If Willie Mays was celebrated as an athlete, he was often underestimated as a speaker and rarely given credit for his intelligence. The perception was understandable when Mays was a scared twenty-year-old with a squeaky voice, but in a view often applied to black athletes of that era, he was frozen in his adolescence. Dick Young, in criticizing the Giant players’ response to Alvin Dark in September of 1964, described Mays “as a very mixed up little boy.” Mays was thirty-three.
The patronizing was not consistent with how Mays actually presented himself. He was still nervous before audiences, but on television, whether on The Ed Sullivan Show, in a home run derby against Mickey Mantle, or in his own documentary, he never sounded uneducated or flighty, and he would occasionally turn a wonderful phrase. Once asked by a reporter about his supposed difficulties in playing under pressure, he said, “I’m always more aggressive then. Even through high school, I played my best basketball in the pressure games. I like that kind of weather .”
Mays also had a quick wit and a biting sense of humor; with his clever razzing of opponents, Tim McCarver called him “a stand-up comic.” Mays once had to fill out a medical card during spring training. One question asked: “Have you ever suffered from fainting spells?”
Mays wrote: “Periodically.”
“And what,” a nurse asked, “does that mean?”
“Every time I think of my income taxes,” he said, “I faint.”
On another occasion, Charlie Einstein was the master of ceremonies at a boosters’ club luncheon, and he warmed up the audience with a Mays fable from the Giants’ tour in Tokyo. With the bases loaded, Einstein explained, a hitter drove the ball to deep center field, but the wind carried it clear out of the park. Mays, however, noticed that the exit gate was open, so he raced through it, reached a tree-shaded avenue, jumped aboard a fire engine answering an alarm, and, three blocks farther, reached up with his glove and caught the ball. One fireman turned to another and said, “Home run in the Polo Grounds.”
After Einstein’s introduction, Mays spoke, and toward the end of his presentation, a member of the audience earnestly asked, “About the time you caught the ball while you were riding on the fire engine in Japan, did the guy on third score after the catch, or was your throw in time to get him?”
Mays didn’t miss a beat. “I didn’t make any throw,” he deadpanned. “Didn’t have to. There were two outs at the time.”
Mays could be underestimated by his friends as well. In January 1965, he was given a testimonial dinner at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. Nearly a thousand people, at $25 a plate, attended, with the proceeds going to a charity for underprivileged children. After the testimonials were over (Don Drysdale: “I flew up here from Los Angeles because I thought I was attending Willie’s retirement dinner. Learning that it isn’t, I’m disappointed”), the event’s chairman, Alan Browne, president of San Francisco Stadium Incorporated, drew the evening to a close: “Good night and thank you.”
But Mays, resplendent in tuxedo and black tie, rose quickly and took the microphone. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Everybody please sit down. I’ve got something to say.” As the big room quieted, he began. “I’m scared. But I can’t let you fine people go without thanking you for what you’ve done tonight in helping a lot of kids.”
Mays was disappointed he hadn’t been asked to speak, and he said as much: “Every time I go to a dinner, they think I don’t want to talk, but at my own testimonial, I think I should say something. For myself, I want to say everyone here has been wonderful to me, and I hope I can show my thanks by playing four or five more good years—”
“You’ve got ten more years, Willie!” someone in the audience yelled, and the crowd cheered.
Mays had now played more games as a San Francisco Giant than as a New York Giant, a milestone he noted. “When I first came here, you had a great ballplayer in one of my idols, Joe DiMaggio,” Mays said, “and I don’t blame you for saying, ‘Show me.’ When I was a boy, my dad once told me to keep my mouth shut and just try my best to produce. That’s what I did my best to do. It was nice of that gentleman in the audience to say I can go on probably for ten more years, but that’s like asking me to go back and be a boy again. I’m no longer a boy.
“San Francisco,” he concluded, “feels like home to me.”
There it was—straightforward, without any notes, and from the heart. The crowd gave him a standing ovation, a fine prelude to a season in which his skills, and his character, were never more in evidence.
In 1964, Mays had led the Giants in games played (157), hits (171), triples (9), homers (47), walks (82), RBIs (111), runs scored (121), and stolen bases (19), and was the only Giant to win a Gold Glove. So for 1965, his salary was increased by... zero. An unnamed front office executive told the Sporting News that Mays had tailed off the last months of the season; according to the reporter, “It might be said that Mays earned $90,000 of his $105,000 salary in April, May, June and part of July, and only about $15,000 in August and September.” It was a “Jekyll and Hyde season,” but despite Mays’s erratic performance, the Giant executive said, “We never for a moment considered cutting Willie’s pay.”
Mays knew he deserved better but assumed he was in no position to complain. No player was. When Koufax and Drysdale held out the following year, they figured they had leverage as a tandem. They didn’t. The Dodgers broke them, and the pitchers reported the last weekend of the exhibition season without getting close to the salaries they had demanded. (Their spare time allowed them to begin filming the movie Warning Shot, which prompted Bill Russell of the Boston Celtics to observe: “Suppose it had been Mays and McCovey—do you think they would have gotten a movie contract?”)
Though Mays and Mantle were the game’s highest paid players, Mays had not received a raise in three years, but as long as the reserve clause was in effect—and the owners could artificially control wages—the players were all supposed to be grateful that their salaries weren’t cut. As the Giant executive told the Sporting News, “We had some players who were paid substantial money in 1964, beyond what they actually earned.” Their salaries would be slashed, he said, but “we’ve never asked any of our players to take a full 25 percent cut and won’t this year.”
The media’s breathless attention on Mays’s salary, combined with their management bias, always put Mays on the defensive. The Sporting News asserted that Mays’s stagnant salary “works no hardship on Willie [because] a raise would boost his income taxes. Actually, he does better financially at $105,000 than he would with a small hike in pay.”
The real story, in fact, was how vastly underpaid Mays was. Had players the basic right to receive market wages, owners would have had to determine which players generated the most revenue in ticket sales and television and radio fees and pay them accordingly. It’s possible that in a true free market, some players would have fared only marginally better, but it’s clear who would have fared the best. As Horace Stoneham himself was fond of saying, “I’d pay my way into a ballpark to see Willie play.”
Mays always felt good during spring training, and 1965 was no exception—not simply because “there was something in the air.” Late in the ’64 season, when Dark was still managing, Mays met with Stoneham about replacements, and Stoneham asked Mays about Herman Franks. Mays knew him well and liked him. Franks was a protégé of Leo Durocher’s who, as a coach for Durocher, had befriended Mays; the two would get into soapsuds fights at the Polo Grounds. Franks had managed Mays in the Caribbean League in 1954 and had coached him under Rigney and Dark. Mays told Stoneham that Franks could speak Spanish and had a good relationship with the Latin players, and he thought Franks could relieve the tension among the black, Latin, and white players. Franks fit Stoneham’s mold for a manager—a player or coach with long ties to the organization, a Durocher disciple, and a friend of Willie Mays’s. Franks was introduced as the new manager on the last day of the 1964 season.
