The twilight years of Mays’s career saw a seismic shift in baseball: a serious challenge to the reserve clause, which led to its demise, and the strengthening of the labor union, which forced a players’ strike. While baseball eras are vaguely defined, a new one had clearly begun in the early 1970s. Mays did not play a major role in the bitter disputes that seemed to threaten the very existence of the game, but his name was invoked by parties on all sides, and his surprising reaction to baseball’s upheavals shed additional light on his character.
Money—especially from television—had changed baseball’s landscape. In 1946, the Yankees were the first team to sell television rights to their games, which netted them $75,000. By 1970, television revenue for the entire league was $38 million. Expansion fees and higher ticket prices brought in even more. But the average salaries for the players, when adjusted for inflation, had changed little.
The Major League Baseball Players Association was formed in 1954 but for years did little for its members. Then in 1966 it hired Marvin Miller, who for more than a decade had helped lead the powerful United Steelworkers of America and who was now determined to convince professional ballplayers that baseball was a business. He achieved some incremental gains in short order—the owners agreed to raise the minimum wage, for example, and contribute to player pensions. But the owners’ principal tool in keeping salaries low and maintaining a docile labor force was the reserve clause, which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld in 1922.
In 1970, after Curt Flood was traded to the Phillies, he sued Major League Baseball in an effort to overturn the reserve clause—in effect, to win his freedom. In an interview, Howard Cosell said to Flood, “It’s been written, Curt, that you’re a man who makes $90,000 a year, which isn’t exactly slave wages. What’s your retort to that?”
“A well-paid slave,” Flood said, “is a slave nonetheless.”
While the representatives of the players’ union supported the suit, many of the game’s high-salaried stars did not. Carl Yastrzemski said the suit, if successful, would ruin baseball. Harmon Killebrew, Frank Howard, Ron Santo, and Gaylord Perry all opposed Flood.
The game’s most important voice belonged to Willie Mays, whose league-high salary—$150,000 in 1970—was cited by the owners as evidence of their fairness and generosity. On the Tonight Show, Johnny Carson asked Mays what he thought of Flood’s case. Mays said, “If Curt is doing something he thinks is right, I think he should do it. I haven’t really studied it too much. I don’t know all the arguments that are going on, and I’m not going to get involved.”
As Brad Snyder pointed out in his book on Flood’s case, A Well-Paid Slave, five black future Hall of Famers—Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks, Frank Robinson, and Billy Williams, as well as Mays—failed to support Flood. All but Robinson had grown up in the South, and Aaron, Banks, and Mays had played in the Negro Leagues. “They succeeded by obeying the system,” Snyder wrote. “They were not boat rockers. They feared retribution from the owners and did not want to jeopardize their salaries, their careers, and their futures in the game.”
Nonetheless, Mays’s comments got the most attention, including a reaction from Flood. In his 1970 book, The Way It Is, Flood wrote: “All but a very few major leaguers share my view of baseball reality. Among those who do not, the most prominent is the great Willie Mays, who reports from the privileged isolation of his huge success that he has absolutely nothing to complain about.”
Flood lost his legal battle, but his efforts effectively opened the door for other challenges, and in 1975 a federal arbitrator ruled that two players, Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally, were free agents when their contracts expired. The reserve clause was dead.
The players’ ability to receive market wages contributed to huge increases in salary, and as a matter of principle—the freedom to choose your own employer—the victory was long overdue. That is the consensus, but not for Mays, who believes something important was lost with free agency.
Mays wants to see players make as much money as possible, and while he has always felt aligned with the owners, he’s never had any stake in their profits. Free agency, to Mays, was not simply about the dollars. It was about values. Mays prizes stability, order, and loyalty, and the reserve clause ensured that rosters were fairly stable and that teams could be kept together. Free agency, however, invited disruption for management while obliterating any pretense that the players were loyal to their teammates, their organizations, or their cities. They were now mercenaries whose only loyalty was to their checkbook.
As Mays said in Say Hey, “Once the arbitrator ruled that a player was free to make his own deal, many of the values that I treasured suddenly went down the drain. I believed in a family atmosphere in a club.... While I didn’t play under free agency, I started to see a change in mutual respect. Oh, ballplayers always griped. I’m not saying we didn’t. But there was also a... what’s the word I want?... pride. Yes, pride, in being there, in being one of the few hundred ballplayers out of the tens of millions of Americans who dreamed one day of becoming a big leaguer.”
