Mays had been worried about his finances for several years. His expenses were still high—and more so after he was traded to New York, where he bought a penthouse overlooking the Hudson in the Riverdale section of the Bronx—and his investments had provided little security. In 1971, playing in a golf tournament in Puerto Rico, he met Vernon Alden, the chairman of the Boston Company, a financial services firm. He asked to meet privately with Alden and told him he would be receiving only $50,000 a year from baseball after he retired. “I can’t live on that,” he said.
Alden pledged to help Mays find work as a corporate consultant and by the following year had arranged contracts for him to represent three large companies, including Colgate-Palmolive, for an annual income of $150,000. Alden advised Mays for years to come, but the significance of these early contracts was that Mays entered the 1973 season with new sources of income. The Mets were still paying him $165,000, but money alone wasn’t the reason he returned for another year.
For the first time in his career, Mays showed up at a spring training camp that was not part of the Giants. As it happened, he wore a gold medallion around his neck engraved with the symbols of three religions. “Christian, Jewish, Muslim,” he said. “I don’t take any chances.”
But he needed more than an amulet. In the off-season he had had his knees examined, and when he took the field for the first time, he wore leather and steel braces around both: one brace to support his bad left knee, the other to prevent him from favoring the good one. “It’s simple,” he said. “Either my knees will take another year or they won’t.” His throwing arm began to bother him as well and required a cortisone shot. He asked Dick Young to watch him play and give him an honest opinion. Young concluded he could play one more year.
Mays had been going to Arizona for spring training since the early 1950s. Now with the Mets, he was in St. Petersburg, where vestiges of Jim Crow remained. He wanted to rent a luxury condominium along the waterfront but was told none was available. An employee at the complex called a local newspaper and said that places were available, but Mays was turned down because he was black. Called by a reporter, the people in charge quickly backtracked and told Mays that a misunderstanding had occurred; he would now be welcomed. The incident appears to have been ignored by the New York press, and Mays didn’t call attention to it. However, he told Black Sports, a monthly magazine, “The hell with the [condominium officials]. They can’t hurt me, man. That sort of thing’s been happening to me all my life, and I’m way past it now. The only thing I ever worry about is, if they’d turn me down like that, what would they do if one of our young black players went there looking for a place? A kid, somebody who wasn’t famous. They’re the people I’m concerned about.”
Mays also had problems with Berra. He arrived a day late, then, one Thursday afternoon, flew back to California to see Mae. She wasn’t feeling well, he said, and he was still miffed about the condo. He intended to return on Friday, an off day, but the flight was canceled and he didn’t get back until Saturday, missing a practice. Mays hadn’t told Berra he was leaving, and the manager fined him $1,000. Mays admitted he was wrong and apologized in the press, but the relationship between the two men soon deteriorated beyond repair. Berra, under pressure after the previous year’s collapse, wanted to impose discipline; he fined Rusty Staub as well for violating a team rule.
As the season unfolded, Mays didn’t make it easy for Berra—another unexcused absence, erratic demands for playing time, and chronic injuries souring his own mood. In one game, Berra ordered Mays to bunt twice, and both times he popped out. Afterward, Mays openly questioned his manager. “I think I sacrificed only ten times in my career,” he said, “and never twice in one game.”
Berra resented Mays’s being there in the first place. Years later, he was discussing his problems as a Yankee manager when George Steinbrenner kept interfering with the roster. “It was not just one guy like Willie Mays when he came to the Mets in 1973,” Berra said. “It was four or five guys who [Steinbrenner] wanted and the coaches and I didn’t.”
Mays began the season 0-for-7. In early May, he smashed into a wall and aggravated his already creaky shoulder. On one play in center field, he had to toss the ball underhand after he caught it, which allowed a runner to easily advance from first to second. In his youth as a Black Baron or in his prime at the Polo Grounds, Mays served as the cutoff man for his left fielder. Now, in a June game at Shea, Mays tracked down a ball to the left center field fence, turned, and unexpectedly flipped it to his left fielder. “His failings are now so cruel to watch that I am relieved when he is not in the lineup,” Roger Angell wrote. “It is hard for the rest of us to fall apart quite on our own; heroes should depart.”
Even opposing pitchers took pity. “I say to hell with all hitters,” an unnamed hurler told the New York Times, “but I gotta admit I feel a little sorry for him. You don’t want him to hit a home run off you or beat you, but you wouldn’t mind too much if he got a base hit off you once in a while or at least hit a long drive. You have to remember, this is Willie Mays, and he’s not even getting the ball out of the infield anymore.”
Willie’s knees had to be drained, and in May he went on the disabled list for the first time in his career for a pulled tendon in his right shoulder. He returned, sore and limping. “They’re keeping the old warrior together with needles and bailing wire,” the Sporting News wrote in July.