Franks marked a new era of Giant baseball. The stylistic opposite of the handsome, God-fearing Dark, Franks was a portly forty-nine-year-old former third-string catcher with a receding hairline and a brusque personality. Emery boards were smoother. One writer said Franks “could cuss, chew tobacco, spit, and scratch.” His habit of pulling his crotch before shaking hands did not endear him to reporters, for whom he had little regard anyway. The feeling was mutual. Atlanta Journal columnist Furman Bisher wrote: “Herman Franks is not the most unpleasant man I ever met. But he’s close.”
But many players, including Mays, believed he had an imaginative baseball mind and improved the clubhouse atmosphere with a more open style. The change began before his first spring training, when the team gathered at Buckhorn Hot Springs in Arizona. Franks invited the players to join him on a wild hog hunt. Most joined him, though Mays declined. (“I’m scared to death of guns,” he explained. “Too many guys get hurt.”) He stayed behind and enjoyed the sulfur baths.
Franks tried not to embarrass his players. He rarely called clubhouse meetings, which Dark had used to dress down his troops, and when a pitcher needed to be replaced, Franks would often send a coach to the mound because the struggling hurler could talk him out of it.
Other players, however, saw Franks as a crass good ol’ boy who was mainly accessible to the stars and whose station-to-station offense failed to manufacture runs. He rarely bunted or used the hit-and-run, and the Giants’ forty-seven stolen bases in 1965 ranked eighth out of ten National League teams’ numbers. The following year, their twenty-nine stolen bases placed them dead last. (In fairness, Stoneham tried to stock his team with home run hitters.)
What most distinguished Franks, however, had nothing to do with baseball. Though he dropped out of college as a freshman, he began buying land in the late 1940s in his hometown of Salt Lake City, which led to interests in real estate development, mobile homes, hardware stores, supermarkets, and drugstores. By the time he became manager of the Giants, Franks was a rich man, which eased the pressures of the position. “I think it makes any job easier,” he said, “if you don’t need the money.”
One thing was certain from the outset: he understood the value of Willie Mays and used some of the same tactics Durocher had to draw the most out of him. Mays no longer needed protection from reporters, but he needed protection nonetheless. In one of his first interviews, Franks said, “When the Giants are on the road, Willie’s phone rings constantly. When he tells the hotel operator he’s accepting no calls, they bang on his door—autograph seekers and people with deals. He doesn’t get the proper rest. I may keep his room number a secret even from the telephone girl at the hotel next season. He’ll be listed as being in room 312, say, but he’ll be in 520.”
Franks promised he’d give Mays more days off. “As for periodic rests, you do that automatically with most players, but Mays is so good defensively, the temptation is strong for any manager to keep him in there whether he gets a hit or not. I intend to resist that temptation. Nearly every time in the past, when Willie was tired and given a rest, he came back like gangbusters.”
Mays also had new standing on the team, though it had been initiated by Stoneham, who wanted him to take on more responsibility—to be not just the captain but something like an assistant manager. Mays agreed, and Franks embraced the idea. “I’m going to put more responsibility on his shoulders,” Franks said. “I can get only so close to a club. The coaches can get a little closer. But a player like Mays can get real close. I expect to have him in my office a lot and talk to him about the club. I won’t hesitate to ask him if he thinks I should play this or that man. He’s very smart. I’m not too proud to ask for suggestions.”
Before most games, Mays would meet Franks and review the lineup—Mays says he kept players off the field if they did not heed his instructions on positioning. They also discussed how to pitch opposing hitters and where to play them. Mays had always been frustrated by his inability to talk to the pitcher while he was in center field, but he resolved that problem by naming second baseman Hal Lanier as the “infield captain.” Mays and Lanier had a special relationship dating from Lanier’s youth. Lanier’s father, Max, had been Mays’s teammate in 1952. Ten-year-old Hal would go to the Polo Grounds, where he and the other players’ children would mill around the clubhouse. “All the players were friendly toward us, but Willie exceptionally so,” Lanier recalls. “He would take us to center field and play catch and pepper with us.”
When Lanier joined the Giants in 1964, Mays called him by his father’s name, “Maxie,” and took him under his wing. On the field, he would position him at second base and, before games, review the opposing pitcher—what he threw when he was ahead in the count and behind. On the road, Mays ate with Lanier, took him to menswear stores, and from his trove of freebies gave him golf equipment, sweaters, and suits. When Mays was asked to appear in a Coke commercial, he insisted that Lanier be included.
Mays’s trust in Lanier made him a logical choice to be infield captain; his principal job was to talk to the pitcher when Mays thought he had lost his concentration or developed a bad rhythm. “I watch [Mays] in the outfield,” Lanier told reporters, “and when he waves me to go talk to the pitcher, I go. The pitcher knows I’m coming in on Willie’s order, and that’s good enough for him.”
More than four decades later, as manager of the Sussex Skyhawks, a minor league team in New Jersey, Lanier decorates his office with seven photographs of Mays. “He was like a second father,” he says.
Mays’s role as a mentor represented a subtle but meaningful change. While he had always given advice, in the past he had waited for teammates to ask him. Now he was more willing to approach players on his own and speak his mind, and he would hold others accountable. If a pitcher was supposed to throw a particular hitter fastballs outside but threw an inside curveball that Mays couldn’t catch because he was out of position, he would chew out the pitcher and the catcher. They typically did not talk back. “Given the amount of ground that Willie covered in the outfield, the last thing that a pitcher would want to do is complain,” hurler Mike McCormick recalls.
Mays also intervened in personal problems, none more directly than Jim Ray Hart’s. Another in the line of black players that the Giants had developed, Hart was a powerful right-handed hitter who already knew about adversity: he grew up picking cotton in the dusty fields that surrounded Hookerton, North Carolina. He broke into the big leagues in July 1963, but he liked to crowd the plate, and in his second game a Bob Gibson fastball broke his shoulder blade. He returned to the lineup five weeks later and had played several games when he was beaned by Curt Simmons, ending his season. In spring training the following year, Alvin Dark threw pitches at him so he might learn to dodge them, and it appeared to work. Hart was hit only four times during the season, and he slugged thirty-one homers and finished second in the Rookie of the Year contest.