Mays, to be sure, is not the most objective critic of free agency. When he was still playing, his high pay cushioned him against the inequities of the chattel system, and his close ties to Stoneham caused him to understate the owners’ treatment of the players as disposable parts. But Mays’s central point—that the demise of the reserve clause contributed to a freewheeling money culture, which has diminished the players’ devotion to the game, fed their conceit about their self-worth, and raised self-aggrandizement to an art form—stands as a reasonable critique of the modern game.
What’s more, Mays proved that he was no stooge of management in 1972, when the owners refused to bargain on insurance benefits, and the players, through their representatives, voted unanimously to strike. As it happened, Stoneham had traded the Giants’ player rep (Hal Lanier) and alternate (Gaylord Perry) after the 1971 season, so Mays suddenly found himself representing the team at this critical time.
The strike itself, which began in spring training, would only succeed if the players remained unified, and as Opening Day approached, Marvin Miller was concerned that that unity was beginning to crack. Many of the players lived from paycheck to paycheck, and they had no experience with labor-management showdowns. The players’ executive board met in New York, and Mays was asked to address it. His comments, recalled in Miller’s autobiography, convey as much about Mays’s commitment to baseball as they do about his support for the union.
“I know it’s hard being away from the game and our paychecks and our normal life,” Mays said. “I love this game. It’s been my whole life. But we made a decision... to stick together, and until we’re satisfied, we have to stay together. This could be my last year in baseball, and if the strike lasts the entire season and I’ve played my last game, well, it will be painful. But if we don’t hang together, everything we’ve worked for will be lost.”
Mays’s words left the room silent. “My doubts” about our unity, Miller said, “disappeared like one of his towering home runs.”
The players held firm. The strike lasted thirteen days and forced the cancellation of eighty-six games, but the owners agreed to add $500,000 in health care benefits. Their control over the players, even before the reserve clause was overturned, had ended.
Clyde King was abruptly fired after forty-two games in 1970. The Giants were only four games under .500, but Stoneham reportedly held King responsible for the Giants’ failure to win the pennant the previous year, and despite King’s background as a pitching coach, the team’s ERA was 5.44. On his last day as manager, the Giants scored sixteen runs and still lost to the Padres, 17–16. Those reasons notwithstanding, King’s inability to get along with Mays was an important reason for his dismissal. Mays’s low assessment of King’s managing skills was never contradicted; King had two more managing stints, with the Braves and the Yankees, but he’d hold those jobs for fewer games than he had with the Giants.
The Giants’ next manager was Charlie Fox, a long-standing coach who had seen Mays thrive under Herman Franks and afforded him the same latitude. The team improved, going 67–53 for the rest of the year, and finished third.
That season produced one of the truly memorable images of Mays’s career. In an April game at Candlestick, the Reds’ Bobby Tolan smashed a ball into deep right center. Both Mays and Bobby Bonds sprinted to the track and leaped at the same time, their gloves reaching over the fence. In a sequence of four wire-service photographs, the two men collide in midair, with their legs entangled, their glove hands outstretched, with Mays’s belt flush against Bonds’s midsection. Next, their feet land, though their bodies are entwined as one. They then collapse to the ground, with Bonds on his left side, Mays flat on his back, the ball visible in his glove. Finally, Mays remains on the ground, the wind knocked out of him, as Bonds lifts himself up and reaches for the ball, which he held up for the umpires. It unfolded like a violent airborne dance. Watching the game was five-year-old Barry Bonds. “I believe I was crying, because anything that happened to Willie got to me,” he says. It was the last out of the inning, and by the time Mays sat up, the Reds’ outfielders, including Pete Rose, were looking over him. “Friends came out to see how I was doing,” Mays recalled. “That’s what made it special.”