No one suffered more than Mae. “When he was batting, I felt I was up there at the plate with him,” she later said. “When his powers started diminishing, I ached with him. It was very difficult to hear people say he wasn’t what he used to be. That was agony. Sheer agony.”
The possibility of his retirement moved beyond speculation. It was now assumed. The only question was when.
Hitting .214 at midseason, Mays was not elected to start the All-Star Game or placed on the twenty-eight-member team by manager Sparky Anderson. Mays had played in twenty-three consecutive Midsummer Classics, and Jack Lang of the Long Island Press persuaded the National League’s commissioner, Chub Feeney, that Mays should play in this one. Feeney also wanted his friend in the game, so he huddled with his American League counterpart, Joe Cronin, and they agreed to enlarge the rosters to allow Mays on the team. Insulted, Mays initially declined but then agreed. “Some guys find a way to duck the game,” he said, “but I always went because it meant something to me and to baseball.”
Justice was served in the American League as well, where Oakland manager Dick Williams added Nolan Ryan, who had already thrown two no-hitters in the season.
Mays made an out in his one at-bat as a pinch hitter, which did little to dampen his claim as the finest All-Star performer in history. His at-bats (seventy-five), hits (twenty-three), total bases (forty), and runs (twenty) remain records to this day. He was also twice named captain.
The Mets were having other problems. Once again, they were devastated by injuries—at one point, Berra had only a dozen healthy players—and they were in last place on June 29 and were still there on August 30. As the Watergate hearings took center stage that summer, Met reliever Tug McGraw wondered aloud who would get fired first, President Nixon or Yogi. Donald Grant said he would not fire Berra “unless public opinion demands it.” (It apparently didn’t, at least not until Grant fired him in the middle of the 1975 season.)
The Mets began a West Coast trip on August 8. Mays still hadn’t said anything about retirement, though the Mets had announced that Willie Mays Night would be held on September 25. The fans in other cities began giving him tributes, starting in Los Angeles, where Mays received a raucous cheer when he pinch-hit in the final game of the series. In San Francisco, he received one final standing ovation when he loped to the dugout after grounding out in his last at-bat. And so it went, from San Diego to St. Louis, from Montreal to Philadelphia.
On August 17, Mays hit his sixth homer of the season over the right center field fence at Shea Stadium. It was the last of his career, number 660.
Fortunately, there were no dominant teams in the Mets’ division, and when their injured players returned, they began to win behind Seaver, Koosman, and Matlack, with Tug McGraw closing, and they narrowed the lead from 11½ games on August 5 to three games on September 9. That day, in a game in Montreal, Mays collided with a metal rail while chasing a foul ball and cracked two ribs. After a day off, he failed to show up for a game in Philadelphia and arrived the following day. Under growing criticism from the press, he had told Grant earlier in the summer that he would be retiring, but then he had second thoughts. Not anymore. He called his friend Sam Sirkis from his hotel room. Sirkis had been helping professional athletes with their investments since the late 1950s and gradually began negotiating contracts for them as well. He had met Mays in 1970 and had represented him ever since. “Willie was very sensitive to critical press,” Sirkis recalls, “and finally he had enough. He wanted to announce his retirement.”
Why didn’t Mays retire earlier? News reports suggested it was money or willful denial or self-centeredness. (The headline of Wells Twombly’s column read: TRAGIC EGO TRIP OF WILLIE MAYS.) A better answer was fear. Mays kept playing because it was all he had ever done and all he really knew. Baseball had given his life order, context, and community, and the prospect of life without it was too chilling to contemplate.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do next,” he said in May. “Would you believe me sitting behind a desk? I can’t stand the idea of working in an office. I’ve got energy I have to work off, even at my age.” He added, “Money has nothing to do with it. Baseball is my life. It’s not something you can just walk away from and say good-bye to.”
His teammates understood his struggle. McGraw said, “Willie was forty-two and he was hurt a lot. He got down on himself after a while because he knew he was going to retire, and he wanted to help the club and also not embarrass himself. Sometimes he’d force himself to play, and then he’d hurt himself again while trying to do it.... I know he and Yogi had a tough time as far as the lineup went, and a lot of times maybe Willie didn’t want to come to the park at all—so as not to cause trouble about whether he should be in the lineup. [But] he didn’t go around second-guessing anybody in the clubhouse, and on the bus and plane he really made himself fit in. I mean, he was with us only two years, and he was twice as old as some of the guys, but you’d think he’d spent the whole twenty years in the bigs with them.”