Off the field, however, Hart struggled with his own demons. He was so quiet, according to one reporter, that he considered “a nod a hello and a throaty chuckle an endless conversation.” Whether due to loneliness or insecurity or some other reason, Hart liked to drink and break curfew, and in July of his sophomore season, Franks fined him and suspended him indefinitely. Mays got the suspension lifted after twenty-four hours. Hart was twenty-three, and Mays thought that he needed someone who’d talk to him, not scold him. He figured that Hart didn’t even realize how much alcohol he consumed—drinking was probably rampant in his rural community. After Hart’s suspension, Mays wanted him to acknowledge the problem.
Hart said, “I just got to have a little every now and then. If I don’t drink some, then I get all tight and nervous.”
Mays remembered how Durocher had dealt with Dusty Rhodes’s drinking: he didn’t forbid it and actually gave him money for it. In exchange, Rhodes agreed not to consume alcohol for the rest of that week. Then Durocher would give him money again and Rhodes would make the same pledge.
Mays told Hart: “If you play for me six days, I’ll give you one.” He explained that if Hart stopped by his locker every Monday morning, he would give him a bottle. They shook hands on it. Franks wasn’t entirely pleased by the arrangement, but Mays reminded him of Durocher’s solution. Mays bought a case of Old Crow, kept it in his locker, and each Monday for the rest of the season, Hart stopped by for his bottle.
On the road, Mays invited Hart into poker games that he organized in his hotel room. Sometimes he would select players based on his friendships; other times, on his desire to keep certain players under his eye. He would carry thousands of dollars in cash, securing the bills with rubber bands, and he would stake some of the players in his games, including Hart. Guys in the card game were in the starting lineup the next day.
Hart excelled under Mays’s vigilance. When he was suspended, he had nine home runs. In the last sixty-eight games, he hit fourteen homers and ended with a .299 average and ninety-six RBIs. He also played in 160 games. When the season was over, Mays took five hundred-dollar bills out of his wallet and gave them to Hart. “It’s for telling me the truth and playing every day,” he said. Hart was an All-Star the following year and had a solid career that lasted twelve seasons.
• • •
In 1965, Mays once again began on a rampage. On May 18, after thirty-two games, he was batting .403, had clubbed fourteen homers, and had driven in thirty. More than half of his twenty-six hits had been for extra bases, and even his singles were mostly line drives. Franks allowed him to make his own schedule to reduce his fatigue. In lopsided games, Mays would sit out the last two or three innings, which over the course of the season added up to several days off. There were fifteen games in which he didn’t start, though he was often used as a pinch hitter. The Giants played only six games in which he didn’t appear, but the sight of Mays on the bench befuddled reporters, who surrounded him after an off day in June. “Why all the fuss?” Mays asked. “They don’t run a racehorse every day. Other players get a day off, often two days, and nobody gets hot and bothered.” Even sitting on the bench was not that restful for Mays—he was too invested emotionally. “If I’m in the park, I’m playing every play even if I’m not in the game,” he said.
Age wasn’t Mays’s only motivation for more rest. He was also injured. Early in the season, he slipped in the outfield and tore muscles in his shoulder and leg. Wrapping the leg provided some comfort, and the trainer would rub hot ointment on his shoulder before each game. Daily whirlpools also helped. Mays could still run, but his throwing was impaired. He believed he had only a couple of good throws each game. The Giants never disclosed the injuries, so before each game, Mays would make one strong throw to third and one to home. Opponents saw that he still had his golden arm and respected it during the game. Mays continued throwing runners out, with thirteen assists during the year, but they mostly came from his outsmarting runners by throwing behind them.
The rest was clearly beneficial. After slumping at the end of May, he rebounded in the following month. On June 20, he stroked seven hits in a doubleheader sweep, raising his average to .342. Three days later, he hit his twenty-second homer of the year—number 475 of his career. On July 8, he hit number 476 to pass Stan Musial and place him sixth on the all-time home run list. But on June 30 he pulled a groin muscle against Houston and, to reduce his need to run, had to move to right field. He played a corner outfield position for several more games but was back in center against Philadelphia on July 10, the last game before the All-Star break.
In the first inning, Mays reached first on an infield single. The next batter grounded the ball to the third baseman, who threw wildly to first. Mays tore fearlessly around second and then third—one fan said he ran “as if his upper torso was chasing his legs.” He wanted to score, but the first baseman threw the ball to catcher Pat Corrales, who caught it on his knees in front of the plate and turned to make the tag, but Mays had launched himself, feet first, toward the plate. A photograph shows him airborne and hatless, his body parallel to the ground, both arms extended like wings on a plane, his left foot smashing into the catcher’s chest protector. The collision left both men on the ground. The umpire called Mays out, but then the ball rolled out of Corrales’s glove. The umpire yelled safe. Corrales was given an error. Neither player returned to the game.
Mays now had a severely bruised thigh and hip, and, according to Ed Rumill of the Christian Science Monitor, “many assumed that he would miss the 36th All-Star game [in three days] at Minnesota.” At thirty-four, Mays had played in fifteen consecutive All-Star games and had nothing more to prove. Prudence dictated rest. That’s what other players had done in similar circumstances. Rumill noted, “Hadn’t ballplayers, some no more than slightly injured, been ‘begging out’ of the midsummer engagement for years. If a fellow let his imagination ramble, he might even get the impression that some of the boys would rather go fishing than play in the National League versus American League classic.”
The National League was in the midst of a dominating run. When Mays played in, and lost, his first All-Star Game in 1954, the National League’s record was 8–13. The two leagues split the next six games. Then the National League won twenty out of the next twenty-two, with one game ending in a tie. The reason for its supremacy in the 1960s was no secret. The National League had integrated far more aggressively than the American League and therefore had superior black and Latin players. The 1965 team was representative. Its starters in the outfield were Mays, Hank Aaron, and Willie Stargell. Dick Allen opened at third, with Maury Wills at shortstop, Ernie Banks at first, and Marichal on the mound. Coming off the bench were Roberto Clemente, Frank Robinson, and Billy Williams. The closer? Bob Gibson. The American League’s only minority starters were Willie Horton, Felix Mantilla (from Puerto Rico), and Vic Davalillo (from Venezuela).
Some years, the only black American League All-Star was Elston Howard, whereas every third National Leaguer was black. That created, for many players, an extra incentive. “The All-Star game meant a lot to us,” Aaron wrote in his autobiography, “because the big difference between the National League and the American League was that we had the black players.... So it was a matter of pride with us. And we always knew we would win.... When people talk nowadays about the National League’s domination of the All-Star game, they usually say that the National League always seemed to take the game more seriously. But they don’t say why. Willie and Ernie and I know why.” The additional motivation for black players, Aaron told Ebony, “was spiritual.”
