One night on a flight out of Atlanta, Mays sat down next to Jim McGee and asked, “What was the best catch you saw out there tonight?”
The Giants had beaten the Braves behind Gaylord Perry, but McGee, covering the game for the Examiner, could not remember any outstanding play. He suggested a one-handed catch against the fence by Giant outfielder Ken Henderson.
“No, that wasn’t it,” Mays said.
McGee said he couldn’t think of any noteworthy grab.
“The catch I made off Tillman in the seventh,” Mays said, referring to right-handed-hitting catcher Bob Tillman.
“That was routine,” McGee responded. “You caught that ball right in front of you, just standing there.”
“Yep,” Mays said. “But did you notice what I did before Tillman swung? I moved ten feet toward left. If I hadn’t done that, the ball would have gone through for a triple—I’d never have reached it—and we’d have lost.”
“Why’d you shift left?”
“I figured, or that’s the way it seemed to me, that Perry was losing something off his fastball. I figured he might be getting tired. And Tillman, as you know, hits the long ball, and he’s a pull hitter. So I shifted to left, and that’s where he hit it.”
McGee knew that Mays enjoyed talking about those kinds of plays more than his athletic feats. For all the focus on his five tools, his intelligence and preparation were just as valuable, and they became even more essential as his physical skills declined. Ken Henderson had a close view of those intangibles.
When he joined the Giants in 1965, the nineteen-year-old was touted as the “next Willie Mays,” which didn’t please the existing Willie Mays. Perhaps feeling threatened, Mays said little to the kid. Henderson then spent much of the next three years in the minors but joined the team for good in 1969. By then, Mays knew he was in the final stages of his career and lent a hand to Henderson, but much of what the young player learned just came from watching.
“I felt like I was able to communicate with him,” Henderson recalled, “and he helped me tremendously defensively. When I played next to him in left field, I’d always look over my left shoulder at him, and at times he would put his hands on his knees with that big, wide-open stance of his. And just before the pitch was made, he’d move. He’d sense something, and he’d move maybe a step toward left field. And I used to watch him, and I would sense when he would move, and I would try to move along with him. He might move five or six steps more to right field, then I would sense that and I would move that way. And it was just a matter of getting to know and to communicate without using any words. It was a sense, an instinct that we had together after playing for a while. And it was really kind of a beautiful thing.”
Cardinal manager Johnny Keane used to tell his team that if Mays was on second base and a hit went into the outfield, the fielders should not try to throw him out unless it was the ninth inning or extra innings. Keane knew that Mays played possum on the bases, slowing down to draw throws so trailing runners could advance. Mike Shannon, who played with the Cardinals for nine years and has been broadcasting major league games for almost forty years, says Mays is the smartest player he’s ever seen. When he slid, for example, he would use one foot to tag the base and the other to jar the ball loose. Or, after drawing a walk, he would limp down to first base, then steal, and laugh while he was dusting himself off. “He had to find ways to entertain himself,” Shannon says.
He recalls one game in which Mays was on second base and a sinking line drive was hit to the outfield. When the second base umpire turned and ran out to get a better view, the third base umpire headed toward second to cover that base. The ball fell for a hit, and as Mays ran for third, he saw there was no umpire. So he cut several feet in front of the bag, saved some time, and scored. The third baseman, Ken Boyer, appealed the play. “The umpire calls him safe,” Shannon says, “and Mays is on the bench laughing.”
Sometimes it was the run that Mays didn’t score that most impressed. In a game against the Pirates at Forbes Field, Mays was on second and the batter hit one off the right field wall. Everyone assumed he would score, but when he got halfway down the third base line, he abruptly stopped and retreated. He saw that Roberto Clemente, who had the best arm in baseball, had fielded the ball cleanly and had launched a perfect throw home. “You had the greatest baserunner against the greatest fielder,” Gaylord Perry says. “Willie’s play was very heads up. He would have been out.”