Says Tom Seaver, “There are individuals you know you’re going to have to tear the uniform off of. It’s like a battlefield and you’re in the trench, and the mentality is exactly the same with baseball. You’re going to fight and play until they tear the uniform off—or, on the battlefield, until they kill you. And you got that sense with Willie—they were going to have to tear the uniform off him. It’s sad to see, but it’s a beautiful thing too, because of the love he had for what he had done for some twenty-odd years.”
Neither he nor any other Met was going to question Mays’s judgment on retirement, Seaver says. “It’s a god you’ll never confront.”
The Mets’ front office, however, apparently did not share the players’ high esteem for Mays. Sirkis took the news about his retirement announcement to Grant, but the meeting did not go well. “Grant was derogatory against Willie in every way,” he says. “I never told Willie about it, but we had no support for Willie’s retirement.” Adds Sy Berger, the Topps executive and Mays’s longtime friend, “The Mets didn’t want him. It was her money. Payson wanted him. Willie knew that, but he would never tell you if it bothered him.”
The Mets helped promote Willie Mays Night, but plans for the actual ceremony fell largely to Mays himself as well as Sirkis, who enlisted corporate donors for gifts and other contributions. It wasn’t that hard. Willie, for example, wanted to present Mae with a fur, and at the offices of the American Fur Industry, he selected a white full-length ermine coat with a hood. When he asked what it cost, the owner, Irwin Katz, said, “This is my personal gift to you for all the joy you have given me.”
Colgate, meanwhile, covered the expenses for a suite at the Roosevelt Hotel, where Mays and Sirkis did most of their planning. One afternoon, four or five members of an African American group called Mays and asked to see him. Mays, in his bathrobe, invited them up and heard their request: they wanted him to talk about “black power” during the celebration. But using baseball to deliver a political message, to Mays, was like diluting the finest wine with a brackish backwater.
“See that door,” Mays told them. “See you later.”
Mays still had to announce his retirement. He had a long relationship with NBC, so he decided to make his statement on the morning of September 20 on the Today show. That afternoon, he held a press conference at the Shea Stadium Diamond Club. About a hundred journalists showed up, as did Grant, Berra, and other members of the Mets’ organization. The Daily News would run a triple headline on its front page the following day:
GARMENT EXEC KNIFED TO DEATH
NIXON, COX DEADLOCK ON TAPES
WILLIE GOES OUT AS GRACEFULLY AS EVER
Mays kept his composure as he spoke before a bank of cameras.
“I thought I’d be crying by now,” he said, “but I see so many people here who are my friends, I can’t. Maybe I’ll cry tomorrow... or the next day.”
He’s retiring, he said, “because when you’re forty-two and hitting .211, it’s no fun.... I just feel that the people of America shouldn’t have to see a guy play who can’t produce.”
He said he played this year only because he was in New York. “New York fans love me,” he said. “They showed me that. You know New York—when they love you, they love you.” He was modest—“I never considered myself a superstar. I considered myself a complete player”—but also cautious about his future. “Managing is hard work, and I don’t want that,” he said, flashing a smile at Berra, “and I don’t want to be a coach and just stand out there like an Indian.”
Mays hadn’t played in eleven days, and his ribs were still healing. The Mets were two games under .500 but in third place, only a game and a half out of first. Would Willie ever play again? “I came in playing,” he said, “and I’d like to go out playing.” But he did not want to “get in the way of these kids who have made such a great comeback.” Still, “if the Mets get in the World Series, I’m playing in it. I don’t know how, but I’m playing.”
Mays acknowledged that his retirement “is no surprise to most of you,” but it was still a surprise to him. “Baseball and me, we had what you might call a love affair.”
• • •
The Mets, behind the best pitching staff in baseball, continued to win. In 1969, they were the “Miracle Mets” for overcoming the Cubs’ big lead. Now their motto was, “You gotta believe.” They won eleven of thirteen games and moved from fifth place to first, where they stood on Willie’s night, September 25. Mays drove to Shea Stadium with Mae, Michael, and Sirkis. Also with them was Cat Mays, who had come in from California. On other trips to Shea, Mays would sometimes stop at a park or a playground and play stickball. “Even at that age, he would do that,” Sirkis recalls. But not this afternoon. Mays said nothing while in the car, and when he pulled up to Shea at around 4 P.M., thousands of fans had already gathered in and around the parking lot, screaming for Willie.
Attending the game were Dodgers (Branca, Reese, and Snider), icons (DiMaggio and Musial), barnstormers (Doby and Joe Black), and the man to whom history had tied him forever (Vic Wertz). Plenty of Giants were there, including Bobby Thomson, now a graying businessman. “I was the center fielder” in 1951, he told reporters. “I saw him once and I said, ‘Bobby, you’d better get a new position.’ ”
Mayor John Lindsay declared September 25 Willie Mays Day. Dick Young said it was “a night the pennant race stood still.” The New York Times editorialized that Mays was “the epitome of what all great athletes ought to be—a man of grace and dignity. His list of vices began and ended with the bedevilment of opposing pitchers.”