Mays did take the All-Star Game seriously, but unlike Aaron, he never looked at it, or baseball itself, through a racial prism. If National League victories brought credit to his race—and prodded American League owners to give more opportunities to black players—so much the better. But Mays strove for All-Star glory for his teammates and his league. Other considerations diluted the game’s purity. He told reporters in 1965, the All-Star Game “means too much to a lot of people. It’s bigger than any one player.” It was also bigger than any one race.
But Mays, of course, was not just another All-Star. When he walked onto the field before the game in Minnesota, Elston Howard and Minnesota Twin catcher Earl Battey doffed their caps and shouted, “Here comes the king!” Despite his injury, Mays was in the starting lineup. “He’s like Mantle,” National League manager Gene Mauch said. “They can both limp into the Hall of Fame.” To everyone’s surprise, Mauch had Mays lead off, and in the first inning, Mays stepped in and promptly hit one over the fence, which gave him an All-Star record of twenty-one hits and three homers. He also scored two runs, extending that record to eighteen. In the eighth, after taking several steps in on a line drive, he reversed himself and made a leaping backhanded catch to preserve a 6–5 win. He played all nine innings.
The last two weeks of July were a disaster. Mays was limping from his collision in Philadelphia, and he had also hurt his thumb, forcing him to release the bat early. He didn’t get a hit in twenty-four at-bats and went twenty-two days without driving in a run. He hit only two home runs in the month, and his average fell from .339 to .310. Mays stopped taking batting practice to preserve his strength and moved to a lighter bat, but it seemed that 1964 was going to repeat itself, with a protracted slump that would sink his average below .300 and assure the Giants’ disappointment. The team had actually played beyond expectations. Cepeda missed most of the season with a knee injury, and the Giants had to carry two “bonus ballplayers,” who contributed little. Franks had only nine pitchers on the roster, and besides Marichal, had only one other reliable starter, Bob Shaw. Out of desperation, the Giants even picked up forty-four-year-old Warren Spahn after the Mets released him; he won three and lost four, then retired after the season.
By August 1, the Giants were still in contention—in fourth place, four games out. But the Dodgers had better pitching, the Braves had superior hitting, and the Reds had more balance. They needed something close to a miracle; more specifically, they needed a month that no baseball player had ever had before. They had such a player in center field.
On August 5, Mays hit two homers in Cincinnati to give him twenty-seven for the year. He also drove in four runs and raised his average to .316. If he could avoid a drought, he would have another outstanding year and preempt speculation about his retirement. His hits against the Reds paced the Giants to victory, giving them three in a row and lifting them into second place, three behind the Dodgers. Two nights later in St. Louis, Mays went 3-for-3, with two more homers and five RBIs in another victory. He hit another long ball the next night, one of three hits.
Perhaps it was the additional rest, because instead of tapering, Mays was getting stronger. The Giants returned home on August 10 for a thirteen-game home stand, culminating with four games against the Dodgers. Mays kept hitting and the team kept winning. Between August 5 and 12, he hit seven homers in a seven-game streak. After going hitless for three games, he roped his eighth home run of the month on August 16, then another one on the eighteenth. Next came the Dodgers.
With Drysdale, Koufax, and Claude Osteen, the Dodgers held first place almost every day from April through August. But they hit poorly—their highest batting average among the starters was Maury Wills, at .286, and out of ten National League teams, they were eighth in scoring. With four teams in contention, their first-place margin was slim throughout the year, and when they arrived in Candlestick for four games, their lead was only 1½ games ahead of the Giants.
The hostilities between the Giants and Dodgers may have lessened somewhat when the clubs migrated to California, but a healthy rivalry still existed. The teams didn’t divide neighbors as they had in New York, but they battled for the pennant every year. The two cities, each convinced of its own superiority, craved California bragging rights; and neither distance nor time could eliminate the bad blood, the beanballs, or the history.
In 1965 the sniping began early, in April, when the Giants played a series in Los Angeles and Don Drysdale knocked several players down, including Mays, in a 2–1 victory for the Dodgers. The losing pitcher was Juan Marichal, who said after the game, “If Drysdale ever comes close to one of our batters again, he better watch out.”
Drysdale responded, “If he wants to get me, I’m only 60 feet, 6 inches away. But if he does, he better get me good, or I’ll take four players with me, and I don’t mean .220 hitters.”
The series at Candlestick that began on August 19 was, by far, the year’s most highly attended. The Giants averaged 19,087 fans a game in 1965. The opening contest against the Dodgers drew 35,901, and the next three games averaged 42,316. It was, indeed, a playoff atmosphere. In the first game, Mays’s two-run homer in the first gave the Giants the lead, and Giant catcher Tom Haller’s two-run blast in the ninth tied it, but the Dodgers won it in fifteen innings. The Giants evened the series in the second game, with Mays hitting another long ball. In the third game, Mays’s homer in the eighth tied the contest, but the Dodgers won it in eleven innings.
Beyond the scores, a tense subplot was developing. In the fifth inning of the second game, Maury Wills came to the plate and squared around as if to bunt. Haller moved forward, but Wills then pulled his bat back, striking Haller’s glove or mask. Catcher interference was called, and Wills was awarded first base. Wills had gotten four hits the previous day, and the fake-bunt ploy was an old trick of his that further antagonized the Giants. In response, Franks instructed his leadoff hitter in the fifth, Matty Alou, to do the same thing in the hope of hitting Dodger catcher Johnny Roseboro.
Roseboro, who replaced Roy Campanella, had been the Dodger receiver since the team had moved to Los Angeles. A lifetime .249 hitter, he was a stout, rugged Gold Glover who tried to unnerve hitters with his taunting and was unapologetic in his calling for knockdown pitches. “When a hitter is standing on top of the plate, fearless and swinging from his ass, you have to move him back,” he said.
On this night, Alou squared to bunt and pulled the bat back, but no interference was called. The move, however, distracted Roseboro, and the pitch missed his glove and smacked him in the chest protector. Roseboro was outraged. “You weasel bastard!” he snarled. He told Alou that if he hurt him again, he’d regret it. Roseboro was going to get him.
From the bench, Franks and Marichal began barking at Roseboro. Franks was protecting his player. Marichal was defending his friend, a fellow Dominican. Roseboro was not one to back down. He yelled back, ridiculed Franks about his weight, and shouted, “You sonofabitch, if you have something to say, you come out here and say it to my face.” Marichal yelled that Alou had only attempted what Wills had done. Roseboro blared, “The next time something like that happens, you’re going to get hit in the head with the ball.”
The game continued, but the dustup was not forgotten. The following day, Roseboro told his teammates Jim Gilliam and Lou Johnson that Marichal had better not get out of line, “because I won’t take any guff from him.”
Marichal was due to pitch against Koufax the very next day, August 22.
