by Allen Barra
Cannon was a fast man with an adjective, but his column made a valid point: television, which was becoming increasingly important in American life and particularly in sports, had chosen Willie Mays as one of its darlings. And Willie’s greatest TV performance was still several months away.
Despite the dramatic opening day home run, Willie began the season slowly, hitting around .250 for the first twenty games. Durocher then shifted him from the third spot in the order to fifth and asked him to stop pulling the ball and hit to right field. In most accounts, Durocher seemed to be asking his center fielder to try to hit with more consistency—for a higher average—and not so much power, but it may well have been that Leo wanted Willie to shoot for the short right-field porch in the Polo Grounds. Whatever his manager’s purpose, Mays caught fire. In the next twenty games—of which the Giants won thirteen—he hit .450 and drove in 25 runs. By June, Willie was hitting over .300, and on June 21—as if to celebrate my birthday—he hit home run number twenty, which gave him as many home runs as he had hit as a rookie with more than three months left in the season.
So tuned in was all of New York to Willie Mays that on June 25, when Willie hit an inside-the-park home run against the Cubs, the Brooklyn Dodgers stopped their own game to announce the feat to their fans. And the Dodgers weren’t the only hometown rivals to take notice of his performance. On July 7, The Sporting News noted, “Even the Yankees themselves spend half their time talking about Mays and what he does.”30
The All-Star Game was played at Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium on July 13. It was Willie’s first All-Star appearance. The National League lost, 11–9, though Willie went 1-for-2 and scored a run. He played in every remaining All-Star Game for the rest of his career, and the NL won seventeen of the twenty-three. After the All-Star Game, the Giants went to St. Louis to play the Cardinals. It was there that Willie found he had lost perhaps the most important link to his past—Aunt Sarah had passed away. The team instructed Frank Forbes to travel back to Alabama with Willie for support. “The moment I walked into the house,” Mays remembered, “I started to think about the years that Aunt Sarah had raised me, and I started to cry.”31 Nearly five hundred people attended Sarah’s funeral; Willie was not one of them. Too upset to join the mourners, he stayed home, shut off in the bedroom he had slept in as a boy, a room so hot, he later said, that he almost fainted.
Here we must pause and consider that despite the small library of books and newspaper and magazine stories written about Willie Mays over the years, we really know very little about him. Mickey spoke of his inner feelings all through his career, but we don’t know much about what Mays felt about the most significant moments and events in his life. As on the day of Aunt Sarah’s funeral, there has always seemed to be a door closed between Willie and us. Why, for instance, did a twenty-three-year-old man—a professional ballplayer for nearly seven years, playing in America’s largest city for two of them, and an Army veteran—need the Giants to send someone along with him just for support? Forbes, after all, had no connection at all to Willie’s family. What did Frank Forbes do on the day of Aunt Sarah’s funeral? Did he go to the church and the cemetery to represent Willie? Did he sit in the living room smoking cigarettes and reading the paper while Willie mourned in his bedroom?
On July 26, Willie caught up to Mickey as a cover boy for national magazines when Time, in anticipation of a big year for Mays and the Giants, devoted its first feature story to him. “A Boy in a Hurry” read the overwritten and generally condescending prose. “Willie Howard Mays, Jr., a cinnamon-tinted young man from Fairfield, Ala., on the edge of Birmingham, has fielded, batted and laughed the long-lackluster New York Giants into a state of combative enterprise. A husky, smooth-muscled athlete with a broad, guileless face, he plays baseball with a boy’s glee, a pro’s sureness, and a champion’s flare.
“Though other centerfielders may have stood above him in statistics (Duke Snider, for instance), with his showman’s manner and his in-the-clutch timing, Willie Mays is baseball’s sensation of the season.”