More than fifty-three thousand fans packed Shea, and their feelings were captured in signs around the stadium.
WE WHO ARE ABOUT TO CRY, SALUTE YOU
A GIANT AMONG METS
BYE, WILLIE, WE HATE TO SEE YOU GO
SHALOM
Met broadcaster Lindsey Nelson served as the emcee, and at 8 P.M., he introduced Walter Curley, New York’s commissioner of public events, who read a proclamation from Mayor Lindsay. The fans booed. Then Nelson said, “The man you came to honor tonight... Willie Mays.”
Mays hopped out of the dugout and walked steadily to the platform set up at home plate, where he joined Mae and Michael. On this cool night, he was wearing his blue warm-up jacket with the large NY insignia across the left breast. He stood next to Mae and Michael, stuffed his hands in his pockets, wet his lips, and stared straight ahead with dark, melancholy eyes. The cheers rang out for six minutes. Nelson tried to stop them after three minutes by raising his hand, but he was booed. The scoreboard lights read 24: SO LONG, YES; GOODBYE, NEVER, and the waves of adulation—“naked love,” one writer said—continued, muffling the roar of the jet planes that flew low out of La Guardia.
Next came the gifts, which told their own story of how much baseball had changed. In presents that harkened to a time when players and fans were neighbors, store owners gave Mays towels, sheets, bedspreads, golf clubs, luggage, records, a silver tray, shirts, and a typewriter. He even got a salami. But in gifts that heralded the coming of the multimillionaire professional athlete and the marriage of big-time sports with corporate behemoths, Chrysler gave Willie and Mae His-and-Her cars—a Chrysler Imperial and a Chrysler Sebring. Pan American Airlines gave him a trip around the world, and American Airlines gave him a week in Acapulco. He also got a boat, bottles of Teacher’s Scotch and Moët Champagne, and a “private telephone system.” Mae, in addition to her ermine coat, received a diamond watch.
Joe Frazier gave Willie a snowmobile. Horace Stoneham gave him a $17,000 Mercedes-Benz. Miles College gave him an honorary doctor of laws degree, and the Amsterdam News gave him a plaque.
The Mets gave him nothing.
Mays finally spoke, though his remarks were short. He was concerned that the ceremony was intruding on a pennant race.
“I apologize for taking up a lot of your time,” he began, his words echoing back. “I say to the Met players, forgive me.” He thanked New York for always supporting him and then bared a bit of his soul. “This is a sad day for me,” he said, “to hear you cheer me and not do anything about it.” He again spoke to his team. “I hope you go on to win the flag for the New York people. This is your night as well as mine. I also want to thank the Montreal ball club. I know this is a delay for you. But this is my farewell. I thought I’d never quit.”
He dabbed his eyes twice as he reached a haunting conclusion: “I see these kids over here, and I see how these kids are fighting for a pennant, and to me it says one thing: Willie, say good-bye to America.”
Willie, say good-bye to America? The sentence seemed to be spoken in the inverse. Should it not have been “America, say good-bye to Willie”—that is, America’s baseball fans could no longer watch him on the field, so they had to say good-bye. But Mays was a public figure who could not envision any other public role for himself, an entertainer with no second act. “He stabbed us all,” Larry Merchant wrote, “with his epitaph.”
Mays waved his cap into the final roar of the crowd, and he hugged Mae and Michael. He then picked up a box of long-stemmed roses and walked them to the stands along the first base line. Joan Whitney Payson, now seventy years old and in a wheelchair, was bundled in a heavy coat. Willie handed her the roses, and she leaned forward and placed a kiss on his cheek streaked with tears. He disappeared through the dugout and into the runway.
Watching in the Met dugout was Cleon Jones. “I felt I wanted to cry,” he said afterward. “I know how Willie must have felt to say he can’t perform anymore. It got next to me.... I think I might have dropped one or two tears. It was one of those times when you cry inside.”
The Mets won the game, giving them seven in a row and a first-place lead of 1½ games. But Mays felt there was nothing left for him. He was now a retired ballplayer. He hadn’t played in more than two weeks, and he was ready to return to Atherton. He called Payson and told her his plan. She urged him to reconsider. “You can’t go home now,” she said. So he stayed.