Baseball is an escape, an alternate universe, and rarely does a game echo the events of the outside world. But that’s what happened in the final game of the Giant-Dodger series. It should have been a triumphant time for African Americans—and for all Americans—for on August 6, President Johnson had signed into law the Voting Rights Act. Instead, less than a week later, in the midst of a Los Angeles heat wave, a race riot erupted in a community that few Americans had ever heard of. The mayhem began after a California highway patrolman stopped two black men in a car on the corner of 116th and Avalon, in a neighborhood called Watts. The driver was under suspicion of drunkenness. There was an argument, then a crowd, then a punch was thrown, and then a mob. The rioting lasted for six days, with raw television images, fed from a camera on a helicopter, delivered live to stations in Los Angeles and the networks. An army surplus store was soon aflame, igniting ammunition that engulfed adjacent stores. Burning cars were turned over, storefronts smashed, fire trucks were met by bricks, police cars by snipers, and the aerial shots, capturing waves of black smoke, provided an eerie cinematic quality. The destruction and bloodshed didn’t end until the area was controlled by 12,242 National Guardsmen carrying .30-caliber machine guns. More than thirty people were killed, about nine hundred injured, and six hundred buildings damaged. There had been race riots before this one and after, from Newark to Detroit to cities beyond, but no word became more synonymous with the era’s urban rage than Watts.
Johnny Roseboro lived near Watts, and he and his teammates continued to play at home through the riot, for Dodger Stadium was sufficiently removed from the unrest. By the time the players reached San Francisco, their televised games seemed to offer a reprieve from the seething tensions in their own city.
The most anticipated game was on Sunday, a warm afternoon with a high sky, which featured baseball’s two most glamorous pitchers. Sandy Koufax was the left-handed fireballer whose later decision to observe Yom Kippur rather than pitch in a World Series game was a rare example of faith and perspective. Juan Marichal was the high-kicking flamethrower whose sweet temperament and snappy clothes had earned him the nickname “the Dominican Dandy.” Koufax entered the contest 21–8, with a 2.10 ERA; Marichal was 19–9 with a 1.73 ERA. The winner might have the inside track on the Cy Young Award.
The game, however, had no bearing on any pitching awards. Maury Wills led off with a bunt single and scored on Ron Fairly’s two-out double. Like other pitchers of that era, Marichal didn’t like hitters bunting, so when Wills came to bat in the second, he flattened him with a high fastball. Wills glared out at Marichal, dusted himself off, and got back in the box. The at-bat ended uneventfully, but Roseboro wanted vengeance.
Wills was Roseboro’s friend and roommate—black players always roomed together—and the leader of the team. Roseboro wanted Koufax to deliver the same message to Wills’s equivalent on the Giants, Willie Mays, who led off in the second. When Mays stepped into the batter’s box, Roseboro put his right hand between his legs and flipped his index finger—his signal for the pitcher to “flip” the hitter, knock him down. Roseboro thought Mays could be intimidated anyway and would often call for his pitchers to brush him back, but Koufax didn’t like throwing at other people’s heads. He sailed a fastball so far over Mays’s helmet that, according to Roseboro, “Mays would have had to climb a ladder to get hit by it.” Mays had been expecting the “courtesy” pitch and believed the message had now been sent.
But in the top of the third, Marichal moved Fairly off the plate with a tight one. The Giant right-hander later said that Fairly had made it look closer than it really was, but the Dodger dugout was now yelling at him, and Roseboro in particular was angry. Mays, in center field, could feel the tempers rising. The Dodgers led, 2–1, but that was secondary. In the bottom of the third, Marichal led off for the Giants. Roseboro believed it was payback time but had lost all hope in his pitcher. “Koufax was constitutionally incapable of throwing at anyone’s head, so I decided to take matters into my own hands,” he later said. (According to another account, both benches had been warned, so Koufax knew that a beanball would result in a suspension.)
Roseboro went to the mound and told Koufax to throw the ball down and in, which would position him to buzz Marichal from behind the plate. The first pitch was a strike, but the second was low and inside. Roseboro dropped the ball, picked it up, and fired it back to Koufax. Marichal later said that the ball nicked his ear, and it would have killed him if it had hit him squarely. Roseboro said it was two inches past his nose, but he readily acknowledged his intent—to scare the shit out of Marichal, which he did. Wills said, “When a hard-thrown ball goes past you that closely, it makes a noise like a bullet.” Mays, watching from the bench, couldn’t believe it. He had never seen a duster thrown by a catcher, and he knew something bad was going to happen.
Marichal turned around and yelled, “Why did you do that? You better not hit me with that ball!” According to him, Roseboro cursed his mother, which angered him all the more. Roseboro said he had already made up his mind that if Marichal protested, “I was going to annihilate him.” When Marichal did protest, Roseboro started out of his crouch.
Marichal, at 6 feet, was taller than Roseboro but far less muscular, and he feared that Roseboro was going to maul him. As Roseboro came toward him, he backed up toward the pitcher. He later said that Roseboro took off his mask and appeared ready to use it against him. Perhaps he thought that’s what happened. But according to the photographs, Marichal used his left arm to hold Roseboro at bay, shove his mask, and spin him toward Koufax, who was charging in from the mound with the ball still in his glove. The melee’s most recognizable photograph shows Marichal holding his bat high above with his right hand, ready to land a blow on Roseboro’s head, a stricken Koufax helplessly trying to separate them. By the time Koufax, third base coach Charlie Fox, and home plate umpire Shag Crawford could intervene, Marichal had struck Roseboro three times with glancing blows, and the Dodger was bleeding profusely from his head. Crawford stopped the swings by grabbing Marichal and throwing him to the ground. The Western Union ticker tape reported: “Game delayed, argument.”
Most baseball fights follow a predictable rhythm. Triggered by some provocation—a brushback pitch, say, or a hard slide—two combatants encounter each other and tussle, but they are quickly swarmed by the other players, coaches, and umpires. If the principals have already fallen to the ground, a scrum is guaranteed. Some players may try to settle old scores, and some fights will produce secondary skirmishes, but most of the action peters out quickly, with guys standing around and watching as the two aggressors are separated. Serious injury is rare. Baseball fights offer the grand entrance of players and coaches rushing onto the field as if they are trying to catch a bus, and that sight alone usually elicits more excitement than any pugilistic feat. But the swamping of the field has a dampening effect, the teammates serving as protectors against bullies and defusing any spark that could ignite a true donnybrook.
