One year before Willie introduced Mae at his birthday party, he took her out to dinner and seemed unusually serious. He told her how he felt. “I want to marry you,” he said, “but give me a little time. I don’t want to lose you.” He slipped a ring on her finger.
Love, yes; commitment, apparently so; an actual wedding date, no. Mae continued to wait, though Willie himself had entered a new phase of his life. In 1969, he wanted to buy a home in Atherton, an exclusive community—said to have the highest per-capita income in California—about thirty-five miles south of San Francisco. Ty Cobb had lived there. So too had Alvin Dark. But Mays didn’t have the money. Instead, he had friends. He had met Dinah Shore on the Pro-Am golf circuit. The actress was also from the South, and she seemed to understand Willie, who was fifteen years her junior, and would often tease him, “Hi, little boy, you need anything?”
“I don’t need anything now,” he’d say.
But one day Mays called her. “Dinah, I got to buy a house, and I don’t know what to do.”
“How much do you need?” she asked.
Mays also asked for help from Donna Reed, and she and Shore helped him cover the $67,000 down payment on the $165,000 house and also paid for new furniture. The house itself had eighteen rooms, including five bedrooms, a swimming pool, and a cabana, all on two acres of spacious lawns with tall redwoods and California oaks.
By November 1971, Willie finally decided, in his words, “to grow up a little,” and also to fully trust again. He invited Mae to his house, and at midnight Mae called her friend, Jessie Goins.
“Willie wants to know,” Mae said, “can you go to Mexico?”
Jessie, who had never been out of California, asked what for.
“Willie is talking about going to Mexico and getting married,” Mae explained. She said Willie wanted to bring a group of friends.
“Whatever it takes,” Jessie said. “When are we going?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
The next day was Thanksgiving.
“No problem,” Jessie said.
Willie’s friends were used to his unpredictable travel whims—last-second decisions, say, to pack the car and drive to Vegas. But this seemed preposterous. Nine people would be traveling, including several who didn’t have passports and one—Mae—who didn’t have a wedding dress. At the airport, Willie bumped into one of his golfing partners, Bob Hope, who asked where he was going.
“Mexico—to get married,” he said. Hope thought that was hilarious.
By now, Mays had become a savvy negotiator and knew how to leverage his celebrity for the best possible deals, be it for cars, clothes, or travel. He had also expanded his contacts in the corporate world, including American Airlines, and he persuaded the carrier to fly his party, free of charge, to Mexico City and then to Acapulco and to put them up in luxury hotels owned by the airline. But American Airlines got something in return. Ebony ran a glorious cover photo of Willie and Mae in Acapulco and published four pages of photographs of the couple’s wedding and honeymoon. In the middle of those pages was a full-page ad from American Airlines promoting travel to—naturally—Mexico.
Willie had also resolved the passport issue. When they landed in Mexico City, they were met by Bernard Farat, an executive at the National Council of Tourism, who allowed them to enter without passports. Willie tried to tip him, but Farat said he couldn’t accept money. Willie had another idea. He had given Jessie a “Willie Mays watch,” which had his image on the face and which she was now wearing.
He showed Farat the watch. “Can you take this?” The executive said he’d be grateful for it. Willie gave it to him and replaced Jessie’s when they returned.
In Mexico City, Mae bought a white lace wedding dress with white gloves and a veil, but a problem arose on the wedding day. Mae and Willie needed to submit a photograph of themselves to the judge, but they didn’t have any. So they had to take a taxi to a photographer’s studio—“It was out in the middle of nowhere,” Jessie says—and once they arrived, the photographer recognized Willie and said he’d take the picture if Willie gave him an autograph, plus his usual fee. Willie got angry only after the camera broke and more time was wasted waiting for a new one. It was Saturday, and the couple had to be in a judge’s private office by noon to take their vows or wait until Monday. Back in their hotel, they were hurriedly dressing for the ceremony when Willie’s zipper broke, requiring someone with smaller fingers to get the damn thing on track. They barely made it to the judge on time. The brief ceremony was conducted in Spanish, which neither Willie nor Mae spoke, but Farat translated.
