by Allen Barra
But not even Mays’s reputation could save the coming seasons for his team. The Giants would finish second every year from 1965 through 1968; not until 1971, when the league was split into two divisions, would they earn a first-place finish, winning the Western Division before losing to the Pittsburgh Pirates in the 1971 playoffs. If there was one baseball regret Willie would take with him into retirement it was his failure, except for a brief flash in 1973, to star in another World Series. Except for The Catch in the 1954 Series and the double in the ninth inning of the seventh game in 1962, he scarcely had a significant moment in seventeen World Series games and never hit a home run.
There were consolations. Willie Mays may very well have had his best year in 1965. He led both leagues with his all-time season high of 52 home runs, the third time in four seasons he won the home run title. He batted .317 and led the NL in both on-base percentage (.400) and slugging percentage (.645). He was clearly the best player in his league and finally walked off with his second MVP Award—the bitter irony being that he’d had to wait eleven years after the first one to get it. No other player in baseball history went so long between MVP Awards.
By the end of the 1965 season, Mays was, with Mantle’s decline, the most revered and the best-known professional athlete in America. He was also suffering from dizziness, stomach pains, and chronic loneliness. He scarcely saw his son Michael except when the Giants traveled to New York to play the Mets. For that matter, he scarcely saw Cat, who had found his own niche in the black bars, pool halls, and nightspots of the Bay Area.
On the other side of the country, Mickey slogged through a miserable, grueling season, most of it spent alone except for his nighttime binges with Ford and a few old fringe New York buddies from the golden days. Sometime in the early 1960s, on a night when Mickey was playing out of town, Merlyn thought she heard an intruder in their house, pulled out a gun, walked downstairs, and fired in the dark. It was never determined if someone was actually trying to break in, but the incident showed how frayed her nerves were. Soon after, she packed up the boys and went back to Oklahoma. For her too, alcohol had become impossible to control. “Every day was a cocktail party,” she would later recall. “That was our lifestyle. We were just country people when we first came to New York. We didn’t have anything, and suddenly Mick was the toast of New York. It scared us both to death.” Both she and Mickey were very shy people, and alcohol was “our way to cope with it.”2
In 1966 the inevitable collapse came. For the first time since 1912, when they were the New York Highlanders,§ the Yankees finished last. Even worse, because of the addition of two clubs, they were the first Yankee team ever to finish lower than eighth. Mickey was practically regarded as washed-up. In fact, he was simply injured a lot and playing in terrible pain when he wasn’t. Though hardly anyone realized it, his performance on the field was outstanding. In just 108 games, he batted .288 with 23 home runs. He worked pitchers for so many walks that his OBP was a commendable .392, with a more than respectable .538 slugging percentage.
No one who saw Willie Mays play in 1966 thought his skills were greatly diminished. He didn’t steal bases as he once did, and he didn’t quite get a jump on the ball in center field as he had five years earlier, but he was still regarded as one of the best players in the game—if not the best—and he was certainly still considered one of the most dangerous hitters. At the end of the season, he had accumulated 542 home runs, eight more than Jimmie Foxx, at that point baseball’s all-time right-handed home run champion, and number two behind Babe Ruth’s all-time 714. Probably the number-one question for most observers going into the 1967 season was this: could Willie Mays catch Babe Ruth?
Willie Mays, as Bill James wrote in The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, “was considered to be slipping; he hit ‘only’ .288 with ‘only’ 37 home runs and ‘only’ 103 RBI. He was still the best player in the league; he just didn’t look so good if you compared him to what he had done the previous five years.”3 Total Baseball’s Total Player Rating placed Willie only fourth (number one was Cubs first baseman Ron Santo). Bill James ranked him number one in Win Shares for the season, a good indication that he should have been named MVP. Mays, though, finished third in the voting, behind Roberto Clemente and Sandy Koufax. The Giants once again came agonizingly close to the NL pennant, finishing just one and a half games behind the Dodgers.
But what, then, of Mickey Mantle, who had the same batting average as Willie and, amazingly, a slightly higher OPS—.930 to .924?
Mantle’s last few years are generally considered by analysts to be a dreary and depressing time, better left unexamined, but they deserve a second look. In 1967 he hit just .245, but managed 22 home runs and 17 doubles in 144 games, 131 of them while playing at first base. Though he could scarcely follow through when batting from the left side, he managed to work AL pitchers for an impressive 107 walks, the first time he had passed the 100 mark in that category since 1962. His on-base percentage was .391, with a .434 slugging percentage. He actually had a better season than Willie, who played in 141 games and also had 22 home runs, but batted only .263 with a .334 on-base percentage, the lowest of his major league career, and a .453 slugging percentage. Mickey’s OPS that season was .825, compared to Willie’s .787.