Bob Stevens said the best play he ever saw by Mays had nothing to do with his physical skills. In a spring training game, the Dodgers had the bases loaded with nobody out and the batter hit a ball to deep center. Mays gave chase and then tapped his glove—the signal, now known by everyone, that he was going to catch it. The runners retreated, but the glove tap was a decoy. The ball hit the top of the fence. Mays fielded it on a hop, whirled, and threw. Only one runner scored on a hit that sailed more than four hundred feet.
Mays was also the consummate sign stealer, not only from second base—where he had a clear view of the catcher’s signals—but also from first and third. He says he could tell by the muscle movement in the catcher’s right forearm how many fingers he was putting down. Mays was also superstitious: running in from center field, he would step on first or third base on his way to the dugout. But he was always calculating. He says he would strike out intentionally in an early inning with the hope that he’d see the same pitch later with the game on the line.
After his dismal, flu-ridden season in 1967, Mays wanted to erase the speculation that he was ready to retire. He turned thirty-seven in 1968, and he knew that made him one year older than Joe DiMaggio when he retired. Mickey Mantle was still playing, but he had moved to first base the previous year (and retired after 1968). Duke Snider had called it quits in 1964 at thirty-seven.
Mays demonstrated that he was still one of the better players in the game. Compared to the figures in the rest of his career, his batting numbers were down in 1968, but offensive numbers were deflated across the majors. It would be known as “the Year of the Pitcher.” Only six players hit .300. Not a single player scored a hundred runs. Only three hitters drove in a hundred. The Giants and the Cardinals threw back-to-back no-hitters at Candlestick, which might not have been so shocking if Marichal and Gibson had hurled them. Instead, it was Gaylord Perry and Ray Washburn. Perry could have lost the game—he faced Gibson and eked out a 1–0 victory. The All-Star Game typified the year and even the decade. Mays led off with a single, advanced to second on an errant pickoff throw, moved to third on a wild pitch, and scored on a double-play ball. The game ended 1–0, and Mays was named the game’s MVP. The Sporting News declared: “Pitching is strangling the breath out of baseball.”
Mays played in 148 games and had 573 at-bats, third on the team behind McCovey and Ron Hunt. His .289 average, 23 home runs, and 79 RBIs all ranked second. He also didn’t wear down, hitting .311 in August and .377 in September, and he had nineteen game-winning hits, the most in the big leagues. Mays also won what would be the last of twelve consecutive Gold Gloves, and he devised new baserunning exploits. He was on first with McCovey at the plate and the Pirates using a shift. Maury Wills, now playing third for the Pirates, was the only player on the left side of the infield. Mays was running on a 3–2 pitch, and when McCovey walked, Wills helpfully threw up his hands to alert his friend that he need not slide. But Mays, seeing the left side of the infield empty, kept running so that he stole third base from first on one pitch. “I was trying to be nice and warn Mays,” Wills said after the game, “but it cost us.”
And 1968 introduced the Giants’ most heralded rookie since Willie Mays. Bobby Bonds was a 6-foot-1, 190-pound free spirit, the California high school athlete of the year who long-jumped 25 feet, 3 inches, ran 100 yards in 9.5 seconds, and was awarded all-league honors in football (he was a touchdown machine at tailback) and basketball (he scored 38 points in one game).
Bonds also played the outfield, so it was natural that he was called “the next Willie Mays.” He had been compared to Mays as a nineteen-year-old in the Western Carolina League, where he hit .323, banged twenty-five homers, and once ran over a catcher to score the winning run. His manager was Mays’s former teammate Max Lanier, who said that his prodigy “could run faster than Mays ever thought of.” Bonds had athletic bloodlines. His sister, Rosie, had been a hurdler in the 1964 Olympics, and his brother, Robert, played wide receiver for the Kansas City Chiefs.
Bonds grew up idolizing the Giant legend. “He didn’t want to go to a team unless it was with Willie Mays,” says Pat Bonds, Bobby’s wife. Bobby said that when he went to spring training for the first time at eighteen, “Willie Mays had a locker near mine, and it took me one-half hour to get dressed because I kept watching him. He put his arm around me and said, ‘I’m gonna teach you how to play ball.’ He was my greatest asset in the game.”