The whole traveling party went on the honeymoon, which suited Willie fine. He loved Mae, but he reveled in the companionship of men, with whom he could play golf while the women shopped and lounged on the beach. For his wife and his friends, Willie organized the trip just as he played baseball—it was spontaneous and flamboyant, and it gave them something to talk about.
Mae and Willie settled in. She put her career on hold and assumed the job of caring for Willie. She cooked, cleaned, answered his mail, packed his luggage, sent out the Christmas cards, paid the bills, took care of the new poodle, and helped with the raising of Michael. “The feminists will probably crucify me for this,” she said, “but if you love the guy, it’s worth it.”
Her warmth and generosity were her greatest assets. She would give the police officers who patrolled the neighborhood pastries or autographed baseballs. But she also stood up to Willie. One time, he had promised to donate a golf bag to a charity, and when he forgot, a member of the charity came to the house and asked for it. Mae told the person, “You go out in the garage, pick out a bag, and if he says anything to you, you tell him to come see me.”
She understood that baseball was Willie’s first love and he could only give her so much of himself—Willie acknowledges that he does not share his deepest feelings with anyone. “Even your own wife shouldn’t know everything about you,” he says. “That’s just the way it is. That’s the way I am.”
But his deeds won over Mae. On one occasion, her cousin Judi Phillips was visiting, and she was in the kitchen, crying. Willie came in and asked what was wrong. Judi said she was on the phone with her mother, and they’d had an argument. Willie pulled out his wallet and gave her a hundred-dollar bill.
“Wipe your eyes,” he said. “Send her some flowers and tell her that you love her.” He then walked out.
When Judi told Mae what had happened, Mae said, “He never ceases to amaze me.” And he found ways to show his love. One Valentine’s Day, he gave Mae a white Rolls-Royce with a burgundy interior.
Mae was thirty-two when she married, and in an interview at the time she talked about her stepson—“Michael is a wonderful boy”—and their intention to start their own family.
“We’d love to have a baby girl,” Mae said. “They’re so wonderful. And I think Willie needs a baby girl. We already have our boy.”
“Two,” said Willie, laughing.
By 1972, Mays was older than every National League ballpark except Wrigley Field. Five managers were younger than he. The itinerant Braves had moved from Boston to Milwaukee to Atlanta, and the game itself looked and felt different. There was AstroTurf (installed in Candlestick in 1970), bright, stretchy uniforms (not good for flabby pitching coaches), new markets (Arlington, Texas), and the push for a designated hitter (adopted by the American League the following year). No other player from Mays’s rookie year remained active.
Mays began the season with a bad vibe. The year before, he had asked Stoneham for a ten-year contract for $750,000. He would finish his playing career over the next several years, then work for the Giants in some capacity. Stoneham rejected the offer, saying the board of directors had authorized him only to offer a five-year contract at $75,000 a year. Mays was both hurt and puzzled; in all their years together, Stoneham had never mentioned the board of directors. Mays turned down the offer and signed a two-year deal for $165,000 a season.
Mays also thought it odd that the Giants had never acknowledged his marriage—no calls, no gifts, nothing. He had a box at Candlestick right next to one used by Stoneham’s son, Pete. Before, Pete’s wife often chatted with Mae. Now there were no conversations.
Events on the field, with the Giants staggering out of the gate, were even more troubling. McCovey fractured his arm on a collision at first base, Marichal started 1–6, and the team lost fourteen out of its first twenty games. Mays started badly too. In nineteen games, he was 9-for-49 (.183), with seven singles and two doubles. Charlie Fox said the aborted spring training, due to the players’ strike, had hurt Mays more than most, but he was also losing patience. On April 25, the Giants called up outfielder Garry Maddox, a lithe twenty-two-year-old Vietnam veteran who, after eleven games in the Pacific Coast League, was batting .438 with fourteen extra-base hits and twenty-two RBIs. He replaced Mays in center field, and comparisons were immediately made to another young center fielder who had joined the Giants long ago after an astonishing run in the minors. Maddox had grown up in Los Angeles but was, in fact, a Giant fan because he idolized Mays and would wear number 24 in Little League. He was now succeeding the real number 24.
Mays and Fox were soon at odds over playing time. Before the first game of a doubleheader in late April, Mays handed in the lineups, then left Candlestick. Both he and Fox later said he was ill, but Herman Franks showed up the next day and spoke with Fox about how best to use Mays.