Mays was no longer the best player in the game or even one of the best, but at thirty-nine, he was surprisingly good. On June 7, he equaled his home run output from the previous season, thirteen, and passed it three days later. He flirted with .300, and his catch on Tolan’s ball was one of several sensational defensive plays, including his cutting off a base hit in left center with his bare hand. In July, Sports Illustrated broke down Mays’s game. He remained one of the best baserunners on the team who, running on 3-and-2, had gone first to third on a wild pitch. He could still throw strikes from the outfield and, using his knowledge of hitters and quick jumps, was still “the master of his position.”
Mays always preferred off-speed pitches to fastballs and, with the rest of the league, struggled against Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson, and Tom Seaver. Mays had other reasons to be scared of Gibson. The Cardinal pitcher, accompanied by teammate Bill White, once visited Mays at home.
“Is that Gibson?” Mays asked in disbelief. “You wear glasses? Man, you’re going to kill somebody one of these days.” Gibson wore glasses but did not use them when he played.
As Gibson recalled, “After that, he never leaned over the plate too much.”
In 1970, Mays conveniently scheduled his off days when Gibson or Seaver pitched, but he made adjustments against hard throwers by bailing out, giving him the opportunity to turn on inside pitches, though his reflexes were fast enough to still reach outside deliveries. Mays, however, received his highest praise as a teammate who helped younger players. “He’s a beautiful person,” said Giant outfielder Frank Johnson. “I don’t think anybody on the club dislikes him. If they do, they’re crazy.” Added Bobby Bonds, “He’s the most nonchalant superstar you’ll ever see. He acts just like he draws the minimum.” ( Sports Illustrated noted that Mays had never been that close to Juan Marichal, who in the off-season told a Dominican reporter that Mays should consider retiring. Marichal later said he was misunderstood and retracted the comment.)
Mays began the year needing 74 hits to reach 3,000, but unlike past home run chases, he went on a tear as he approached the milestone, going 10-for-23 to reach 2,999. Then, on July 18, in a sunny afternoon game at Candlestick, Mays came to bat in the first inning. When Montreal Expo hurler Mike Wegener walked him on four pitches, the crowd booed madly on each throw. In the second, Mays stepped to the plate again and, with an 0–2 count, cut on a low slider and chopped it through the infield on the left side—“every bounce,” the Examiner wrote, “was lustrous with history.” When Mays reached first base, he doffed his cap to the cheering crowd—he was only the tenth player in big league history to get 3,000 hits, Hank Aaron having reached the mark earlier in the season. Mays was soon surrounded by his teammates, and several Expos congratulated him as well. A ten-minute ceremony was led by Chub Feeney, now president of the National League. Also on the field were Stan Musial, who put his arm around Mays, and Monte Irvin, representing the commissioner’s office.
After the game, Mays said he couldn’t help but think about the record, given that two photographers were at his front door when he left for the park. “I don’t feel excitement about this now,” he said. “A reaction may set in later, but the main thing I wanted to do was help Gaylord Perry win a game. I don’t like to talk about goals, but maybe I have a goal—to help the guys win.”
He played 139 games and hit .291, with twenty-eight homers, eighty-three RBIs, and ninety-four runs scored. On the Giants, only three players hit for higher average and for more RBIs, and only two for more homers. On September 28, Mays entered another exclusive club—he had at-bat number 10,000 for his career. Only Ty Cobb (11,434) and Stan Musial (10,972) had more.
The cover of Saturday Review blared: “The Age of Willie Mays.” The date was May 8, 1971, two days after Mays had turned forty, and the photo was one of Willie’s favorites. Set in an ornate gold frame, it showed him at the plate, swinging the bat, his arms fully extended, his eyes on the ball. His uniform was skin tight, and what Mays loved about the picture was its display of his muscular thighs, torso, and arms—he had a few gray hairs on his temples and a slightly receding hairline, but he still had a thirty-two-inch waist, Herculean arms, and a sculpted physique. Charlie Fox noted that this was no accident. “In twenty-two years,” he said, “Willie has gained a pound and a half. You spread a buffet for the team after a game, and young players will gobble everything in sight. Willie will take one stick of gum.”
