape, not even for Willie or Maury, from being a Negro, which is more than enough to stir things up when bigots are around.
Willie is the highest paid star in baseball. He is a certain future member of the Hall of Fame.... I hope Willie hasn’t forgotten his shotgun house in Birmingham’s slums, wind whistling through its clapboards, as he sits in his $85,000 mansion in San Francisco’s fashionable Forest Hills. Or the concentration camp atmosphere of the Shacktown of his boyhood. We would like to have heard how he reacted to his liberation in baseball, and to his elevation to nationwide fame. And about his relations with his managers, coaches, fellow players and his many loyal friends, black and white.... Willie didn’t exactly refuse to speak. He said he didn’t know what to say. I hope that he will think about the Negro inside Willie Mays’s uniform, and tell us one day.
The distortions—“Birmingham’s slums,” “the concentration camp atmosphere,” “his liberation in baseball”—only highlighted Robinson’s intemperateness, and his disdain for Mays continued in his interview with Argosy . Mays’s captaincy, Robinson said, “is a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t really have any impact. It merely means Willie is the oldest player on the club in terms of service.... He’ll never become the first Negro manager. He’s personable and has great talent, but he’s never matured. He continues to ignore the most important issue of our time. He’s never really had any decent guidance in these matters and probably keeps looking only to his own security as a great star. It’s just a damn shame he’s never taken part. He doesn’t realize he wouldn’t be where he is today without the battles that others have fought. He thinks it’s not his concern. But it is.”
It appeared as if Robinson’s own rage had got the better of him: he concluded that Mays would never manage because he was not more active in the civil rights movement—a complete non sequitur.
Mays believed that Robinson was bitter because he had never been asked to manage, and now his unworthy heir was in line to wear that crown. Nonetheless, Mays didn’t respond to the attacks and made no reference to them in his 1966 autobiography. He had faced plenty of criticism, but these rebukes came from his hero. “It hurt him a lot,” McCovey says. “I just know it hurt him.” Four years passed before Mays, once again denigrated by Robinson, defended himself.
Alvin Dark began the year on notice. The previous season, Stoneham had called him into his office, said he knew about his girlfriend, and demanded that he end the relationship. Stoneham was no moralist, but his manager’s hypocrisy was hurting the team. Dark fined any player $250 if a woman was caught in his hotel room, and he would alert house detectives to watch the players most apt to violate the rule. Stoneham was also unhappy with the team’s play. Despite winning the pennant in 1962, he thought the Giants backed into it through the Dodgers’ collapse. The following year, a terrible August cost them a chance at another pennant, and by 1964 even a championship wouldn’t protect Dark’s job. Dark continued his affair with the flight attendant, Jackie Rockwood, though he eventually divorced his wife and married her.
Dark never tried to rationalize his own hypocrisy, but he believed Stoneham also resented him because, unlike past managers and coaches, he didn’t drink with him.
Fortunately, the Giants were winning, and on July 1 were in first place, with a 46–28 record. But in the middle of the month, they lost five in a row, and on July 21 were in second place. Edgy in the best of times, Dark began to seethe until, in an interview before a game at Candlestick, his anger boiled over.
Stan Isaacs, a reporter for Newsday on Long Island, had asked to interview Dark. Unknown to the manager, sportswriting was in the midst of a revolution. The day was about to end when journalists and athletes had effectively been partners in creating heroes and protecting rogues, and a new era dawned in which scribes questioned, contested, and analyzed their subjects. A new professionalism emerged, which meant that teams could no longer ensure favorable coverage with free travel, meals, and booze. Prodded by television, sports journalists had to dig for news, find fresh angles, and apply the same standards as the rest of the newspaper. The change was slow, but it was led by a group of young reporters—irreverent, ambitious, and intrusive—eager to push aside the old guard.
One such writer was Isaacs, who asked questions that no other reporter had ever considered. In the 1962 World Series, he was curious about the feeding habits of Ralph Terry’s new baby. “Breast or bottle?” Isaacs asked the pitcher.
Now Isaacs had traveled to San Francisco en route to covering another event in Los Angeles. He interviewed Dark, whose answers appeared in two columns, the first of which appeared on July 23. The columns’ gist was that the Giants continued to squander great talent with dumb mistakes. Dark concurred, and he had identified the cause. “We have trouble because we have so many Negro and Spanish-speaking players on this team,” he said. “They are just not able to perform up to the white ball player when it comes to mental alertness.”
Isaacs noted that Dark’s views were also held “by other brains of the major league trenches.” What set Dark apart was his willingness to discuss his opinions openly, a subject, he told Isaacs, “which you New York writers and I disagree on.”