After the Giants lost three games in New York, they traveled to Philadelphia, where, on May 5, Mays received a phone call from a reporter in New York and was told that the Giants were trying to trade him to the Mets. He was stunned. He knew that the Giants were going with a younger team, but he couldn’t believe that Stoneham hadn’t told him first. The organization that he had given his life to apparently didn’t want him anymore. He took it personally. He felt betrayed. “I only regret that I wasn’t told,” he said to reporters at the ballpark. “I’m not mad at anybody. I’m just sad. They’re mad at me.... I was told they were going with young players. But I’ve contributed as much as the youth. Why punish me? When your time is up, they tell you to go? That’s not fair.”
Mays’s age was less the issue than his salary. The Giants were going broke, and Stoneham could no longer afford his high-priced players. Thanks to the team’s division championship in 1971, attendance had surged 52 percent, to 1,122,786, and the Giants’ parent company earned $460,000, but it eliminated all dividends on common and preferred shares. Stoneham retained his $80,000 salary, but his loss in dividend income cost him at least $47,000. The Giants’ dwindling attendance in 1972, 647,744, ensured another year of red ink, and one by one—Perry, Lanier, and Dick Dietz (1971), then McCovey (1972) and Marichal (1973)—the team was dismantled.
On one level, the effort to trade Mays was a mournful exercise. Joan Whitney Payson, who had vowed to bring Willie back to New York, had bankrolled the Mets in part to ensure that Mays and the other Giants would play nine games a year in New York, and throughout the 1960s, she had offered Stoneham considerable sums for Mays. This public courtship led to George Carlin’s joke in 1966 when he played sportscaster Biff Burns. “In the sport-light spotlight tonight,” he said, “first, a baseball trade: the San Francisco Giants have traded outfielder Willie Mays to the New York Mets in exchange for the entire Mets team. The Giants will also receive $500,000 in cash, two Eskimos, and a kangaroo.”
Payson never offered that much, but even in 1971, well after Mays’s prime, Dick Young reported that she had bid $1 million for him. Stoneham concluded that he needed Mays to win a championship. In 1972, however, the Giants were reeling, so Mays was expendable. But with his average under .200, the market had changed.
Stoneham wanted the Mets to assume Mays’s contract and offer him a long-term deal. But he also wanted some young players. He traveled to New York in early May, and in four days of negotiations, he pressed for infielder Ted Martinez and one of two pitchers—Jon Matlack or Jim McAndrew. He got none of them. The Mets, led by M. Donald Grant, Payson’s stockbroker who served as the organization’s chairman of the board, did not deem Mays worthy of a single major league player and certainly not $1 million. The negotiations stalled.
Mays’s fans, including those in the press, just wanted the return of their hero in exile. Red Smith wrote: “Twenty-one years have taken something off the speed, the arm, the batting eye, the power and the bubbling joie de vivre that made him the most exciting player of his time, but he is still Willie, a beautiful man. It would be a joy to welcome him home.”
Wrote Dick Young, “When there’s a chance to get a Willie Mays, don’t quibble about a decade or two.”
They got their wish, and the trade was announced on May 11. Willie would go to the Mets for a minor league pitcher named Charlie Williams and cash, with reports speculating the sum to be $100,000. Stoneham, however, later acknowledged that he didn’t accept any money. Ultimately, all that mattered was that Willie would be taken care of, and the Mets agreed to pay him $165,000 that year and the next. Mays said the Mets also agreed to pay him, on his retirement, $50,000 a year for ten years.
The announcement, at a press conference at the Mayfair House, caused Stoneham to tear up. “I never thought I would trade Willie,” he said. “But with two teams in the Bay Area, our financial situation is such that we could not afford to keep Willie and his big salary as well as the Mets. The Mets are the only club that could take care of him. Don and Mrs. Payson are as much in love with Willie as I am.”
By then, Stoneham had explained to Mays why he couldn’t tell him about the trade talks. If the trade hadn’t happened, then what? They were all blindsided by the leaks, and the trade may have been harder on the owner than the player. Stoneham was now seventy years old, and looked it. The financial stress, as well as the alcohol, had done him no favors. He sold the Giants in 1976, but even that wasn’t his biggest loss.