There was poetic symmetry in Mays’s life. He had been born forty years earlier and had joined the Giants twenty years earlier. He had also achieved a kind of royal status, recognized by writers, players, and fans alike. In both 1970 and 1971, a poll of the players had ranked Mays as the fourth-best outfielder for the All-Star Game, but in 1970 the voting returned to the fans, who elected Mays to start. One time in Los Angeles, he was hit by a pitch in the small of his back. “The pitcher, Don Sutton, looked on in horror,” Jim Murray wrote, “as if he had just thrown a dart through the Mona Lisa or cracked a statue of St. Francis with a well-aimed rock.... Sutton ran up like a Red Cross nurse. The crowd—a Dodger crowd, mind you—booed him.”
The claim that this was “the Age of Mays” was a stretch. It was more like “the Age of Elegies,” as wistful tributes for Willie tumbled in. The Saturday Review ’s Peter Schrag wrote that Mays “should be well past his prime, an aging star dogged by fragile legs, trick knees, fatigue, and the other assorted aches and pains that the flesh of annuating athletes is supposed to suffer. But Mays moves with the grace of memory, defying time, defying the inexorable erosion of fantasies, defying age itself. He remains unequivocally our man. To see him now is like watching the instant replay of a generation, the crowds of twenty years, the old ballparks with their erratic dimensions and their even more erratic fans.”
Schrag noted Mays’s unpredictable moods and his coldness to reporters he didn’t know, but those could be forgiven. Mays urged the young Giants to adopt his daring style, which the writer summarized as: “If you want to make money, don’t play it safe.” At a time of increasing corporate conformity, Schrag concluded, and “when baseball itself seemed to be dulled by tepid professionalism,” Mays “appeared to us as the new romantic individualist, a man of the ritual, but a man who enriched it. He brought jazz to the game.”
Milton Gross, Mays’s longtime friend and confidant, wrote in the New York Post : “Mays is more than a man nearing middle age so far as baseball is concerned. He is an emotional experience. He is the tie that binds so many of us to our carefree days of the past and for the younger generation he is the legend that lives, the only authentic piece of active history which links baseball as it is to what it used to be.”
Wells Twombly, a sports columnist for the Examiner with a literary flair, reprised the theme that Mays’s aging violated nature’s will. “As the greatest baseball player of his generation advances on home plate,” he wrote, “carefully picking his steps on legs that are only slightly bowed, it is difficult to shirk the feeling that perhaps this is the only mortal time ever agreed to leave alone. It would be a sin to have him grow old. Indeed, there are moments, especially when he goes swooping after a fly ball in darkest center field like a peregrine falcon chasing a dove, when it seems he will still be playing this game two decades from now.... But the end moves closer with every inning, with every pitch. These bits and pieces, these broken shards, are nothing more than that. Nature has, in the final analysis, a ghastly sense of humor.”
The veteran sportswriter Joe Falls lamented that Mays had never played a game in his city, Detroit, and he had never seen Mays play in person. So he flew to Cincinnati to watch him. Mays struck out twice and popped out twice, but he also went into deep center field for a towering fly, turned around, and— plop! —the ball fell into his glove for a basket catch. “The whole trip was worthwhile,” Falls wrote.
He had an even better anecdote in 1971, when Mays finally played at Tiger Stadium in the All-Star Game. The next day, two young men dialed Falls with a story that highlighted the bond between Mays and his fans. Tim Hemming, nineteen, and Ron Salsido, twenty-one, placed a call to Mays’s hotel room at 4 A.M. on the day of the game. Though half asleep, Mays answered and spoke to the guys, and he agreed to help them out. They had bleacher seats, and before the bottom of the first inning, one of them threw a baseball onto the field. Mays picked it up, signed it, and threw it back, setting off a mad scramble.
“I got a black eye out of it,” Hemming said, “but I’ve got the ball.”
On Mays’s fortieth birthday, he was given a party similar to the celebration on his thirty-fifth. It was again held at the Fairmont Hotel (in the Grand Ball Room), it again raised money for a charity (the Hunters Point Fund), and it included a list of impressive dignitaries from the worlds of sports, entertainment, and politics. The price per plate had gone from $25 to $24, to match Mays’s uniform number.