The Mets won their next game, then flew to Chicago with a half-game lead for the final series of the regular season. Two doubleheaders were scheduled. They split the first one but still picked up half a game. On Monday, October 1, they needed to win only one of the two games. Seaver started the first and was staked to a five-run lead; McGraw threw the final three innings and picked up his twenty-fifth save of the year. The umpires canceled the second game, and the Mets celebrated in the locker room. “We began pouring it on,” McGraw later said, “hollering and screaming and wondering what all the people who’d counted us out of the human race a couple of months earlier must have been thinking.” At 82–79, the Mets’ .509 winning percentage was the lowest to win a division or a pennant. They scored fewer runs than all but one team in the majors, and they had no hitter with a .300 average or a pitcher who won twenty games.
You gotta believe.
Mays was with the team but did not see any action. After the game, Seaver looked for him in the clubhouse.
“Where’s Willie?” he asked.
“He took two sips of champagne,” someone told him, “and he’s passed out on the training table.”
The Mets faced the Cincinnati Reds in the playoffs in what appeared to be a mismatch. The Reds had won ninety-nine games, played three future Hall of Famers in Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan, and Tony Perez, and had MVP Pete Rose. What’s more, Seaver’s arm was strained from overuse down the stretch.
But the Mets had depth at pitching, the great equalizer in baseball, and the teams split the first two games in Cincinnati, with Matlack throwing a shutout for the Met victory in the second game. Mays did not play in either contest. Back at Shea for the third game, he did take the field in a way that added to his unique portfolio of contributions.
The Mets were leading, 9–2, in the fifth when Rose, on first base, tried to break up a double play with a hard slide at second. He knocked down Bud Harrelson, who had broken his wrist on a similar slide by another player in June. The wiry shortstop quickly regained his feet and cursed Rose, who charged him. The benches and bullpens emptied, secondary skirmishes broke out, and a five-minute brawl ensued. Rose was known for his hell-bent aggression—embraced by Reds fans as “Charlie Hustle,” despised by others as a dirty player. In a lopsided game, the Met fans saw Rose’s slide as a cheap shot, and when he took left field in the bottom of the inning, he was pelted with debris. Vendors later described fans grabbing beer cans right off their trays and hurling them at Rose, who flung several right back. The inning continued, but when a whiskey bottle flew out of the stands and nearly hit Rose, he called time and headed for the dugout. Red manager Sparky Anderson took his entire team off the field and told the umpires they wouldn’t return until it was safe. The umpires consulted with Chub Feeney, who informed Berra that the Mets would have to forfeit unless the fans could control themselves. The public address announcer delivered that warning, which only provoked more boos.
Feeney had an idea—why not send the most respected Met onto the field to talk to the fans in left field. “He chose Willie Mays as a designated peacemaker and asked Berra to serve as a Henry Kissinger in knickers,” Red Smith wrote. So out of the dugout appeared Mays, like an apparition, who was promptly cheered by the crowd. He was joined by Berra as well as Cleon Jones, Seaver, and Staub. Mays gave the peace sign to the fans, who again applauded him. He made a straightforward appeal. “Look at the scoreboard!” he yelled. “We’re ahead. Let ’em play the game.”
The grounds crew had to sweep up the debris, but play resumed, with Rose back in left field. The Mets won, 9–2, and Mays had a coda to his legacy as a peacemaker.
After an extra-inning Reds victory in the fourth game, the series went to the fifth and final contest, in New York, Seaver against Jack Billingham. In the fourth game, Staub had separated his shoulder when he ran into the outfield wall, so Cleon Jones shifted from left to right and Ed Kranepool played left. Kranepool drove in two runs in the first, but the Reds chipped away and tied it. In the bottom of the fifth, the Mets went ahead, 3–2, and with the bases loaded, Kranepool was due to bat against a left-hander. Berra called for Mays to pinch hit, and the Reds countered with right hander Clay Carroll. Mays hadn’t been to the plate in thirty-one days and hadn’t had a hit in forty-two days. He swung on the first pitch and chopped the ball straight down, perhaps off the plate, and it bounded high in the air. Carroll grabbed it but had no play. An infield single—“the shortest heroic blow in memory,” Roger Angell wrote—and a run batted in. Mays scored himself a few moments later.
The Mets won, 7–2, but the victory was overshadowed by the fans, estimated at five thousand, who crashed onto the field after the final out. METS’ CLINCHER MARRED BY MANIAC MOB, read a Sporting News headline. Even before the game ended, the spectators pushing against the railing had trampled the wife of the Reds’ trainer. The game had to be stopped so the other wives of Reds players could be escorted to safety. When the game ended, the 340 police officers on the field could do little against the stampede. Pete Rose, who was on base, had to run through the crowd like a halfback seeking the safety of the dugout, where his teammates stood with bats in their hands. Reporters sat aghast in the press box as the rioters tore down the fence, pulled up home plate, and ripped out the turf. “If those are Met fans,” Rose said bitterly after the game, “they must let them out of the zoo before the game and then lock them up afterward.”