As Pat Gallagher, a longtime Giant executive, later said, “Selling Willie was the great tragedy in Horace’s life.”
At the press conference, Grant conceded that the trade had little to do with improving the club. This was about helping Willie. “There was a lot of sentiment and pride” in bringing him back, Grant said. “Willie would be taken care of just as Mr. Stoneham would want him to be.”
The comments were sad and paternalistic—Stoneham and Grant sounded like “plantation owners,” wrote the New York Times ’s Dave Anderson—but Mays, who was at the conference, found the words reassuring. The clubs were doing what you do in any family. “I really have to thank that man,” Mays said, nodding to Stoneham. “He looked after me. He took care of me.”
Typically, he concealed how he truly felt, but his wife told a reporter the following year how deeply he had been wounded. “No one, not even myself, really can imagine how badly Willie was hurt when he was traded,” Mae said. “We’re very close. But he wouldn’t then, nor now, talk about it. He felt like a father to some of those” Giant players.
But Mays’s ties with New York had now been restored. “I always liked San Francisco,” he said, “but this is like coming back to paradise.” Asked if playing in New York would give him a psychological edge, he noted, “I don’t know that psychology can do anything for you when you’re forty-one, but I can still run and I can still swing a bat.”
The St. Francis Monastery of Manhattan, in its “Your Good Word for Today,” had recorded: “New York has reason to rejoice these days. Willie Mays has returned. There is some heart in professional sports.”
The Giants, and much of San Francisco, were devastated. Mayor Joseph Alioto said in a statement, “There is no joy in Frisco. The mighty Stoneham has struck out.” Clubhouse attendant Mike Murphy cried. So did Tito Fuentes and Bobby Bonds. Charlie Fox, in a clubhouse meeting, told the players the trade was in Willie’s best interests. “We should all get down on our knees tonight and pray to God that what has happened to Willie will happen to us when we’re through.” But that was no consolation to Bonds. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so disappointed or hurt,” he later said. “It was like they cut me down the middle and traded part of me. It was like only half of me was playing for the rest of the year.”
Lon Simmons spoke with Mays on the phone for his pregame show. “What do you actually feel?” he asked.
“Well, first of all,” Mays said, “it was very hard for me to leave San Francisco, leaving the guys I know so much, but once you get here and the feeling that you have here, it’s just like you’re going to another family.”
Simmons asked a series of questions. Did he feel like he was returning to where it all began? Did he have any thoughts on how long he was going to play? Was he going to make San Francisco his home? Mays answered respectfully but cautiously. Then Simmons tried to draw Mays out of his shell.
“Willie, what are your thoughts now about San Francisco? Have they been good years for you out there?”
Simmons might have expected an answer that would reveal Mays’s struggles and triumphs and the long journey that spanned fourteen years in which the city learned to love him and he learned to love her. But Willie does not reveal the secrets of his heart in radio interviews. “I think I had wonderful years in San Francisco,” he said. “I have a lot of wonderful friends there. I’ll be coming back there off and on, I know.”
After the interview, Simmons played a clip of Mays scoring from first base on a McCovey bunt that rolled along the left field line, announced that the Giants were retiring number 24, and declared the end of an era. The first time Simmons saw Mays in an orange and blue Met uniform, he cried.
Mays had indeed come full circle. He had played for the New York Giants, the venerable patriarch from the league’s earliest days; the San Francisco Giants, the defiant adventurer who opened the West; and now the Mets, in the vanguard of the upstart expansion teams that ultimately increased the majors from sixteen clubs to thirty. Mays’s repatriation, however, was freighted with meaning beyond wins and losses, as his storybook return was seen as an antidote for baseball and New York. It was a bad time for both.
In baseball, the wounds were still deep from the players’ strike, which was only a preview of battles to come. Curt Flood’s lawsuit had left scars on players and owners alike, while an unusually bitter holdout by Oakland A’s pitcher Vida Blue against his bombastic owner, Charlie Finley, had ended in a crossfire of accusations. Baseball itself had been surpassed by football as a television attraction, as the NFL now featured glamorous athletes like Joe Namath and O. J. Simpson. The average baseball attendance had fallen steadily throughout the 1960s—the game’s meditative qualities were anachronistic in an era of instant gratification. A character’s comment in the 1973 movie Bang the Drum Slowly, “Baseball is a dying game,” seemed true enough.