This Candlestick brawl was different. The benches and bullpens emptied, but instead of order being restored, the hostilities increased. The Giants’ on-deck batter was the twenty-one-year-old Cuban Tito Fuentes, who had made his big league debut just four days earlier. Perhaps unfamiliar with the customs of major league fights, he raced toward Marichal and Roseboro brandishing his bat. A photograph shows Fuentes poised to clobber Roseboro. Bolting from the dugout, meanwhile, was Orlando Cepeda, who was also carrying a bat, as he had in Pittsburgh in 1958. Fortunately, there were no accusations after the game, or evidence, that anyone other than Marichal had used a bat as a weapon.
The Dodgers wanted revenge. Outfielder Wally Moon, who was thirty pounds lighter than Cepeda and seven years younger, barreled into the Giant first baseman. Relief pitcher Howie Reed charged from the bullpen and, according to one account, “went berserk” and “turned into a 205-pound madman trying to pull players off Marichal so he could get at him.” Rookie pitcher Mike Kekich had one arm around Marichal’s neck but was not able to deliver a decisive punch. “I blew it,” he said. Lou Johnson sprinted in from left field and threw wild punches into the maelstrom. “I was swinging at anybody in a white San Francisco home uniform,” he explained. Coach Danny Ozark initially tried to separate the players but then tried to fight Marichal, who was taunting Roseboro. “He’s a goddamn nut,” Ozark said. “He was asking Roseboro to come and get some more, I guess. A guy like that would hit a woman.”
Marichal’s behavior surprised those who knew his mild personality, but he entered the game still on edge after his exchange with Roseboro two nights earlier. Matty Alou said, “Juan wanted to fight all day. He had the devil inside him that day.” While Roseboro may have started the fight, Marichal’s attempted bludgeoning of him violated the game’s unwritten rules and created a very different dynamic. The New York Times reported: “In the melee that followed within a few seconds, peacemaking seemed desperately urgent, and there didn’t seem to be the usual taking of sides. Everybody seemed horrified by the nature of the attack and by the sight of blood streaming down Roseboro’s face.” Adding to the mayhem was the belief that Roseboro had lost his eye. “I thought [the bat] had knocked Roseboro’s eye out,” Dodger manager Walter Alston said. “There was nothing but blood where his left eye should have been. A man might as well have used a gun as a bat.”
For a moment, Watts had spilled over to the national pastime.
One person who would not be pacified was Johnny Roseboro, who had been given boxing gloves at a young age, later learned karate, and was known for his strength. One writer said, “When Johnny Roseboro comes at you, you should be entitled to call a priest.” Roseboro lamented that once the battle with Marichal began, “I forgot all the fancy fighting I’d ever learned and went after him as if it was an alley fight.... I didn’t see anything clearly. It was all confusion. My head didn’t hurt much, but I had blood all over me and could see I was still bleeding. I was mad that he had hit me with a bat and mad that I’d only gotten in one blow, which I didn’t think had hurt him. As Marichal ran toward the dugout, I chased him.”
But Roseboro never made it there. A massive right hand grabbed his jersey, next to his chest protector, and began walking him to the Dodger dugout. The hand belonged to Willie Mays. “You’re hurt, John, you’re hurt,” he said. “Stop the fighting. Your eye is out.” On their way, Roseboro gave the finger to the fans, who booed him.
A photograph shows Mays, without his hat, pulling Roseboro along surrounded by nine Dodgers. Blood from Roseboro’s face has splattered his chest protector. He is looking in disbelief at his right hand, also covered with blood. Flecks of blood are scattered on Mays’s uniform as well.
When the fight began, Mays rushed onto the field and darted in and out of players, pulling them apart and removing the bat from Fuentes’s hand. “This is crazy,” he said to players on both teams. “You’re too smart to get mixed up in it.” Foremost in his mind was the fear that the fans would rush the field, which would set off a riot. His most important task was getting Roseboro into the dugout. Mays worried that his friend had lost his eye and knew he needed treatment. He also believed that as long as Roseboro was storming after Marichal or was close to any Giant, the fans would be tempted to jump the railing.
Mays took Roseboro to the dugout and sat down next to him, which defied all tradition and logic—a player, in the heat of a brawl, taking a seat on the enemy’s bench. Mays used some towels to stanch the bleeding, then cradled Roseboro’s head while the trainer, Bill Buhler, examined the injury. Roseboro had a two-inch wound on the left side of his head near the top of his scalp, allowing blood to pour into his eye, but the eye itself was fine. Roseboro reacted more with anger than relief. He started cursing Mays for holding him back and tried to rejoin the fray, but Mays restrained him. At some point, the Dodgers’ Lou Johnson lit out for Shag Crawford. Mays jumped out of the dugout and grabbed him around the knees before other players piled on, but not before Mays took a knee to the head.
Like a spent windstorm, the brawl finally wound down, with both Marichal and Roseboro in their respective dugouts. Roseboro wanted to stay in the game, but his trainer and his manager told him to go to the clubhouse. To get there, he had to walk across the outfield. He was greeted with jeers, so he bent over and patted his rear end. In the clubhouse, the trainer wanted to stitch the wound, but it was in a difficult position and Roseboro didn’t want the needle, so butterfly bandages were used.
The rest of the game was sullen and anticlimactic except for one at-bat. Crawford told Koufax, “Whatever you do, don’t throw at anyone. We don’t want a riot here.” With police officers in the dugouts, it seemed a reasonable concern. When play resumed, a shaken Koufax walked two batters and then faced Mays. One of the lefty’s best pitches to right-handers was his hard fastball just off the inside corner. Hitters would lean back and were then helpless as his next pitch, a big curve, snapped across the plate. But Koufax was now robbed of his “jammer,” and Mays could crowd the dish. Koufax threw him a high fastball, and Mays crushed it 450 feet into the left center field bleachers for his thirty-eighth homer of the season. “I don’t take much pride,” Mays later said, “in the advantage I had over him.”
The home run made it 4–2, and the Giants won, 4–3. After the game, Mays went into the Dodger clubhouse to check on Roseboro and assure him it was just another fight. But by then he was gone. Candlestick’s security guards had feared for Roseboro’s safety, so they had put a Giants cap on his head, hustled him out of the ballpark, and sent him to the airport with a police escort.
The Giants’ victory put them a half game out of first, but the talk was of the fight—and of the man who now had a new title. “Willie Mays,” said the Sporting News, “acted as the great peacemaker.”
The Dodgers recognized his contribution.
Maury Wills: “I gained new respect for Willie after that.”
Walter Alston: “Mays was the only player on either club who showed any sense.”
So did his fellow Giants. “It was getting out of control,” Gaylord Perry said. “Willie was there to try to take care of the situation. It would have been a lot worse if Willie hadn’t gotten Roseboro to calm down.”
Mays’s efforts brought a redeeming quality to one of the ugliest incidents in baseball history. That was the assessment of the league’s president, Warren Giles, who said, “This man was an example of the best in any of us.”