Nonetheless, it was brutally obvious to everyone who saw him play that Mickey was a shell of the player he had been just a few years before. As early as the 1966 season, when Mickey was still just thirty-four, George Strickland, a scout for the Cleveland Indians, filed a report to his front office in which he refrained from putting the customary grade on Mantle’s entry. “This guy,” he wrote, “is ageing and he’s showing it and I really don’t feel he should be playing right field now. The injuries are just too much for this guy to overcome. If he comes back, it won’t be for any length of time, because there is just too much chance for him to re-hurt himself, and he’s just got too much going against him with the bad arm and the bad legs. He can’t throw at all right now and it is just tough to see a great player get old and lose it so quick.”4
In the spring of 1966, George Carlin, appearing on Perry Como’s Kraft Music Hall, did one of his most popular routines. Carlin’s sportscaster, Biff Burns—“In the Sport Light Spotlight, spotlighting sports in the [pause] Sport Light Spotlight”—announced a 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, two Eskimos, and a kangaroo.” Years later, when I was writing for the Village Voice, Carlin sent me a note commenting on a column I’d quoted him in. This led to an exchange of letters. I mentioned his bit on the Willie Mays “trade” and asked whether he’d ever heard from Mays about it.
“Willie sent me a letter,” said Carlin, saying what a big kick he had gotten out of it. “I would have sent him a tape, but we didn’t have tapes back then, so I sent him a printed copy of the routine.
“I grew up and went to school in that area they call White Harlem. There was just a handful of old Catholic families left, mostly Irish like mine, some Poles. When we played stickball, all the kids I knew wanted to be Mickey Mantle. I guess they felt they were guarding some last bastion of racial integrity. But I was a Willie Mays man. I couldn’t make a basket catch to save my life, and at bat I’d lunge at the ball like Willie and miss it by a mile. But if being Willie Mays is your dream, who cares how well you actually played? If you fantasize about being Willie Mays, you fantasize about winning.”5
Jim Bouton, trying to pitch with a bad arm, appeared in only seventeen games in 1967 and remembered having little contact with Mantle, who seemed to be in another world. He recalled a spring training game between the Giants and the Yankees in which Mickey and Willie “seemed so tired that you wondered how they made it onto the field. When they saw each other, they didn’t even come over and shake hands, they just nodded and went about their business.”
At the end of spring training in 1967, Mantle and the Yankees stopped
off in Birmingham for an exhibition game with Carl Yastrzemski and the Boston Red Sox. My mother and I were there with a few thousand enthusiastic fans. In his first at-bat, on the first pitch, Mickey slammed a wicked line drive over the corner of the right-field fence—in fact, just about where you would hit it to get a cheap-shot home run at Yankee Stadium. According to Birmingham News sportswriter Alf Van Hoose, Mickey’s shot landed just a few feet from Willie’s only home run at Rickwood Field, in 1948. Neither Mickey nor Willie ever knew that they would be forever tied in home runs hit at Rickwood.
“I felt relieved,” Willie remembered years later, “with the coming of the 1967 season. The pressure of hitting number 512”—of passing Mel Ott’s career total and becoming the NL’s all-time home run leader—“was gone. But even though I had a good spring, I was beginning to wonder about the reliability of my skills when the regular season began.”
Early in the season, in a game at Crosley Field, Gary Nolan, a nineteen-year-old fireballer for the Cincinnati Reds, fanned Willie Mays four times—all of them swinging. In four trips, the man who had passed up Mel Ott on the all-time NL home run list managed only two weak foul balls without putting a single ball in play. “Okay,” said Willie, “the kid was good. But he was only 19. And I had never struck out four times in a game before.”6
The entire season was depressing. For the first time, sportswriters in some National League cities began to tell their readers that the Willie Mays they saw off the field was not the ebullient “Say Hey Kid” they had been reading about for so many years. One Philadelphia writer approached Willie for an interview before the second game of a doubleheader in which an exhausted Mays would not play. “Why aren’t you playing?” he asked. Mays did not answer. “I’m keeping my thoughts to myself” was all he would reply. “You want a story, you write what you want.” And so he did: “Everybody thinks Willie Mays is nice, friendly, warm, sociable, fun-loving … a joy to be around. It will come as a shock to those out there in fantasyland that Willie Mays is cold, surly, suspicious, uncooperative. He is not an easy guy to talk to.”7 There was no indication from the writer that just maybe he had just caught Willie Mays on a bad day.