The New York to which Mays was returning was no longer “the capital of baseball” and was not in “the golden age” of anything. The forces that had pushed the Giants out in the first place—suburban flight, crime, congestion, poverty—had only taken a deeper hold. New York was spinning toward bankruptcy, three years away from the Daily News ’s famous headline: FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD. Gotham’s preeminence had been lost, its confidence shattered. In movies such as Dog Day Afternoon, The French Connection, The Out-of-Towners, and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, New York was depicted as a relentless urban dystopia. And where the Polo Grounds once stood was a redbrick fortress of an apartment building—“the projects”—and center field was paved with an asphalt playground surrounded by wires for foul balls. WILLIE MAYS FIELD, proclaimed a forlorn sign. SOFTBALL PLAYING ONLY.
For many New Yorkers, the departure of the Dodgers and the Giants was seen as the symbolic beginning of the city’s downward spiral. Now Willie Mays had returned to reverse it, and it began in his very first game.
Before the trade was made final, Grant and Yogi Berra, in his first season as the Mets’ manager, had told Mays that he would be a role player, platooning with left-hander Ed Kranepool at first base and spelling Tommie Agee in center. His first game in New York was on May 12, when the Mets faced the Giants. Bonds and Fox sought him out before the game to shake his hand. When Maddox spoke to him, the new Giant center fielder said he needed a mitt. “Willie gave me his glove right there,” Maddox recalls. “His name was written into it.”
Mays didn’t start the first game, and when a pinch-hitting opportunity arose in the eighth, the crowd booed when John Milner stepped into the on-deck circle. Mays didn’t get in the first game of the series or the second, but in the final game, on Mother’s Day, he started at first base and led off. Rain kept the attendance down to 35,505, but their cheers, Mays later said, gave him goose bumps. He took the field in the strange pin-striped uniform—he said it felt “a little awful”—but he had his familiar number. Jim Beauchamp, who had been number 24, now wore number 5. With the rain coming down, Mays faced Sam McDowell in the first inning. “It’s kinda hard to consider Buck the enemy,” McDowell later said. “There’s just no way you can feel he’s the enemy deep down inside you.”
McDowell walked Mays in his first at-bat but struck him out the second time. Mays fielded some throws at first base and caught a pop-up, then in the fifth, came to bat with the score tied 4–4, with Don Carrithers pitching. Mays felt more relaxed than during his first at-bats, and he was thinking home run. The crowd, according to Sport, “cheered Mays with a fervor nearing desperation.... There were 40,000 who wanted it to happen, who were trying by a collective act of will to make it happen, just this once.”
With the count full and the rain falling harder, Mays lined the pitch over the left field wall. It may have been his most dramatic swing ever. It was certainly his strangest trip around the bases. He got to first and passed Dave Kingman. Then standing around second base were Fuentes and Chris Speier, who wouldn’t give Mays a direct path to the bag. “Get outta here!” Mays squealed. He nodded to Jim Ray Hart at third and, as he headed toward the plate, “I felt something in my leg,” he recalled, “and I couldn’t hardly get to home, and I happened to turn my head to the right, and I saw all the Giants in there clapping, and I got to home plate and made a half turn right before I realized it.” Mays was heading to the wrong dugout. He stopped himself, turned left, and jogged to the correct one.
If it had rained any harder—if the heavens had opened up—there might have been a mass conversion in Shea Stadium to all faiths, one writer observed. Columnist Pete Hamill wrote: “Willie Mays ran the bases, carrying all those summers on the forty-one-year-old shoulders, jogging in silence, while people in the stands pumped their arms at the skies and hugged each other and even, here and there, cried. It was a glittering moment of repair, some peculiar sign that we might be able to erase what happened, eliminate the sense of cynicism that flooded the city in 1958 when the Giants and Dodgers left for the West. It was as if some forgotten promise had been kept.”
The home run was the difference in the game, the Mets winning, 5–4.