Mays’s peacemaking added a new dimension to his standing as the game’s most complete player. “A leader in sports,” said the Pittsburgh Press, “doesn’t have to be the best player on the team, although it helps. A leader doesn’t necessarily lead with his bat, his glove, or his arm: he can lead with his head and his heart, too. Willie Mays is such a leader.... He leads by inspiration, by deeds. Yet his quick thinking is also one of his great assets.... Mays helped break up the riot in San Francisco when he went into the pile of players and came out with John Roseboro, leading the Dodger catcher to the dugout.”
Media adulation was not unusual for Mays, but he had now transcended the game. As the Boston Record American reported: “Except for the majestic presence of Willie Mays, several players could have been maimed. Willie was out of the dugout in a flash to help disarm Marichal and prevent several dukes-up situations. He has extrasensory perception, that Willie Mays.... He is so well respected that several belligerent combatants [were calmed] as Willie walked between them and among them.... This could be the year Mays wins the MVP award and Nobel Peace Prize, too.” Added the San Francisco Examiner ’s Prescott Sullivan: The brawl “might still be going on had it not been for [Mays’s] intervention.... As a natural born peace-maker, he would be of far more value to his country in Vietnam.”
It was Mays’s finest moment on a baseball field. The most revealing glimpse of him occurred in the Dodgers’ dugout, when he was gently ministering to Roseboro. Mays “cupped the enemy’s head and surveyed his wounds,” wrote Sports Illustrated, “with a deep anguish on his expressive face.” Roseboro looked at Mays and saw that he was crying. “I guess Mays was more a ballplayer than he was a Giant,” Roseboro later said. “He was a sensitive guy.” The tears rolled down Mays’s face, and they rolled down the television screens in Los Angeles, where viewers saw the image up close. And on newscasts that night and the following morning, Americans across the country beheld the same stirring image of a baseball icon—heroic, sentimental, proud, wounded.
Why did Mays cry? And, more important, why among some sixty players and coaches did he so distinguish himself amid the bedlam?
Mays answered those questions in part after the game. Shaking his head sadly, he said, “I hate to see good friends fighting like that.”
Mays did consider many Dodgers—Drysdale, Jim Gilliam, Koufax, Roseboro, Wills—personal friends. But his feeling ran deeper. Mays played baseball for many reasons—for the money, for the competition, for the thrill of the game. But baseball was also his family. It’s a quaint notion, but it applied. With the exception of his father, Mays had severed ties with most of his Alabama kin. He and his cousin Loretta had a falling-out over the sale of his aunt Sarah’s house. The other cousin with whom he’d been raised, Arthur B, had been killed in a stabbing. His mother’s death had cut his involvement with virtually all of his half-siblings, and his stepfather had died as well in a stabbing.
Mays had spent most of his adult life around baseball players. Regardless of their uniform, he trusted them. Much attention was paid to Mays’s various homes, but his real home was always the clubhouse, where he was surrounded by the men who knew him best and where his loyalties rarely wavered. The Giant broadcaster Lon Simmons says, “Willie thought he was the head of a family.”
So when the Dodgers and Giants staged their epic brawl, it was, to Mays, like a family being ripped apart. He did what most would do in a serious family disagreement. He tried to separate the belligerents. He tried to make peace. But the violence had occurred. So in the dugout, his hands holding a towel soaked with blood from the deepest of wounds, he wept.
In one regard, the brawl could have been worse. Had a white player used a bat against a black player, or vice versa, the images could have inflamed urban tensions even more. The pictures of Watts and Candlestick, however, were still intertwined. The Christian Science Monitor noted: “The rioting so far has been in the streets. But if baseball and all the other major spectator sports aren’t careful, do not heed the red flags and act drastically and at once, they may also be faced with mob violence of the sort that could threaten their futures.”
Though Roseboro admitted starting the fight, he wasn’t disciplined. Marichal immediately apologized for using his bat and said he swung it in self-defense. President Giles fined him $1,750 and suspended him for eight playing days. It was the largest fine that Major League Baseball had ever levied against a player, and the suspension was one of the longest, though the punishment was seen by many as far too light.
Marichal was booed for the rest of the year whenever he pitched outside San Francisco, and wherever the Giants went—Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York—the players received threatening phone calls. Cepeda got a call saying that his body would be found in a river. When the Giants landed in Los Angeles, they were met by a police escort, and at Dodger Stadium the fans booed them loudly—until Mays stepped to the plate. He alone had been cheered in every city on the road trip. The fans knew what had happened at Candlestick. But the Los Angeles cheer—a raucous standing ovation by fans whose own player had been hammered by a Giant—meant even more. “I will always treasure the memory of the roaring welcome that Giant-hating crowd gave me when I came to bat for the first time,” he later said. “It was a salute maybe to the hot pace I’d been going at, but much more, obviously, to my reputation as the ‘peacemaker’ in the Roseboro incident.”
The fight, and the immediate aftermath, left Mays and the Giants drained. The team lost its next four games; Mays went hitless in three games and sat out another. But he hit a home run on August 26 in Pittsburgh, then traveled to New York, where he had a historic weekend. On Friday night, he hit his fortieth homer of the season, marking the sixth time in his career that he’d had at least forty long balls in a year. He wiped out the National League record of five seasons held by Ernie Banks, Ralph Kiner, and Duke Snider. (Babe Ruth had the Major League record, hitting forty or more in eleven seasons.) On Sunday, Mays hit another homer, which gave him seventeen for the month, breaking Kiner’s National League mark. Kiner, who broke the record as a Pirate, was now a Met broadcaster, and he interviewed Mays on his star-of-the-game show.
“Are you sore?” Mays asked him.
“Sure I’m sore,” Kiner said.
“I’m sorry, Ralph.”
Kiner later said, “I’ve seen two of my records broken by Willie. Sure, it hurts a little. But if somebody had to break them, I’m glad Willie did.”
Mays’s last home run in New York was also number 494 for his career, passing Lou Gehrig and putting him fifth on the all-time home run list. He also moved closer to 500, which was a magic number in those days. He had just completed his most memorable month in baseball: seventeen homers, twenty-nine RBIs, and a .363 average, plus his role as peacemaker. He was now followed by a growing number of reporters who wanted to chronicle his five-hundredth homer while he also battled for a pennant.
In early September, five teams were within three games of one another. Even without the suspended Marichal for a weekend series in Los Angeles, the Giants beat the Dodgers twice and reached first place for the first time all season. The Giants reeled off fourteen consecutive wins, seventeen out of eighteen, and were four games in front with only twelve to play. Mays led the way. On September 12, in the Astrodome at Houston, he led off the fourth inning with a 450-foot line drive into the center field runway for his five-hundredth home run, and as he jogged around the bases, the fans stood and chanted: “Willie! Willie!”