Mays was alternately tender and stern with Bonds, but always protective. When he didn’t like the way a coach was trying to adjust the way Bonds held the bat, Mays ran him off. He lent Bobby money for his new house in San Carlos, and he gave him extra furniture from his own house. When Pat was pregnant with their third child, Bobby was supposed to leave home for spring training, but Mays told him to report late, that he would take care of things in Arizona. “When I had the baby,” Pat recalls, “Willie and Bobby would play cards, and I think he let Bobby win the money to buy the crib.”
Bonds made history in his very first game when he hit a grand slam, the first time that had happened in a rookie’s debut in the twentieth century. Like Mays as a rookie, Bonds was talented but raw—in only eighty-one games, he led the team in stolen bases (sixteen) as well as strikeouts (eighty-four) while whacking nine homers. Pat says that Bobby was determined to be as good if not better than Willie, and his numbers bore out that relentless ambition. In his first full year, Bonds hit thirty-two homers and stole forty-five bases (in forty-nine attempts), but unwilling to shorten his swing, he hit .259 and struck out a staggering 187 times. (In Mays’s first full year, by contrast, he struck out 57 times.)
The Giants were certain they had finally found Mays’s successor, though Mays himself never cared much for the “next Willie Mays” hoopla. For one, he was still around, but he also thought the tag was unfair to the next in line, and he pleaded with reporters not to write so much about Bonds at such a young age. “It puts too much pressure on a kid who tries to live up to the notices,” he said.
Some observers have speculated that the pressures on Bonds contributed to his personal problems, specifically his excessive drinking. Mays, aware of his taste for alcohol, urged him to take care of his body, but the pleas didn’t work. Bonds’s demons haunted him throughout his life.
His oldest son, Barry, was four years old when Bobby joined the Giants, and over the next several years, the boy would attend games and putter around the locker room. On Fathers’ and Sons’ Day, he would take the field, swat a beach ball with a plastic bat, and run around the bases. Like most kids in and around the clubhouse, Barry gravitated to Mays and would rummage through his stuff for gloves and baseballs and would hide on top of the locker. Mays obliged the boy and, when his parents asked, agreed to be his godfather.
For some years, Barry was estranged from his father, resenting him for his neglect as both a father and a husband, though he says they reconnected once he entered college and were close from then on. Barry had another father figure as well from a very young age. “Willie was always challenging me as a kid,” he said. “I remember when he’d catch the ball, and he would just flick it and it would go all the way back into the infield. And I could barely reach the infield as a kid. And he would tease me: ‘C’mon, how are you ever going to make the major leagues if you can’t throw the ball to second base?’... He would laugh at me because I couldn’t throw.”
When Barry Bonds joined the Pirates in 1986, he wore number 24.
At the All-Star Game, Herman Franks announced that he would not return as manager unless the Giants won the pennant... and the Giants didn’t win the pennant. For the fourth consecutive year under Franks, they finished second (the Cardinals again won), though with eighty-eight wins, it was their worst season under Franks. The team was always a pitcher or two short and, with the exception of center field, never that strong up the middle. In addition, both the Dodgers and Cardinals recognized the imperative of speed, stolen bases, and “small ball” to manufacture runs in a low-scoring era. Stoneham’s fetish for home runs, embraced by Franks, was costly.
Financial problems also loomed, which eventually had a direct impact on Mays. The Giants’ parent, the National Exhibition Company, also owned three minor league teams and a hotel and related recreational facilities in Casa Grande, Arizona. For 1968, the company posted an operating loss of $179,099, compared to an operating profit of $215,491 in 1967. Plunging attendance caused the red ink.
For the second straight season, the Giants were out of the race by the first day of August, but it was also the first year of the Oakland Athletics, who had migrated from Kansas City and now divided the Bay Area’s fan base. The consequences for the Giants were devastating. In 1968, attendance fell 33 percent, to 837,220, from the previous year, marking the fewest fans they had drawn in their eleven years in San Francisco and less than half their record in 1960. It was also the first time they had fallen below 1 million since leaving New York. The Athletics, who finished in sixth place, drew 837,466 fans, virtually the same number as the Giants. The A’s were eighth out of ten American League teams in attendance; the Giants, seventh in their own league.