Mays had joined a team that was still in despair from a tragedy. Three years earlier, the Mets had won the World Series with Gil Hodges as their manager. Tough, disciplined, and highly respected, he was recognized as one of the best managers in the big leagues. He also smoked three packs of cigarettes a day, and on April 2, 1972, just two days before he would have turned forty-eight, he dropped dead of a heart attack. His replacement, Yogi Berra, would always suffer by comparison. He had been a Met coach and in 1972 would be elected to the Hall of Fame for his career as a Yankee catcher. In his only other managing stint, he had been fired by the Yankees, who thought he had lost control of the team, and his efforts to prevent that from recurring led to clashes with several veterans, most notably Mays.
The Mets were a fairly young team, so while Berra may have envisioned Willie as a high-priced scrub, he was still a demigod in the locker room. Tommie Agee recalled playing with Mays in the 1966 All-Star Game in St. Louis. “When I went out in the outfield, I tried to stand in the same place Willie Mays had been standing,” he said.
Met pitcher Jerry Koosman was nine years old when Mays broke into the majors. “Willie Mays had always been my hero,” he said, and now having him “as your center fielder or first baseman—talk about giving you a pump!” They became friends and often ate meals together in Willie’s hotel room, where Mays would strengthen his hands by squeezing a rubber ball. “We’d talk about baseball every night,” Koosman said. “How to play the game, what to do in certain situations, what hitters looked for, what he looked for against certain pitchers.”
No Met idolized Mays more than Cy Young winner Tom Seaver, who as a player at Fresno State College once sat next to Mays in the dugout when the Giants were there for an exhibition game. “I looked at him and the top button of his uniform was unbuttoned, so in the big leagues, I never buttoned my top button,” Seaver says. “That’s where I got it from.”
The first time Mays played in center with Seaver pitching, he approached Seaver before the game with the opposing team’s lineup, asked how he was going to pitch each batter and where should he play. “Part of me thinks, isn’t this ironic, but the professional part of me thinks, this is spectacular,” Seaver recalls. “So I went down the lineup. And then I said, ‘If I want to move you, I’ll turn around and move my glove that way, and you move until I lose eye contact, and that’s it.’ And then he said, ‘We’ll adjust the last six outs.’ And I said, ‘Absolutely.’ ”
Seaver, who pitched in the majors for twenty years, says Mays was the only position player who ever asked him how he was going to pitch to opposing hitters. “Nobody ever did that to me,” he says. “Nobody.”
There were still skeptics who viewed Mays’s return to New York as one more bauble in Joan Whitney Payson’s bejeweled life. Mays might be good for an occasional thrill and a few nostalgic riffs from aging journalists, but he was ultimately a museum piece who wouldn’t do much to help the team. Mays proved them wrong.
Including his home run against the Giants, he got on base nineteen times in his first thirty-seven trips to the plate. He scored at least one run in each of the next six games he played and won three games with base hits—two homers and a fourteenth-inning single. New York had revived him.
As was always the case, the numbers alone did not reflect Mays’s contributions. His teammates would talk about one play for years, a baserunning ploy that defied age and reason. It occurred against the Expos on May 18, and Murray Kempton, whose baroque essays covered New York for more than three decades, wrote about it while on assignment for Esquire . Kempton initially observed Mays taking batting practice, noting that “there falls upon him in the cage a desperation like the prisoner’s in his cell.”
In the first inning, Mays dodged two close fastballs, tipped a pitch, and then walked. The next hitter, Ted Martinez, drove the ball into right center. Mays, Kempton wrote, “gunned around second and then, coming into third, quite suddenly slowed, became a runner on a frieze, and turned his head to watch the fielders. He was inducing a mental error; he had offered the illusion that he might be caught at home, which would give Ted Martinez time to get to third.
“And only then did Willie Mays come down the line like thunder, ending in a heap at home, with the catcher sprawled in helpless intermingling with him and the relay throw bouncing through an unprotected plate and into the Montreal dugout.”
Mays jumped to his feet and pointed to the ball to ensure that the umpire knew to send Martinez home. The two runs, Kempton wrote, “were the unique possession of Willie Mays, who had hit nothing except one tipped foul.”