Warren Spahn greeted him in the dugout. “I threw you the first one and now I’ve seen the five-hundredth,” he said. “Was it the same feeling?”
“Same feeling, same pitch,” Mays replied.
Eddie Logan, the clubhouse manager, tracked down the woman who caught the historic ball and offered her an autographed baseball in exchange. She refused, but she gave Logan her phone number should Mays want to call her about it. “She can have it,” Mays said.
The following night at the Astrodome was even more dramatic. The dome itself was a revolutionary structure that tried to transform the experience of watching a game. Astro home runs, for example, prompted the scoreboard circling the outfield to light up with Western cartoons featuring fireworks, rockets, snorting cattle, galloping horses, and gun-wielding cowboys; a home run by the visitors was greeted by a ticking time bomb flashing TILT . Going into the top of the ninth, the Astro’s Bob Bruce held a 5–2 lead, but after he gave up a one-out walk, he was replaced by Claude Raymond, a small right-hander from Quebec with a good moving fastball. He retired the first hitter and was now one out from victory. But Jesus Alou (the youngest of the three Alou brothers) singled to right, making it 5–3. The next batter was Mays.
Mays usually didn’t try for homers, but this situation was different, and everyone knew it. Though he led the league in home runs, Raymond didn’t want to walk him, which would bring up McCovey, the go-ahead run. So he challenged Mays with fastballs. Twice Mays swung so hard that he fell to one knee. Both times he missed. Raymond couldn’t find the strike zone and ran the count full. Mays dug in for the next delivery. Alou prepared to leave with the pitch. The Astros were in ninth place, twenty-four games out of first, and only 15,415 fans were in the cavernous dome. But they began to cheer as Raymond came to the stretch and fired. It was a fastball, and Mays nicked it foul. The crowd clapped louder as Raymond prepared for the next pitch. Alou took off, and Raymond threw another fastball. Again a tip foul. Now the fans were on their feet and screaming, but not for Raymond or the Astros or the Giants but for the man at the plate. Mays fouled it back again. Alou trudged back to first. The fans caught their breath. One more pitch came. Another fastball. Another foul. Perhaps Raymond thought about an off-speed pitch, but that might now seem... unmanly. “I kept waiting for a breaking ball,” Mays said later. “A curve, a slider—something other than a fastball. But that’s all he threw. Nothing but fastballs.” They were two heavyweights throwing their best punches. On the bench, Herman Franks muttered, “It’s like challenging God.”
On the tenth pitch of the at-bat, with the fans still yelling and Alou still running, Raymond threw another fastball on the inside part of the plate. As he recalled, “Willie bailed out but opened up on the ball at the same time, the way only he could.” Mays hit the ball squarely and lined it deep into left field. The Giant players jumped off the bench. Alou kept running. The fans gasped as the ball sailed over the fence.
TILT!
As Mays circled the bases, Marichal was so excited, he started pacing in the dugout, tossing seat cushions on the bench.
“What’s he doing?” Franks asked coach Larry Jansen.
“I think he’s looking for his glove,” Jansen said.
“Why?”
“He wants to go in and pitch when they come out.”
“He pitched nine innings yesterday,” Franks fumed. “Is he out of his fucking mind?”
Mays was embraced when he got to the dugout. Then he tipped his cap to the still-cheering crowd.
The Giants won the game in the tenth on a two-run single by Jim Davenport, and in their jubilant locker room afterward, all anyone could discuss was Mays’s at-bat. “Everyone in the stadium knew he was going for the home run,” said Giant outfielder Len Gabrielson, “and he went and got it. Honest to God, Mays is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. And there’s not one guy in the big leagues who thinks different.”
Astro general manager Paul Richards approached Raymond after the game, commended him for staying with the fastball, and told him it was a great duel.
Indeed it was. When Roger Angell in 1991 asked Mays to name his favorite long ball, he said, “Home run against Claude Raymond.... That was the only dramatic-type home run I ever hit.”
The Mays legend reached its zenith in 1965. Life ran an eight-page, thirteen-photograph essay on Mays’s final month of the season, when he hit .360 and smashed another eleven home runs. “To his team he gives the best—and he gives baseball its finest hours,” the magazine pronounced. Mays “drives himself almost demonically,” and the Giants’ opponents have been “outpaced, outclassed, and outplayed by the most brilliant virtuoso performance ever seen in baseball.” A shirtless Mays shows the ten pounds of muscle he has gained since entering the big leagues. In one sequence of photos, he is shown sliding into home plate into the legs of an opposing player, tumbling over his shoulder in a cloud of dust, and then, on his back, screaming in pain as the wind is knocked out of him. The umpire punches him out—but Mays finishes the game, and the Giants win on his forty-ninth homer of the season.
But Mays’s dramatics were not enough. After winning seventeen out of eighteen games, the Giants lost seven out of ten. They were still 23–10 the last five weeks of the season and finished with ninety-five wins, but they couldn’t hold off the Dodgers, who won fifteen out of their last sixteen and beat the Giants by two games. The Dodgers won the World Series in seven games against Minnesota.
While the Giants had exceeded expectations, they would have almost certainly won the pennant but for the brawl. It was Marichal’s best year—he finished with a 2.13 ERA, 10 shutouts, 24 complete games, and 240 strikeouts compared to 46 walks. But the suspension forced him to miss two or three starts, and when he returned, he wasn’t the same, losing four out of seven games in the final month. Koufax, who pitched a perfect game in September, won the Cy Young.
Roseboro filed a civil suit against Marichal, which was settled out of court, and in some ways the fight overshadowed Marichal’s career. Though he was the winningest pitcher of the 1960s, he was not elected to the Hall of Fame until his third try, and only after Roseboro posed with him at an old-timers’ game. The two men did become friends, and when Roseboro died in 2002, Marichal eulogized him.
Mays won the MVP in 1965. His fifty-two home runs were a personal best, and his .317 average was his highest since 1960. He led the league in slugging percentage (.645) and was among the leaders in runs scored (118) and RBIs (112). He seemed to be getting stronger with age: in his first four years in San Francisco, he hit 133 homers; in the next four, he hit 186. With 504 career home runs, the records of both Mel Ott, the National League champ (511), and Jimmie Foxx, the greatest right-handed home run hitter (534), were in sight. The real question was whether he could reach the Babe (714).
Anything seemed possible. After the documentary on Mays appeared in 1963, Lee Mendelson urged NBC to rerun it as soon as possible. “Don’t forget,” he said. “This is perishable, not Peter Pan.”
After Mays’s 1965 season, Mendelson wired NBC: “I take it back. He is Peter Pan.”