The Giants did not face an immediate crisis, as each National League club reaped a $2 million windfall from the expansion teams in San Diego and Montreal, which would start in 1969. The Giants also received a million-dollar settlement over litigation stemming from the Polo Grounds. But the one-time gains did not obscure the cold emptiness of Candlestick Park, which for some games drew fewer than 2,500 fans. Stoneham’s abysmal sales and marketing were hurting the team as well. Lon Simmons recalls a fan who wanted to buy season tickets, but the Giants didn’t accept checks. He left without any tickets.
Fittingly, the 1968 Giants led the league in road attendance, drawing almost 1.6 million, setting the pace for the seventh time in the past eight years. Everyone knew the reason: the fans wanted to see Willie.
National Exhibition was a publicly traded company, and at its annual meeting in early 1969, Stoneham was asked about Mays’s salary. At $125,000, he was the company’s highest paid employee, though that was deceiving. Stoneham’s salary of $80,300, which hadn’t budged in years, did not include dividend payments. Stoneham said he expected Mays to again play for $125,000. Juan Marichal was also discussed. His $100,000 salary was second to Mays’s, and in 1968, he had won twenty-six games, recorded an ERA of 2.43, and had thirty complete games (a mark never achieved by the decade’s other top pitchers—Gibson, Koufax, and Denny McLain). Stoneham said Marichal might receive a raise.
News accounts do not indicate whether any shareholders complained about Mays’s salary, but the issue was clearly in play. Unless Stoneham could turn around the company, the high-income stars would have to go, and the entire franchise could be in peril.
The Giants’ next skipper was Clyde King, a soft-spoken North Carolinian who had been managing in the minors for thirteen years—most recently for the Giants’ AAA club in Phoenix—and was promoted for one purpose: to break the Giants’ second-place stalemate. In some ways, the forty-four-year-old former pitcher was a refreshing change from the abrasive Herman Franks, and his experience managing some of the younger players in Phoenix, who had felt neglected in Franks’s star system, was a benefit. But King had never led a big league team before, and he was the first manager in Giants’ history, besides Leo Durocher, who had not served in some capacity with the parent club. His lack of experience, on all counts, hurt him. He was unaccustomed to a twenty-five-man roster—his limit in Phoenix was twenty-one—and, fearful that he would run out of players at other positions, would only carry nine pitchers. He also apparently didn’t understand how to “double switch” players to move the pitcher’s spot in the order.
But his biggest difficulty was his relationship with Willie Mays, who as a rookie had actually faced King when he pitched for the Dodgers. (Mays struck out once and hit a home run another time.) But King had no history with Mays as a teammate or a coach and didn’t know how other managers had handled him. Even as a veteran, Mays still needed encouragement and support and remained hypersensitive to slights. He had been doubly protected by Franks, his financial adviser, who allowed Mays to determine his own playing schedule.
Mays had now played more years in the majors than any active player, and he believed that he had earned special privileges and that both he and the club were the better for it. King thought otherwise, so troubles were inevitable. “In Willie, he inherits an institution,” wrote the Los Angeles Times ’s Mel Durslag. “It’s as if a new conglomerate suddenly acquires the House of Rothschild.”
In his first press conference, King declared that all the players, regardless of age or tenure, would be required to practice equally. Then in spring training, he announced that Mays was going to hit leadoff; he felt Mays’s speed would benefit the top of the lineup. It’s possible that if King had suggested the idea to Mays so that Mays could claim some ownership of it, the switch would have been easier. But King didn’t. He thought he should treat Mays like every other player, and Mays balked.
“Why do you want me to bat leadoff?” he asked. “I’m no kid, you know.”
“I know that, but you’re not hitting home runs like you used to,” King said.
“I can still hit twenty or more,” Mays said. “That ought to be enough.”