Above all, the story cemented Willie’s image as a happy primitive in the minds of baseball fans everywhere: “Two or three nights a week, when the Giants are at home, the star centerfielder of the big leagues scoots down the block … to play a fast game of stickball with a band of ten- or twelve-year-old boys. Capering and joking with the kids, Mays catches their play, urges them in his high, giggle-edged voice: ‘Throw harder! Harder!’ ”32
The newspaper and magazine photographs of Willie in the streets of Harlem playing stickball with kids touched a chord in America’s subconscious that would never quite fade. Even today you can see the footage on numerous documentaries or websites and hear Mays reminisce about those times with analysts such as MLB.com’s Harold Reynolds. Three years earlier, when Mickey Mantle had come to New York, he also played stickball in the streets with boys, less than two miles from where Willie joined the pickup games, but there were no photographers to record Mickey’s stickball play.
There was only the slightest hint in the Time magazine cover story that there might be a deeper, more inaccessible Willie Mays who wasn’t known to fans and sportswriters. “Willie,” said Frank Forbes (identified by Time as “guardian Forbes”), “isn’t loquacious.”
Some Giants fans simply knew all along that their team was destined to win the pennant. “Do you want to know why the Giants are going to win the pennant?” wrote actress Tallulah Bankhead in the September 21 issue of Look. “Well, darlings, I can tell you in two words: Willie Mays.
“Not since John McGraw snatched Frank Frisch off the Fordham University campus to play second base have the Giants boasted so dazzling a star, such box office dynamite. I don’t want to put the whammy on Willie, but it’s my guess that before he shucks his Giants uniform in 1970 he’ll be rated with Babe Ruth. But what am I talking about? Willie’s right up there with the Babe now in my book. Let’s not have any filibustering by Mickey Mantle and Duke Snider fans. They’re both crack centerfielders and a credit to their parents, but they’re not in Willie’s class.”
That a white woman—an actress and a celebrity from a prominent Alabama family yet—could write such glowing words about a black ballplayer made it clear that a new age was dawning in America. Willie Mays wasn’t just the hero of black America—he was the greatest sports hero in all America. The popularity of boxing was in sharp decline, and football and basketball had not yet challenged baseball as America’s national sport. Joe DiMaggio was retired; Ted Williams and Stan Musial began the 1954 season as the best-known players in baseball, but they were grizzled veterans and Willie Mays was young and dynamic. He was the first great black team sports hero in American history and had now succeeded in winning over white fans in America’s biggest city.
* Or so, for some odd reason, Willie remembered when I interviewed him briefly in 1988 and talked about the strange events of the night of March 2.
† In 1979 I was living in Houston, Texas, and went to an autograph show that featured, among other baseball greats, Al Lopez. I asked Lopez if he had actually made the statement about Mays so often attributed to him. “Oh, my God, yes,” he said with a big laugh. “I’d give anything to go back in time and erase that from people’s memory.”
‡ Either date would be possible. Speaker, who played from 1907 to 1928, including eleven seasons with Cleveland, was a big Indians fan and attended both regular and World Series games as well as spring training exhibitions. Actually, there’s a very good chance that Speaker and Mays could have gotten together after both exhibition and World Series games. In 1954 the Giants and Indians faced each other several times during spring training.
§ Rickey would later refine his statement in his 1965 book The American Diamond: “If there was a machine to measure each swing of a bat, it would be proven that Mays swings with more power and bat speed, pitch for pitch, than any other player” (p. 102). Rickey might be forgiven for his overstatement considering that, as a National Leaguer, he
saw Mays play frequently and Mantle almost not at all.
11
“In Here, It’s 1954”
In 1954 the Giants, powered by Willie Mays, pitcher Johnny Antonelli (who won twenty-one games), and outfielder Don Mueller, finished five games ahead of the Dodgers. On the last day of the season, Willie beat out Mueller for the batting title, .345 to .342. The team had him skip the postgame press and jump on the next train to New York so he could appear on two different television shows in one night—Ed Sullivan and The Colgate Comedy Hour. Sullivan lobbed Willie a softball question: “What was it like to beat out a teammate for the batting title?” Willie smacked it over the wall: “If I hadn’t won it, I would have wanted him to.”