One of the most harrowing photographs was of Mays, who was in center when the game ended. He took off his hat and tried to leave the grounds through the bullpen in right field. In the picture, he has almost reached the bullpen door, but a young man with thick hair has grabbed him from behind and is trying to tackle him. A Met player with his warm-up jacket on is throwing a block on a second fan who is also chasing Willie. They want his hat, but Mays clutches it tightly. The bullpen door is open, and two arms are reaching out, trying to rescue him.
The last time Mays ran off a New York baseball field like that, after the final game at the Polo Grounds, the fans pursued him with love and reverence. This time, they chased him with the angry zeal of a mugger.
Mays played in the World Series in his rookie season, and so too would he in his final year. “I came in a winner, and I’m going to leave a winner,” he told reporters before Game One. He was also returning to the Bay Area, where the Mets would face the Oakland Athletics. The A’s led the league in clubhouse squabbles, thick mustaches, and garish uniform combinations, but they had upset the Reds last year to win the World Series and had a great running game with Bert Campaneris and Billy North (though North was injured), three twenty-game winners led by Catfish Hunter, and relief ace Rollie Fingers. They also had MVP Reggie Jackson, though the “P” could have stood for “provocateur.” “The Mets,” he said, “have no name players.”
The Mets’ center fielder down the stretch had been Don Hahn, but with Staub’s shoulder still ailing and lefty Ken Holtzman pitching the first game for the A’s, Berra decided to move Hahn to right and start Mays in center. The move delighted the fans at sun-splashed Oakland–Alameda County Stadium, who gave Mays the longest pregame ovation of any player on either team. But Mays hadn’t started a game in five weeks, and since then, had only played in the outfield the three innings of the final playoff game. Berra also had him hitting third.
Throwing out the first pitch was Hank Aaron, dressed in a light blue suit and red tie, the first time an active player was given that honor. With 713 homers, he was one behind Ruth, and his presence in the stadium, standing near Willie, was a visual reminder of the game’s rich history: two players who began their careers in the Negro Leagues now stood as the second- and third-greatest home run hitters of all time.
Mays got the first hit of the Series, a clean single to left in the first inning. But as he rounded first base, he stumbled and had to scramble back. Later in the game, he booted a ground ball single in center field and was charged with an error. Joe Garagiola, the former catcher who was announcing the game on television, stepped out of his booth and said to Charlie Einstein, “It’s got so you pray they won’t hit a fly ball to him.”
“Leave him alone,” Einstein said. “He’s retired.”
“I know.” Garagiola nodded. “So who was that who got the base hit to left?”
In a pitcher’s duel the A’s won, 2–1. Mays had one hit and no fly ball chances in the outfield.
Game Two was also played in the afternoon, with a brilliant sun and cloudless sky, and the outfield was a hazard. In Game One the A’s Joe Rudi, who went on to win three Gold Gloves, lost a deep fly ball in the sun, which went for a double. The Mets had even more trouble. In the second game, Cleon Jones went to the track for a fly ball... and it dropped right in front of him. All day, fielders on both teams staggered under pop-ups.
The contest was remembered as one of the wackiest World Series games ever played, taking twelve innings and lasting four hours and thirteen minutes—at the time, a postseason record. Eleven pitchers were used, another record. Six errors were committed, five by the A’s. Their second baseman, Mike Andrews, committed two errors in one inning, after which owner Charlie Finley tried to place him on the disabled list with a fabricated injury. Andrews’s teammates threatened to strike unless Finley reinstated him, and they taped Andrews’s number, 17, to their shoulder during a workout at Shea. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, mortified at the spectacle, publicly denounced Finley and demanded that Andrews be returned—which he was, though his martyrdom made him a hero in New York. If that wasn’t weird enough, A’s manager Dick Williams told his team that he was quitting as soon as the Series ended, regardless of the outcome. Which he did.
Yet the 1973 Series is known primarily for one thing. In Game Two, Mays pinch-ran for Staub in the ninth inning with the Mets leading, 6–4. With banners and bedsheets reading WE LOVE WILLIE MAYS and THE AMAYSING METS, the crowd cheered the opportunity to see him one more time. Mays was on first when the next hitter singled to right, but as he rounded second, he stumbled to the ground. “Here’s the unusual thing,” said Tony Kubek for NBC, “one of baseball’s all-time greatest runners had an easy shot going from first to third, and he fell.” He was stranded at second.