Mays thought the extra at-bats at leadoff would wear him out sooner and he could help the team more by driving in runs in the three hole. He didn’t complain to the mainstream press, though he did tell the Chicago Daily Defender, “I’m used to knocking in runs. If they want me to score runs, I can, but I if I knock in fifty runs this year, it will be a miracle. [But] I’m not going to fight with [King]. If he feels that’s what I should do, then I will. He’s the manager.”
Even without Franks seeking his guidance, Mays found ways to continue to control the field. On one play, he fielded a single to center and, with a man at first, he overthrew the cutoff man in a vain attempt to cut down the runner at third. On the overthrow, the hitter advanced to second. Sitting in the press box was Franks. “Look at him,” Franks said. “He’s managing in place of King. He wanted that hitter to move up to second base so first base would be open. Now they’ll walk the next hitter on purpose. Then they’ll get the next guy out and have the guy after him having to lead off the next inning. That’s the way Willie’s got it planned.”
Mays proved to be good at the top of the order, hitting .317 over the first eleven games. But the Giants were 6–5 and had beaten only the expansion San Diego Padres. In the next game, Mays was hitting third, with Bobby Bonds leading off. Perhaps it was just a coincidence, but one day later the Giants began a nine-game winning streak in which Mays hit .364.
On the field or in the dugout, Mays almost never lost control of his emotions, but it did happen. At Candlestick in September 1968, two fans along the first base line kept heckling him, and when he came jogging to the dugout after a good catch, one of them yelled, “Nice catch for a $100,000 bum! You’re finally earning your money!” Mays had heard enough. He changed course, headed for the stands, and tried to scale the railing. Herman Franks, among others, had to restrain him. The police escorted the hecklers out of the ballpark. After the game, first base coach Charlie Fox said, “Ordinarily, you don’t mind needling from the fans, but these fellows were really abusive right from the start of the game.” Mays apologized: “After all these years, I should have known better.”
A more publicized blowup occurred the following year at the Astrodome with Clyde King. It was June 24, a Tuesday night game. Mays thought he was getting the night off, but before the game a teammate told him that his name was on the lineup card, which was posted in the dugout. Mays retreated to the clubhouse to take off his sweats and put on his uniform. King said when it was time to present the lineups, he couldn’t find Mays and assumed he didn’t want to play, so he erased his name from the card. Mays returned to the dugout, saw his named removed, and erupted. He thought King was trying to show him up—first putting him in the lineup, then taking him out. He barked at King, waved his arms, and appeared ready to charge him when McCovey, Perry, and Larry Jansen surrounded him. Mays continued to shake his finger at King, then settled down. In the second inning, Jim Ray Hart, playing the outfield, hurt his shoulder, and King asked Mays if he wanted to play.
“You’re the manager,” Mays said.
He played the rest of the game. Afterward, King told him that he would be fined.
The incident only crystallized the bad relations between the men. Mays didn’t believe he was accorded enough respect, and King resented his attitude. “If I’m fined,” Mays told him, “I quit.”
Stoneham was not about to let that happen, and no fine was levied. Chub Feeney, citing the best interests of the team, urged Mays to apologize to King, which he did. Even his most ardent booster, Charlie Einstein, described Mays’s behavior in the dugout as “unforgivable,” but the Examiner ’s Prescott Sullivan noted that the tantrum was the first for Mays “in some eighteen years as a professional player [and] he had us wondering if he’d ever get around to it.... It’s only human to foul up now and then, and Willie, who had baseball’s longest good conduct record going for him, finally did it.”
Mays began the 1969 season needing only 13 home runs to reach 600. Pundits predicted that with a fast start, Mays would hit that plateau by Mother’s Day. Though his knees troubled him throughout the year, he began well enough and had 9 homers on June 21. Then he went almost two months, to August 15, before he hit the tenth. He didn’t hit his twelfth—599—until September 15. The chase for 600 didn’t garner the media attention that accompanied 512, but the pressures were the same. Mays had also injured his knee on July 29 in a home plate collision with Cub catcher Randy Hundley, and the damage was evident. “People cringed in sympathy,” Bob Stevens wrote, “when he went on defense and stumbled and wobbled and did not quite get to some baseballs he would have gobbled up two years ago. When he swung at the plate, the knee would cave in under him and rob the swing of the pure, terrifying power it once generated. Yet, Willie played.”