Dark said, “You can’t make most Negro and Spanish players have the pride in their team that you can get from white players. And they just aren’t as sharp mentally. They aren’t able to adjust to situations because they don’t have the mental alertness.”
Some Negro players, like Mays and Robinson, were exceptions, he allowed, but “you would have to be here day in and day out to see what happens. They are not the kind of thing a manager can correct—missed signs and such—but they are inabilities to cope with game situations when they come up. And one of the biggest things is that you can’t make them subordinate themselves to the best interests of the team. You don’t find the pride in them that you get in the white player.”
Told by Isaacs that the Boston Celtics had been quite successful with black players, Dark shrugged, saying, “I only know what I’ve seen on this team and other baseball teams. If I’m wrong, then I have been getting an awful number of the slow ones.”
In the age of the Internet and cable television, these comments would have been a national story in seconds, but in 1964 it took a full week for the Newsday columns to reach the Giants. When they did, Dark denied that he had made the statements (Isaacs acknowledged that he didn’t use a tape recorder) and pledged to sue, but he withdrew the threat when he was told that his private life would be made public in any trial. Charlie Einstein later wrote: “Those of us who were accustomed to the way Dark punctuated his agitation with negatives might have been less apt to publish his words, but when Isaacs did publish them they came as no surprise.”
The Giants were in Pittsburgh when they learned of the interview, and Mays had a revolt on his hands. Most of the black and Latin players came to his room at the Carlton House. Mays was not in the best condition. Suffering from a bad cold, he had an inhaler, which he would periodically hold to his nose. His body ached and his eyes were watery, but he saw the anger in his teammates and knew he had to restore calm.
“Shut up!” he told them. “Just shut up.”
“You don’t tell me to shut up,” Cepeda said. “I’m not going to play another game for that son of a bitch.”
“Oh yes you are,” Mays told him. “And let me tell you why.”
He said that Stoneham was so upset that he was planning to fly to Cincinnati the next week and fire Dark—which would be a disaster by turning him into a martyr. Mays said that he, Chub Feeney, and Herman Franks were all trying to persuade Stoneham to hold off. “I tell you for a fact, he is not going to be back next year,” Mays said. “Don’t let the rednecks make a hero out of him.”
Mays also had a practical reason. Fire Dark now—or quit on him—and their pennant chances disappear. They were two games out of first, and Dark gave them the best chance to win. “I don’t say it’ll happen, but it’s money if we do, and we ought to take our best shot. We changed managers in the middle of 1960 and look where that left us.”
Mays noted as well that Dark didn’t discriminate when he filled out the lineup. Though both Cepeda and Marichal had complained about incidents to the contrary, Mays’s point could be supported. Dark played more black and Latin players than any other manager in baseball. Mays went back a long way with Dark and told the players he knew him better than anyone there. “I know when he helped me and I know why,” he said. “The why is that he’s the same as me and everybody else in this room: he likes money. That preacher talk that goes with it he can shove up his ass. I’m telling you he helped me. And he’s helped everybody here. I’m not playing Tom to him when I say that. He helps us because he wants to win, and he wants the money that goes with winning. Ain’t nothing wrong with that.”
Mays used the same argument that Durocher had used in the spring of 1947 when the Dodger players had circulated a petition objecting to Jackie Robinson. Money trumped all else. In this case, Cepeda mildly objected, but Mays reiterated that Dark was color blind when necessary. “Suppose him and a lady friend went to a picture show together in Birmingham, where I’m from, and one of them passes out. And somebody shouts, ‘Is there a doctor in the house?’ And it turns out the only doctor is colored. You think Dark’s gonna turn him away?”
Willie McCovey, standing beside the window, said, “Be awhile for him to get there, that doctor, seeing as he’d have to make his way down from the balcony.”
That broke the tension. Mays had quelled the uprising. Cepeda later said that he wished Mays had spoken out against Dark, but Mays worked from within. The team would carry on.
The Giants’ next stop was New York, where Commissioner Frick met Dark for lunch and recommended that he call a press conference. When the team arrived at the clubhouse at Shea Stadium on August 4, copies of the Newsday columns were waiting in envelopes for the black and Latin players. Before the game, Dark spoke to about thirty-five reporters, who discovered that communication was not his strength. “I was definitely misquoted on some things, and other statements were deformed,” he said. Dark tried to defend himself by noting that he started seven Latins and blacks and had replaced several white players with minorities, such as Jim Ray Hart for Jim Davenport at third.
Then he said, “I thought I proved my feelings when I named Willie Mays captain. If I thought Negroes were inferior, would I have done that?”