Mays took the field in the bottom of the ninth. With Hahn in center, he thought he was to play right. The two Mets looked into the dugout and got their direction. Willie was to play center. With the late afternoon shadows now covering the batter’s box, the first hitter, Deron Johnson, drove the ball into left center. Mays, his sunglasses turned upward, moved tentatively to his right, feeling his way, searching for the ball. But he couldn’t see it. He staggered and at the last moment tried to lunge for it, but instead of pitching forward, his legs flew out from beneath him and he landed hard on the ground. His glove was outstretched, but the ball fell only inches from it and rolled to the wall. Mays’s sunglasses flipped down from the fall, and as he got to his knees, he lifted them back up and turned his head helplessly in search of the action. Cleon Jones retrieved the ball, and Johnson was credited with a double.
Fans could only wince. As Kubek told his broadcast partner Curt Gowdy, “Boy, Curt, this is the thing I think all sports fans in all areas hate to see—a great one playing in his last years having this kind of trouble, standing up and falling down.”
The misplay led to two runs to tie the game. In the top of the tenth, Mays again found himself in the center of the action. With runners on first and third and one out, he was in the on-deck circle, holding two bats. The hitter, Felix Millan, lofted a fly ball to medium left field. Rudi flipped down his glasses and caught it, and Harrelson tagged at third and sprinted home. Mays moved toward the plate to clear out Millan’s bat. Rudi’s throw, on one bounce, was up the line a bit. Mays, on one knee behind the plate, motioned to slide, but Harrelson thought he could avoid the tag by cutting inside catcher Ray Fosse and staying on his feet. Fosse caught the ball and swiped his glove at Harrelson. Umpire Augie Donatelli, expecting Harrelson to slide, was flat on his stomach, and he called Harrelson out. Mays, outraged, jumped to his feet, ran to the plate, and dropped to both knees. His batting helmet tumbled off, and the two bats fell to the ground. Mays looked up, spread his arms wide, and yelled at the ump. His words—“No way! He didn’t touch him!”—were immaterial. It was the image, replayed on television and reproduced in photographs, that was heartbreaking. Mays was rarely seen complaining to umpires. Now he looked like a desperate supplicant, his face creased with anguish, his hair too long, his emotions exposed. He appeared like a character actor making a vain attempt to play Willie Mays.
Berra, Harrelson, and other Mets continued the argument.
“Where did he touch him?” Berra demanded. “Where did he touch him?”
“Right here,” Donatelli said, touching Yogi’s backside. “On the ass.”
When Donatelli threatened to eject Harrelson, the Met shot back, “I’m not getting thrown out for your inadequacies!”
Donatelli had been in the majors one year longer than Mays, and during the argument Mays remembered that Donatelli would also be retiring after this season, and the question suddenly dawned on him: What are we doing here?
The instant replay showed that Harrelson was safe, but that would be forgotten. What remained was the photograph of Mays, so powerful that what actually happened on the play was twisted around. When Donatelli died on May 24, 1990, the New York Times ’s obituary read: “In the 1973 series... Donatelli called Willie Mays of the New York Mets out at the plate, leading to another famous argument.”
Mays found redemption in the twelfth. He came to bat with runners on first and third and two outs. The shadows had now reached second base while the outfield remained treacherous in the fading sunlight. Mays, chewing gum, took a slider from Rollie Fingers.
“I can’t see, man,” he told Fosse.
Fosse called for a fastball. If the old man can’t see, then hard stuff, always his weakness, was the way to go.
Mays waved his bat and waited for the fastball. He got it, hitting a sharp one-hopper over Fingers’s glove and into center field. He stumbled coming out of the box, his helmet falling off, and he ran gingerly to first base. But the go-ahead run crossed the plate. Mays, at first base, rubbed his right knee.
Met hurler Ray Sadecki, who had already pitched in the game, was watching the action on television in the clubhouse. He turned to Harry Parker, who had also pitched, and said, “He had to get a hit. This game was invented for Willie Mays a hundred years ago.”
McGraw, who looked up to Mays like a father, was on second, and he and Mays advanced one base on a hit and then scored on an error. After Mays crossed the plate, McGraw shook his hand and tenderly wrapped his arm around Willie’s shoulder. The Mets took a 10–6 lead.
Mays still wasn’t finished. In the bottom of the twelfth, with the game now in prime time on the East Coast, Reggie Jackson led off with a deep fly into left center. Mays went back to the track, looking up, and touched the wall with his right hand. But he made no effort on the ball, which bounced chest high against the wall. Jones again retrieved it, and Jackson ended up on third. The A’s scored only one run in the inning, and the Mets won to tie the Series.
In the raucous locker room afterward, NBC’s Dick Schaap asked Seaver if he thought Mays was going to get a hit in his final at-bat, and Seaver described Mays’s cunning.