The ballroom was festooned with pennants from all twenty-four major league teams, symbolizing the event as a nationwide salute. That Mays was hitting .368 contributed to the theme of the star as a timeless wonder. Seven hundred celebrants showed up, and the front table consisted of a pretty fair outfield—Mays, Aaron, and DiMaggio. In one of his few public speeches, the fifty-six-year-old Yankee legend said, “I know you’re going to wind up in the Hall of Fame, but I don’t know if I’ll be around to see you get in. There’s a rule, you know, that you have to wait five years after you retire to be elected.”
Chub Feeney said, “Those of us who saw him break in twenty years ago have all grown older, but he hasn’t.” Carl Reiner, the director, remarked, “Mays brings out the child in all of us that refuses to die.” Albert Brooks did a ventriloquist act. Charlie Fox, in his finest Irish tenor, sang an altered rendition of “Danny Boy.”
“Friends may forsake me; let them all forsake me; I still have you, Willie boy.”
Horace Stoneham almost broke down praising Mays, and Dianne Feinstein—who, the Sporting News reported, “may be America’s most attractive city supervisor”—gave Willie a plaque that read: “Mr. Mays, you are a very bright light in San Francisco.”
The evening’s most poignant moment occurred with the remembrance of Russ Hodges, who had died three weeks earlier of a heart attack at the age of sixty. He had been the voice of the Giants for twenty-two years and had seen all but three of Mays’s home runs. Mays was one of the first to be notified of his death. “Willie broke up over the phone,” a member of his family told the press. “He couldn’t talk.”
At the birthday celebration, Hodges’s call of Mays’s at-bat in Houston in 1965, when he kept fouling off fastballs until he finally hit the game-tying homer, was dramatically played to a tearful audience.
The party was like Mays’s thirty-fifth in one other respect. Whoever planned it did not include Mays as a speaker. Lee Mendelson, who had filmed the documentary in 1963, was surprised when he picked up the program and noticed the omission. “I remember that very distinctly,” he says more than thirty-five years later. “I went up to Stoneham or somebody and said, ‘I haven’t talked to Willie about this, but I think Willie would like to speak.’ And somebody said, ‘Do you think he wants to speak?’ I think there were people around the Giants, the PR people, who didn’t realize what a good speaker he was and were always trying to protect him.”
Mays didn’t need the protection. He wasn’t completely relaxed in front of audiences, but he had tried to improve his diction and grammar and had worked on lowering his voice. After radio interviews, he would ask friends how he sounded. He continued to speak without notes, but his friends would hear him practicing his talks in a separate room in his house. On the night of his birthday, wearing a cream-colored suit, he gave a heartfelt speech with a surprise ending.
“All I’ve ever done is to try my best,” Mays said. “America must be a beautiful country when someone like me can have the opportunity to do what everyone here this night has said.” He hit familiar notes in describing what motivated him to play. “I don’t play for myself,” he said. “I play for the fans. If they enjoy my playing, I enjoy myself.... I’ll be at Candlestick Park ready to play tomorrow night. People ask me when I’m going to retire. I’d like to say never... maybe I can be thirty-nine forever, like Jack Benny.” Mays revealed a bit more than usual, however, when he talked about the struggles of celebrity and how tough it was “to live in a bowl.” He also defended himself on racial matters. According to the Examiner, he said he “didn’t care for the rap that he’s an Uncle Tom, although he never used that expression.”
Before he said his final thank-you, Mays said he wanted to make a special introduction. “She’s always mentioning that wherever we go, she’s never introduced, and she’s gotten mad at me sometimes when I don’t introduce her as my girl. But she has to understand that it is different when you are going around with a baseball player.” He nodded to his partner. “I’d like to introduce Miss Mae Allen.” Mae was completely surprised. She stood, took a bow, and wept.
Willie’s acknowledgment was so uncharacteristic that the Examiner ran a sidebar, “Mae and Mays,” and wondered if they’d “step up to the matrimonial plate soon?”
Not all the attention was favorable. Mays could still be uncomfortable with interviews, and that was clear when he appeared on Dick Cavett’s show in January.
“Some people look at their fortieth birthday as a crisis,” Cavett said. “How do you feel about that?”
Mays thought Cavett was suggesting that he was getting too old to play, and his reply was tetchy and defensive. “Hey, why does everybody want to ask me about my age?” he snapped. “I may play three or four more years.”