Despite the gesture, though, Mueller seemed to resent something about Mays—perhaps the way Leo favored him, or perhaps the fact that Willie took any ball he could get to, including, Mueller felt, some that he could have handled in right field. The next day, as the Giants suited up at the Polo Grounds for their championship team picture, Mueller walked past Mays’s locker and said, “Hey, Willie, is it true that you’re the best center fielder in baseball?” Mays knew he was being tweaked. He buttoned his shirt and said, without looking at Mueller, “The best right fielder too.”1 The two men did not speak again that day.
The Giants were big underdogs in the World Series against the Cleveland Indians, who won an amazing 111 games despite scoring 59 fewer runs than the Yankees. Pitching, of course, was Cleveland’s strength: they led both leagues with a sensational 2.79 ERA—though the Giants had the best ERA, 3.10, in the National League.
In later years, the Giants and several writers who followed the team would argue that New York’s four-game sweep of the Indians was not an upset, which is nonsense unless one simply believes that there can be no real upsets in baseball. If there have been upsets in the World Series, the Giants’ victory in 1954 is probably the biggest ever. No team that had three Hall of Famers on its pitching staff—Bob Lemon (who won twenty-three games), Early Wynn (who also won twenty-three), and Bob Feller (near the end of a fabulous career but still capable of going 13–3)—should have been beaten in four straight games. And no team with a pitching staff that great should have given up twenty-one runs (while the Cleveland hitters scored just nine).
A theory would arise that the Indians became demoralized after Willie Mays’s incredible catch in the first game; it was as unprovable as another notion, propagated by Mays himself as the years went by, that “The Catch,” as it came to be known, wasn’t the greatest play in baseball history.
One of the best accounts of The Catch can be found in Arnold Hano’s A Day at the Bleachers, which also happens to be one of the greatest books ever written about baseball. “When the evening papers of September 28, 1954,” reads the opening of Hano’s book,
reported that a dozen men and boys were already camping across the street from the bleacher entrance outside the Polo Grounds prior to the first World Series contest, I felt the urge.
I turned to my wife and said, “I think I’ll go to the game tomorrow.”
She said, “Don’t you need a ticket?”
I said, “Only for the reserve seats. I’ll sit in the bleachers.”2
Nothing highlights the difference in professional sports then and now than the simple fact that in 1954 it was possible to simply show up at the stadium the day of a World Series game and buy a ticket. Hano’s objective was to sit in the bleachers, watch a baseball game, and write about how he and the fans around him responded. No sportswriter ever had more spectacular luck than Hano on that day. No box seat near either team’s dugout could have provided him with a better view of what happened on September 29, 1954.
Giants reliever Don Liddle was on the mound, “jerking into motion,” Hano wrote, “as Wertz poised at the plate, and then the motion smoothed out and the ball came sweeping into Wertz, a shoulder-high pitch, a fast ball that probably would have been a fast curve, except that Wertz was coming around and hitting it, hitting it about as hard as I’ve ever seen a ball hit, on a high line to dead centerfield.” Wertz was Vic Wertz, a powerful, pull-hitting first baseman who had come to Cleveland from Baltimore twenty-nine games into the season.
“For whatever it is worth,” wrote Hano, “I have seen such hitters as Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Ted Williams, Jimmy Foxx, Ralph Kiner, Hack Wilson, Johnny Mize, and lesser-known but equally long hitters as Wally Berger and Bob Seeds send the batted ball tremendous distances. None, that I recall, ever hit a ball any harder than this one by Wertz in my presence.”*
The ball would probably have landed in the seats in any stadium but the Polo Grounds, a ballpark that, as a friend of mine once said, “looked as if it was designed by M. C. Escher.” I was there when I was a boy, and the oft-used term to describe the outfield, “cavernous,” was immediately apparent. I thought it looked like the heart of a city. I’m told that in its last year, when I saw it, the center-field wall was only—that’s the term they used, only—about 450 feet from home plate, much shorter than in earlier days.