“I think he had a good shot at it,” he said. “I think he decoyed the catcher into thinking he couldn’t see.”
“How’d he do that?”
Seaver imitated Mays’s high-pitched voice. “ ‘I can’t see, man! I can’t see. I can’t see! The background is terrible.’ So they threw the ball right down the pike and base hit.” Seaver then laughed uproariously.
Most of the game stories, as well as longer articles in Sports Illustrated and the New Yorker, described Mays’s misadventures as part of a roller-coaster day—high jinks and redemption—that were part of a whole comedy of errors from both teams. There was no suggestion that his misplays would have any historical traction. Red Smith began his Times column on Mays with his RBI single. He wrote: “So he lost the game in the ninth inning, won it in the twelfth, came perilously close to losing it again—and walked away from disaster grinning. Never another like him. Never in this world.”
What Mays said then, and has always said, was that he lost the first ball in the sun, though he should have played it more safely. On the second ball, he didn’t want to crash into the fence with a four-run lead and risk injury when the team was already shorthanded.
It does Mays little good to point out that he had barely played for the last six weeks, that the sun made other outfielders look just as bad, and that he did get the game’s most important hit. He has become the poster boy for all athletes—or, for that matter, even entertainers or politicians—who don’t know when to quit.
Did Mays play too long? Of course. But so did Ruth and Aaron and Mantle and Gibson and—in other sports—Unitas and Ali and Jordan and Gretzky and countless others who wanted to stretch their glory. But Mays is synonymous with this particular sin for one reason: he committed it in the World Series, on television. The very medium that was central to the legend, that broadcast his gifts to all corners of America—that made the Catch immortal—was the medium that recorded and preserved him at his nadir.
That wouldn’t be so bad, except the images have cheated his legacy. If Mays had stumbled through the last years of his career, then his missteps in Oakland would befit his record, and the scorn, more than three decades later, would be deserved. But that wasn’t his record. At thirty-eight, thirty-nine, and forty, he still performed at levels that equaled or exceeded those of most of his peers. That part of his legacy, however, and what he did to achieve it, has been obscured by those images of him chasing a few wayward fly balls in Oakland’s cruel, glinting twilight.
The Series continued in New York, where the Mets took two out of three and Mays pinch-hit once for his only appearance. Game Six featured Seaver, and despite a tired arm, he gave up only two runs in seven innings. The Mets, however, could manage only one off Catfish Hunter. Mays didn’t play.
The final contest pit Jon Matlack against Ken Holtzman, facing each other for the third time. The A’s took control early. In the third inning, Campaneris and Jackson each launched two-run homers. The A’s were leading, 5–1, in the sixth when Rollie Fingers relieved Holtzman and shut the Mets down until the ninth. Then a walk, a single, and an error made the score 5–2 with two runners on. There were two outs, and with left-hander Wayne Garrett due up, the A’s brought in lefty Darold Knowles. Garrett, nicknamed “Red,” had hit .265 during the season and had been the Mets’ second-leading power hitter, with sixteen homers. He had gotten a single off Knowles in Game Six but was only 5-for-29 (.172) in the Series.
He was now the tying run. And Mays sat on the bench, hoping to be called on to pinch-hit. There were the percentages to play—a right-handed hitter would have a better chance than a lefty. And there was a storybook ending to write—the embattled icon, in his final swing, ties Game Seven in the ninth inning. Mays wanted that ending, or at least the chance. He thought he deserved it. Ever since he watched Bobby Thomson hit his home run, he wanted to be the man, and this was no exception. But Berra never looked his way. He had clearly lost confidence in him after the second game, and Mays was forgotten the rest of the way.
That he wasn’t called to pinch-hit at the end might have been for the best; obviously rusty, he might have looked bad in his final at-bat. But his friends and fans regret that he didn’t have the chance. “I don’t care if he was in a body cast,” Lon Simmons said. “I would have sent him to the plate—he was Willie Mays.”
Garrett popped out to the shortstop. The Series was over. The Mets had scored two runs or fewer in five out of the seven games.
Mays dressed quickly. “I don’t feel nothin’ yet, man,” he told reporters. “I probably won’t feel nothin’ until next spring training.”
What he felt was anger, disrespect. He has few regrets in his life and puts a positive spin on almost all his memories. But not this one.
“Mae could tell you,” he later said. “I went home so quick. Forgot my glove, my uniform, everything, and when I got home, Mae asked me, ‘Where is your glove?’ I said, ‘I gave it away.’ I didn’t care. If I’m overlooked at that time, I said to myself, ‘Go on home.’ I left very quickly.”
The love affair was over.