Cavett: “George Blanda is forty-three and—”
Mays cut him off. “Blanda is only a placekicker. He comes and plays a few seconds once a week. I play every day. Are we going to discuss football or baseball?”
Cavett: “I sense I’m being put on here. Mr. Mays, you make me nervous.”
The two staggered through the rest of the interview until Hank Aaron and Jim Bouton joined them.
By now, Mays received little criticism from San Francisco journalists, who recognized his unique status and knew how to approach him and what to expect. But he was subject to an unusually personal attack from a Chronicle columnist named Glenn Dickey, a screed so caustic that competing writers for the Examiner rose in Mays’s defense.
Dickey’s column was supposed to run the day after Mays’s birthday, but as the Sporting News reported, it was held for three weeks on the theory that eviscerating a man on his birthday might offend some readers. Mays, Dickey wrote, “sheds his greatness like a cloak when he leaves the playing field.... You know the myth [of] the Say Hey kid, a happy-go-lucky fellow with a kind word for everyone. Try that on an autograph-seeking kid who has been brushed off, a sportswriter who has been cursed, a manager who has tried to exercise authority, a black who has tried to get Mays to speak out against racial inequities.” Dickey described Mays as a “hypochondriac” who used his “famed fainting spells” to garner extra attention, and now, “when the Giants are looking for him, they check the hospitals first.” Dickey’s conclusion: “Occasionally, there is talk that Mays will be the first black manager, but he would bring only indolence, an uncertain intelligence and a petulant personality to the job. Better keep playing, Willie.”
The timing of the attack was not particularly good. Three days earlier, Mays had hit a game-winning home run, breaking the National League record by scoring run number 1,950 of his career. For that, the grounds crew ceremoniously dug up home plate and gave it to him. The day before the column appeared, Mays had what the Sporting News said was “one of his most sensational days in San Francisco.” Against the Mets, he hit a game-tying home run in the eighth. Replacing the injured McCovey, he made several game-saving plays at first in the ninth and tenth innings; then, in the eleventh, he was on second base with one out when the hitter chopped a bouncer to third baseman Tim Foli. Mays could have reached third easily if he had run fast. Instead, he slowed down so that Foli, glimpsing Mays out of the corner of his eye, believed he could tag him instead of getting the sure out at first—a high-risk baserunning gambit that required speed, improvisation, and an instant calculation of his chance for success. Mays avoided the lunging Foli and slid in safely at third, giving the Giants runners at the corners with one out instead of a man on third with two outs. Mays scored the game-winning run on a sacrifice fly.
The day that Dickey’s harangue was published, Charlie Fox said of Mays, “I’d kiss him if Jim Bouton wouldn’t put it in his next book,” and Dickey’s own newspaper wrote that Mays “should have been given the stadium.”
The column set off a media firestorm, drawing scorn from radio talk show hosts as well as Lon Simmons during a game. The Examiner also pounced. Prescott Sullivan, who acknowledged that “we are not one of Mays’s biggest boosters,” described Mays as “a less than perfect human being, [but] with fewer faults than are necessary to the species.” He asked Examiner photographer Charles Doherty if Mays was uncooperative. “Not at all,” Doherty said. “Oh, there may have been a couple times over a period of thirteen years when he balked at posing for gag shots, but I’d say he had a pretty good record.” He also asked Giant beat writers about Mays.
Bucky Walter: “He’s okay. I’ve always gotten along with him.” Jim McGee: “I’ve never had any trouble with Willie. It isn’t easy to get a story out of him, though. He tries to avoid controversy.”
Wells Twombly attacked the messenger, saying of Dickey, “Ambition doth make hatchet men of us all.” Sarcastically calling him a fine newsman, Twombly wrote: “Confronted with the fact that his shirt slithered off his back at high noon when he left his air-conditioned hotel room, he immediately broke the news that it is humid in Houston in the summertime.” Twombly also noted: “If Willie isn’t the bubbly little creature that New York writers used to insist he was, he, at least, isn’t surly. And these days, that is a blessing.”
In a second column, Dickey said that many fans had written to him—“the kinder ones suggested I was mentally ill”—and the Giant players “threw me out of the clubhouse.”
Mays himself never commented on the column, nor will he. He never dignifies his adversaries. But he was visibly upset when he read it, which confirmed his view that with rare exception, he should never trust a journalist.