When Mays read these words the following day, he later said, “I was actively sick.” In his view, the comment indicated that Dark had made him captain to protect himself.
It was their last night in New York, and Mays’s cold had worsened. When he got to the clubhouse, Dark handed him the lineup to take to the umpires, and his name wasn’t on it. Dark was going to let him rest. But Mays made a different calculation. If he sat out, he might be accused of bailing out on a manager who had effectively embarrassed him in public. That could hurt Mays’s reputation as well as Dark’s. Einstein asserted that if Mays had sat out, it would be seen as a protest, and Dark’s managerial career would have ended right then.
Mays took the lineup card, considered the options, and wrote in his name. He hit two home runs and the Giants won, 4–2.
The Giants stayed in contention, but the Cardinals, winning nine out of their last eleven, edged the Reds and the Phillies by one game. The Giants finished in fourth, three games out. Stoneham fired Dark in the sixth inning of the final game.
Dark was incensed. With ninety wins, the Giants had improved by two games on the previous season, and he thought he had weathered the racial storm. He was not without his supporters, including Jackie Robinson, who was unperturbed by Dark’s racist comments. “I have known Dark for many years,” he told the New York Times, “and my relationships with him have always been exceptional. I have found him to be a gentleman and, above all, unbiased.”
The circumstances of his firing could have been far worse had Mays not suppressed the players’ uprising or had he criticized Dark for what he considered to be his betrayal. Dark’s career suffered little. He was managing again in two years and managed nine more years with four teams, winning the World Series with the Oakland Athletics in 1974. More than three decades after he retired from managing, Dark says Mays “is the greatest player to have ever put on a uniform.” Mays is equally generous in thanking Dark for his mentoring in the early 1950s and his support of Mays as manager. But the two men stopped talking to each other after Dark’s New York press conference in 1964 and have rarely spoken since.
Mays’s defense was as good as ever in 1964, and included one of the most acrobatic catches of his career. On September 4 in Philadelphia, he was playing unusually shallow against light-hitting Ruben Amaro, but Amaro drove the ball deep toward the scoreboard. Mays ran full bore until he reached the fence, then jumped, left arm extended, and grabbed the ball—but his momentum was carrying him forward, so he had to throw his legs out straight to prevent his face from smashing into the fence. His legs hit it hard, with his body suspended in midair, then he crashed to the ground on his back. He stood up and flipped the ball to the right fielder as the Philadelphia fans gave him a standing ovation. Hano, who wrote the book on the Catch, had now seen one better: “It is my own opinion that you cannot make a better play than that one—the run, the catch, the improvised thrusting of legs at the board to break the immediate impact, the daring of the boards, the holding of the ball despite the heavy crash to the ground.”
Mays, wearing a brace, had to sit out one game, but he was back the following day.
After his brilliant start, Mays ended up hitting under .300—.296—for the first time in eight years. He still had, by any measure, an exceptional year, easily leading the league in home runs (47, fourteen ahead of Billy Williams), slugging percentage (.607), OPS (.990), and placing second in runs scored (121) and RBIs (111). In July he passed Eddie Mathews as the leading all-time home run hitter among active National League players. He ended the year with 453, one behind Mickey Mantle in his last significant home run campaign. Ahead of the two sluggers lay Stan Musial, who retired in 1963, with 475, Lou Gehrig with 493, Mel Ott with 511, Ted Williams with 521, Jimmie Foxx with 534, and then the Babe with 714.
But 1964 marked the first time that Mays’s batting average declined each month (excluding October)—from .488 in April to .189 in September. For all the improvements in his personal life, he still took sleeping pills on the road. “I have a lot of tension,” he explained. “I’d rather take a pill and relax myself than stay awake and do nothing.” Since Mays joined the club in 1951, he had missed only 25 games out of a possible 1,892. In 1964, he appeared in 157 games, the most of any Giant. He did not collapse on the field as he had the past two seasons, but on September 3 he was so weary that he was lifted for a pinch hitter for only the second time in his career (the first occurred the previous year when he collapsed at the plate). Mays was given the following night off.
Coach Herman Franks said, “I’ve spent a lot of time with Willie on the road off and on since 1951. I’ve seen him become exhausted before but not as completely as late last season.”
If Mays wore down that completely at thirty-three—and his average declined in lockstep—it was easy to conclude that his best years were behind him. Maybe his good years as well. Mays himself would never acknowledge such a possibility. Never. But he made some concessions. After the second game of the twenty-three-inning Met doubleheader, he was asked if he still liked to play.
“I love it,” he said. “But the way it is these days, the name of the game is money.”