The Giants battled the Braves down the stretch in September, and that they “won any games at all,” Stevens wrote, “was because [Mays] was producing—hurting like all hell. But playing and producing.” He drove in five game-winning runs in September and scored the game-winner four times.
But number 600 lingered. The Adirondack Bat Company had sent Frank Torre, the retired Braves’ first baseman (and Joe’s brother), to present Mays with some gifts when he hit the milestone homer. Torre followed Mays for six weeks, waiting for the moment. Mays wanted to hit number 600 in San Francisco during a ten-game home stand, but he never came close. Then, on September 22 in San Diego, he was given the night off. Municipal Stadium was nearly empty—there were 4,779 fans—and the public address announcer had advised the small crowd that the fan who caught Mays’s six hundredth homer “tomorrow night would receive season’s tickets for next season.” But in the seventh inning with the score tied, King looked at Mays on the bench, and Mays looked back.
“I’m not tired,” he said. “Just hurting a little bit.”
“Grab a bat,” King said.
Mays pinch-hit for rookie George Foster. With a runner on second, he just wanted a single against Mike Corkins, a rookie who was five years old when Mays broke in. His first pitch was a belt-high fastball. Ron Fimrite’s story of the game suggested a redemptive quality to the blow that followed: “In the privacy of San Diego’s Municipal Stadium, the great center fielder—staggered by injuries, haunted by the specter of old age and the taunts of critics who have been burying him for the better part of four years—lofted a 391-foot home run to the empty left field seats.... As Mays rounded the bases, the tiny crowd rose to its feet and gave him the reception that rightfully should have been his from a far greater multitude.”
The ovation was expected. What Mays didn’t anticipate was the scene at home plate, where all the Giants had raced from the dugout to greet him. He was genuinely touched by the reception. “It was my most satisfying home run,” he said after the game, “because of all those guys waiting for me when I crossed home. There was nobody left on the bench. That really got to me.”
Mays acknowledged that he had been trying too hard and the pressure had affected him, and he again waved off the possibility of reaching 714. He was just glad the team won. The only man happier than Mays was Frank Torre, who estimated that he had seen forty games, traveled 12,000 miles, and spent $4,200 waiting for the historic swing. Not expecting Mays to pinch-hit, he almost missed it entirely, but he scurried onto the field to present Mays with his awards: a trophy made up of three bats on a plaque with the number 600 tying the handles together at the top, a $12,500 Italian sports car, and a share of Adirondack stock for each foot the ball had traveled; at $9 a share, it was a $3,519 clout.
Said Mays, “I’m just glad Torre can go back to his family.”
Mays stole six bases for the year, which made him the first player ever to hit at least three hundred homers and steal at least three hundred bases. He played in 117 games and had 459 at-bats, his lowest totals for a full season to date, but he finished with the third-best batting average on the Giants, .283 (second among the regulars), and the third most RBIs, with fifty-eight. While his thirteen homers marked the first time he’d hit fewer than twenty in a full season, they were still second highest on the club.
The leagues now had two divisions with six teams apiece. The Giants once again finished second, three games behind the Braves in the West Division. During the season, news reports claimed that Joan Whitney Payson, the owner of the Mets, was trying to trade for Mays. The Mets were young and talented but needed some veteran leadership. Stoneham said he had no intention of trading Mays. It didn’t matter for the Mets. Founded only seven years earlier, the Miracle Mets won their division, the pennant, and the World Series.
Mays took some consolation when the Sporting News named him “Player of the Decade,” an honor that Ted Williams and Stan Musial had held before him. Another publication chose Mays for a team called “Baseball’s Greatest Living Players.” At last he was with DiMaggio.