A more creative attack came from a magazine called Sport Scene, which in 1971 published an article, “Willie Mays Is Hurting the Giants!” How so? “Usually no man wins or loses a pennant by himself, but an overreliance on Mays may very well have cost the Giants one or more flags.” If only he had played for the Dodgers.
There were no second-place finishes for the Giants in 1971. They finally won something, the National League West, though even that they almost blew. They took over first place on April 12, were up by ten games in early June, and had an 8½-game lead on September 3. But they lost eight out of nine in one September stretch and had to win the final game of the season to hold off the Dodgers.
McCovey, hobbled by injuries at the age of thirty-three, played only 105 games. Bobby Bonds was now the star, hitting .288 with 33 homers, 102 RBIs, and 26 stolen bases. Younger players, including Ken Henderson, third baseman Al Gallagher, and rookie shortstop Chris Speier, rounded out a solid if unspectacular starting lineup—Bonds’s .288 average was the highest on the team. Marichal and Perry anchored the starting staff, and reliever Jerry Johnson had a career year as closer (eighteen saves).
The hot bat that Mays took into his fortieth birthday cooled down as the summer progressed—he was hitting .289 by the end of June and, playing in 136 games, finished the season at .271. The year reflected his adjustments to his age. The most walks he ever had for a season was 82, in 1964, but in 1971 he drew 112 walks, giving him a team-best on-base percentage of .425. More surprising were Mays’s stolen bases—twenty-three in twenty-six attempts, equaling his stolen bases for the three previous years combined. Mays says he ran more because McCovey missed so many games, reducing the need to keep the hole open on the right side, and it’s probably true that Mays would have stolen far more bases in the 1960s with a different cleanup hitter. Regardless, in 1971 he showed that with his power numbers down, he could beat you in other ways.
There were, however, signs of decline. The most obvious were his strikeouts—123, by far the most of his career and the first time he had surpassed 100. Mays also had seventeen errors, another career high, but eleven of those were at first base. Perhaps the clearest indication of age occurred in September, when Dodger hurler Bill Singer hit Mays with a pitch, sidelining him for several days. “He couldn’t get out of the way,” McCovey recalls. “So we teased, ‘You’re slowing down.’ That was kind of the beginning of it, really.”
In the Giants’ final game, against San Diego, Mays drove in the first run with a double and scored on rookie Dave Kingman’s homer. San Francisco won, 5–1, triggering a celebration in the clubhouse as the players sprayed champagne, romped around, and happily denigrated the Dodgers. “They kept saying we were a dead horse,” Marichal said. “Who’s dead now?”
Mays sat slumped in the corner, subdued. He had received about ten cortisone shots during the year for various ailments, and the night before, Giant trainer Leo Hughes had wanted to give him another shot for the painful bursitis in his right shoulder, which had prevented him from holding his bat properly aloft. Mays refused, because he would have to wait twenty-four hours to play. He did, however, advise Bonds to take a cortisone shot for a pulled muscle in his left rib cage—so Bonds sat out the most important game of the season, but now he’d be ready for the playoffs.
Reporters clustered around Mays. When Kingman poured champagne over his head, all he could do was wipe it from his eyes. He spoke almost as if he were watching another team.
“Let them celebrate,” he said. “That’s for the kids. I’m really happy for them. We’re not there yet. They don’t think like me. We still got the Pirates to worry about.”
He considered the broad sweep of his career. “Nineteen fifty-one, 1954, 1962. That’s not many pennants when you play twenty years, and we don’t have this one yet. The kids are happy because they just won the division. I won’t be happy until we get into the World Series. I like to wait to do my celebrating.”
Mays ran his hand over his sunken face. “Man, even this was a long time coming.” Asked if he was tired, he could barely speak the words: “Oh, man, I’ve been so tired for the last month or so. Everybody on the team’s known it, but I had to play. I had to be there.... Those kids need me. They come to me and I go to them with advice. Some of them look on me as their father.”
McCovey, who had been spelled repeatedly by Mays, paid homage to his friend. “You know who I’m happiest for?” he said. “Willie. He played too much. He played when I couldn’t because one of us had to be in there.”