Kempton compared his hesitation at third base to both the Delta blues and to Faulkner—a purely southern gambit that required a rhythmic defiance of all convention. “Willie Mays arraying himself of the charge—three pauses to assemble the irascible, occasionally even vicious dignity of the southern country boy’s announcement that he is taking command of the city ones.”
The Mets won, 2–1. After the game Berra said, “I think Willie timed that throw. I’ve seen him do that before. He slows down and tries to hit the plate at the same time as the throw to make it hard on the catcher.”
Mays said, “Yogi lies a lot. You can’t time no throw like that.”
Mays may not have played stickball in Harlem anymore, but he was still visible outside the ballpark. In August he accepted an invitation to speak at Riker’s Island, where he took some swings on a softball field and addressed about five hundred inmates, most of whom were black and Hispanic. “I wanted to come and talk to you fellas,” he said. “I don’t think my coming here is going to change anything for you and that things will be any different when I leave, but I want you to know that I’m very happy to be here just the same. I understand what’s happening here.”
Asked by a reporter what he meant, Mays said, “I can’t explain it. It’s something between me and them. But believe me, I can feel it in here.” He pointed to his heart. A prisoner asked Mays for his baseball hat. “I’m sorry,” Mays said. “I can’t give it to you because it’s the one I use in ball games. But if you’d like, I’d be happy to give you the vest I’m wearing.” Mays took off his gold vest and handed it over.
“Wow,” the inmate said, “right off his back. He’s good people.”
The Mets were 14–7 and in first place when Mays joined them, and they won nine in a row and fourteen out of eighteen. Then came the injuries. Right fielder Rusty Staub, whom the Mets had acquired in the off-season and was now the centerpiece of their offense, broke his thumb and didn’t return until September. The Mets’ other outfielders, Cleon Jones, Tommie Agee, and John Milner, also went down, as did second baseman Ken Boswell. The upshot was that Mays played more than he’d anticipated—in one three-week period, he started seventeen of twenty-three games, and it was too much. His left knee needed to be drained, he pulled his right thigh muscle, he injured a finger sliding into a base. Friction with Berra, only six years his senior, soon surfaced over playing time—Mays thought he was being overused, which was hurting his performance. Berra wanted Mays to take batting practice before each game and follow the same schedule as everyone else. But Mays had been setting his own schedule for years, and he wasn’t prepared for the extra work. The strain was evident, with reporters variously describing him as “brooding” or “crotchety.” “By the end of the season,” Sports Illustrated wrote, “he could hardly drag himself to the plate.”
The year began with Mays at 646 homers and Hank Aaron at 639. Aaron was thirty-eight years old, and Mays had known for several years that it was only a matter of time before Aaron would pass him. He did just that on June 10, with home run 649. Now Hank alone would chase the Babe.
With Mays on the team, the Mets made only one trip to San Francisco in 1972. They flew in from Los Angeles late on July 20; while walking through the San Francisco airport, Mays was so distracted that he bumped into a pillar. Berra had announced that he would not be in the starting lineup, but Mays asked to start and Berra agreed. Mays had never been in the visitors’ clubhouse, and he had a funny feeling throughout the game. Only 18,117 fans were at Candlestick, the attendance curtailed by Berra’s announcement. But they gave Mays a standing ovation when he hit a two-run homer in the fifth inning.
The Mets couldn’t overcome their injuries or their lousy hitting and finished in third place, 13½ games out. Mays posted the lowest offensive numbers of his career, but he gave the Mets as much as they could have hoped for. He played in sixty-nine games, about 50 percent of the Mets’ total once he joined. His .402 on-base percentage led the team, and his .267 average and .446 slugging percentage were second. His star power had not diminished. Though the Mets were not a pennant contender in the second half, they led the league in both home and road attendance.
Mays’s improbable return, awash in remembrance and renewal, was hailed as a triumph. “Mays knows that we New York fans will not forget,” Jeff Greenfield wrote at season’s end. “And in turn, Willie Mays is reminding New York of our own best moments, and our own best hopes. He is there to convince us that it was not a dream—that time when New York was secure in its own vitality. The city is an unhappy land that needs a hero, but we are less unhappy now that Willie Mays is back where he belongs.”