In 1954 the official measurement was recorded at 483 feet, but both Roger Kahn and Arnold Hano have assured me that that was only part of the difficulty for a batter trying to reach the center-field seats. The wall in that part of center field reached up to—what height exactly? I don’t know, and no history of the Giants or the Polo Grounds has ever been able to tell me. In the famous full-page picture of The Catch, which my father taped to my bedroom wall—a picture almost as dear to me as the photo of the rookies Mickey and Willie in 1951, which still gives me goose bumps—the section of wall Willie is racing toward looks to be at least three times, perhaps as much as four times, his height. To me, it looks to be 20 feet, perhaps 25.
And how far was Willie from the wall when he caught the ball? I’m judging a good 20 feet, which means that when Mays caught up with Wertz’s drive, he was anywhere from 450 to possibly 460 feet from home plate when he made The Catch.
But I’ve gotten ahead of the story. Back to Hano:
“And yet, I was not immediately perturbed. I have been a Giant fan for years, twenty-eight years to be exact, and I have seen balls hit with violence to extreme center field which were caught easily by Mays, or [Bobby] Thomson.…
“I did not—then—feel alarm, though the crack was loud and clear and the crowd’s roar rumbled behind it like growing thunder. It may be that I did not believe the ball would carry as far as it did, hard hit as it was. I have seen hard-hit balls go one hundred feet into an infielder’s waiting glove, and all that one remembers is crack, blur, spank. This ball did not alarm me because it was hit to dead center field—Mays territory—and not between the fielders.…
“And this was not a terribly high drive. It was a long, low fly or a high liner, whichever you wish. This ball was hit not nearly so high as the triple Wertz struck earlier in the day, so I may have assumed that it would soon start to break and dip and come down to Mays, not too far from his normal position.
“Then I looked at Willie, and alarm raced through me, peril flaring against my heart. To my utter astonishment, the young Giant center fielder—the inimitable Mays, most skilled of outfielders, unique for his ability to scent the length and direction of any drive and then turn and move to the final destination of the ball—Mays was turned full around, head down, running as hard as he could, straight toward the runway between the two bleacher sections.
“I knew then that I had underestimated—badly underestimated—the length of Wertz’s blow.”
Let’s pause for a moment to admire Hano’s writing. Thousands of words have been written about this single play, and none have approached his description. Here were a thousand words that were worth a picture. And yet he wrote that “no man can get the entire picture; I did what I could.”
One of the things he saw while trying to keep his eye on the flight of the ball and Willie’s pursuit was the runner at second base: “I saw [Larry] Doby, too, hesitating, the only man, I think, on the diamond who now
conceded that Mays might catch the ball. Doby is a center fielder and a fine one and very fast himself, so he knows what a center fielder can do. He must have gone nearly halfway to third, now he was coming back to second base a bit. Of course, he may have known that he could jog home if the ball landed over Mays’ head, so there was no need to get too far down the line.”
As it turned out, Hano was right. In 1998 I asked Doby why he hadn’t gone as far as third while the ball was in the air. “I really didn’t think Willie had a chance to catch the ball,” he said, “but then it jumped into my mind that if he did, what people would remember would be what a fool I had made of myself running nearly all the way home and getting nailed by fifty feet trying to scramble back to second base. It also occurred to me that if I was right, and the ball was over Willie’s head, I could crawl home from second base on my hands and knees if I had to. You know what? If that ball had been over Willie’s head, Vic [Wertz] would have had an inside-the-park home run.”
Hano quickly calculated that Mays’s catch, if he made it, “would not necessarily be in the realm of the improbable. Others had done feats that bore some resemblance to this.
“Yet, Mays’ catch—if he was indeed to make it—would dwarf all the others for the simple reason that he too would have caught Lieber’s”—that is, Hank Lieber’s fly ball to Joe DiMaggio in the 1936 World Series—“or DiMaggio’s fly”—in the 1937 Series—“whereas neither could have caught Wertz’s. Those balls had been towering drives, hit so high the outfielder could run forever before the ball came down. Wertz had hit his ball harder and on a lower trajectory. Lieber—not a fast man—was nearing second base when DiMaggio caught his ball; Wertz, also not fast—was at first base when …