The Giants’ inability to wrap up the division cost them dearly. The Pirates, led by Willie Stargell and Roberto Clemente, had won their division by seven games and were well rested. But Marichal had to pitch the last game of the season, which meant he could pitch only once in the five-game series against the Pirates, and not until the third game. Perry threw the opener in Candlestick and won, 5–4, but the Pirates won the next game, 9–4. In Pittsburgh, Marichal pitched well but lost, 2–1. The fourth game returned Perry to the mound against Steve Blass.
The playoff attracted writers from New York, including Jimmy Cannon, who had immortalized Mays years ago and now had a chance to rhapsodize about him again. “The face is young, but the lines of exhaustion age him,” Cannon wrote.
He carries the skills across the autumn, and he reminds me of those summer days years ago on picnics. There was a race, and people would have to negotiate a measured distance holding a raw egg on a spoon. The ones who were careful, walking gingerly, won. Every step was important, and if the egg rolled off the spoon the race was over. This is Willie Mays now, going through a playoff with the egg of his skills on a spoon.
“It is just a helpless hurt,” he told me.... “I can’t even think about it.”
Mays hit well in the opening games, going 3-for-7 with a home run and three RBIs. He got a single in game three, but neither he nor anyone else could stop the Pirates. The Giants were drained from the division race, and they could not overcome their many injuries; Bonds missed the second playoff game and was a nonfactor throughout. Mays went hitless in the fourth game, as the Pirates knocked out Perry in the sixth inning and won handily, 9–5. The series ended quickly.
The most-discussed play for Mays occurred in the third game, in the sixth inning, when he came to bat with Tito Fuentes on second, the game tied, and no one out. With the series at 1–1, it was a critical moment. On the first pitch, Mays squared and bunted it foul. The next pitch, he faked the bunt and took a ball. On the third pitch, he bunted, but the ball rolled only a couple of feet. He screamed to Fuentes, “Go! Go! Go!” But catcher Manny Sanguillen grabbed the ball, checked the runner back, and threw out Mays. The Giants failed to score.
For a player who had once been criticized for his unwillingness to bunt, Mays’s play evoked both bewilderment and sadness. Had he been bunting for a hit—and with the element of surprise, he would have succeeded with a good bunt—the play would have been easy to justify. But he had already tipped his hand and was bunting to sacrifice. For most batters, that was a legitimate move—get the runner to third with less than two outs. But Mays had never been “most batters.”
He was grilled with questions after the third and fourth games. Why did you bunt? He answered evenly, without rancor. He said he was trying to make it as easy as possible for the next hitters, McCovey and Bonds, to drive in the run. “I felt one of them could get Tito home and the way [Marichal] was pitching, another run could’ve meant the ball game, right?”
“Yes,” someone challenged, “but that means you were giving up and saying you couldn’t drive in Fuentes yourself.”
“I resent anybody saying I’m giving up,” Mays said calmly. “That run to me was an important run. I was thinking of the best way to get the run in, the best way to win. Another thing: I’ve played 137 games this year. I’m dead tired. I didn’t feel that strong Tuesday. If I felt stronger, I’d never do that.”
Mays didn’t fly home with the team. He wanted to go by himself. Says Fuentes, “I believe he was hurt and embarrassed. It ate him alive, and he wanted to think about it.”
It was, no doubt, a melancholy end to Mays’s season, but it did not obscure his contributions. By now, his record as one of the greatest players in baseball history—if not the greatest—had been established, and if he had retired in 1971, his legacy would have included his durability and his fitness. At thirty-nine and forty, he easily outperformed Babe Ruth at those ages, who, bloated and ailing, had to retire after twenty-eight games in his fortieth year. Mickey Mantle and Joe DiMaggio both retired at thirty-six. Neither Ty Cobb nor Ted Williams played in as many games, at thirty-nine and forty, as Mays, and Stan Musial’s numbers weren’t as good at that age either.
Had Mays retired, he would be remembered for defying his own biology through a lifestyle that emphasized temperance, moderation, and rest, and the images that would have bracketed his career would have been the Catch in 1954 and his collide-and-catch with Bonds in 1970, two moments that captured the skill and spirit of the man. But Mays did not retire.