Mickey was now playing first base, but it quickly became obvious to most American Leaguers that he could no longer move with major league—quality agility, even at his new position. Dave Nelson, a rookie for the Cleveland Indians that year, had grown up idolizing Mantle. In May, he saw Mantle in the flesh for the first time and recalled how strange it was to see the smiling hero from his baseball cards standing near first base with a blank look on his face. Major league baseball, however, was played to be won, and Nelson was determined to do what he had to do. In his first at-bat, he slapped a bunt down the first-base line that Mickey simply could not get to on time. “I had no idea at the time,” Nelson said later, “that other clubs had decided some things for themselves out of reverence for him. I had great speed, so [my bunt] was a base hit. I turn around halfway down the right field line and there’s our first base coach walking towards me, and he stops me and tells me, ‘Hey, Dave, we don’t bunt on Mickey out of respect for him.’ I go to myself, ‘Oh-kayyyy.’ So then I walked back to first base, and I’m standing next to Mickey Mantle. I’m looking at this guy’s arms, and they look like tree trunks, and I’m saying: ‘Man, he’s gonna punch my head off.’ And then he pats me on the butt and he says, ‘Nice bunt, rook.’ And I look at him and say, ‘Thanks, Mr. Mantle.’ ”8
For Mickey, the 1967 season consisted of a few short ups and a lot of long downs. In July, he was hitting just above .230 but was given the honor of being named captain of the AL All-Star team. But unlike Willie, who took the midseason classic as seriously as regular-season games—if not more so—All-Star Games for Mickey were “like a cocktail party to me and Whitey.”9 In 1967, in Anaheim, he showed up, chatted with reporters, shook hands with former teammates and longtime friends, and hugged his old manager, Casey Stengel, who told anyone who would listen that Mantle was the greatest ballplayer he had ever managed—something he had somehow neglected to say during all the years he had actually managed Mickey. Mantle was also asked to do a ceremonial handshake with Willie.
He arrived late, missed the team photo, struck out in a first-inning at-bat, showered and dressed in the locker room, and caught a cab to the airport to fly back to Dallas and get out to the golf course in time to see Cincinnati’s Tony Perez win the game for the NL with a home run in the fifteenth inning. Or at least that’s how Mickey remembered it. Since the game started at 4:15 PM in Anaheim, or 6:15 PM Dallas time, it’s unlikely he would have been out playing golf that night.
Willie played the whole game and went 0-for-4.
For the first time since he had wept in the Giants’ locker room sixteen seasons before, Willie Mays began to doubt himself. In a July game at Candlestick against the Braves, Mays began to shake. He thought it was a fever, but could not rule out an anxiety attack of the kind that had sent him to Mount Sinai Hospital on more than one occasion. Herman Franks asked him to stay in uniform long enough to deliver the lineup card to the home plate umpire, a shrewd move, as the other team would then think Mays, if he wasn’t starting, was at least available for reserve hitting. Reserve outfielder Ty Cline started in the outfield. It was a bad night for Giants center fielders: trying to beat out an infield chopper, Cline pulled a muscle and had to come out of the game. Jesus Alou was the only other outfield sub available, and he had injured his leg just two days before. Willie quickly pulled off his jacket, reached for his glove, and trotted out to center field. His legs felt like lead, and he could scarcely swing the bat when his turn came in the order. The next day he checked into a hospital for five days. Whatever the problem, he already felt exhausted this early in the season.
When he finally got back into the lineup, Willie found that he simply did not feel strong. In fact, he would admit, “I never felt strong again for the rest of the season.”10 He would also admit to Bob Costas in a 2009 interview that he was taking amphetamines—“reds”—at the time, though he explained, “The trainer would give us this stuff and we didn’t always know what it was.” In a game at Atlanta, with the Giants leading 1–0 in the third, San Francisco had runners on second and third with slugging third baseman Jim Ray Hart due at bat. Billy Hitchcock, Atlanta’s manager, startled everyone from the fans to both dugouts by signaling to his pitcher to intentionally walk Hart—to get to Mays. Willie was dumbfounded: “They were loading the bases to pitch to me! That had never happened to me before. I was furious and embarrassed, but raring to go.… Maybe I couldn’t blame Hitchcock, but I also couldn’t wait to get up to bat with the bases loaded. Did I concentrate! Make me look bad, huh? I smacked a single past first base and the runs were enough for a victory.”11
August saw the first depressing story on Willie Mays to appear in a national sports magazine. The first sentence of “Say Hey No More,” written by Mark Mulvoy for the August 7 issue of Sports Illustrated, seared the eyes of a high school student who had worshiped Willie since his first pack of baseball cards: “Sitting there in the Giants’ clubhouse in Candlestick Park, Willie Mays looked old and sick.” It didn’t get much better after that: “His eyes were like road maps—Route 1 from San Francisco to Santa Cruz—and the circles beneath them said that Willie Mays does not sleep too well at night any more. His voice was somewhat muffled and restrained—the vigorous ‘Say hey’ is only a memory.” (Actually, no sportswriter I ever knew remembered Mays using the phrase “Say hey” since 1954.)
Mulvoy portrayed a Willie Mays for whom the joy of playing baseball was gone, a man approaching middle age for whom the game had become a chore, a job—an increasingly difficult job. “Despite all this,” Mulvoy wrote, “Willie has not even thought about retirement. ‘I’d like to play for a long time more,’ he said, ‘but I’ll stay around only if I do a good job. I’d have to make some adjustments, maybe bat second and hit more to right field. Maybe I’d have to play left or right so I won’t have to run so m
uch. But I won’t play first base like Mickey—not for the Giants. If I played first and [Willie] McCovey went to the outfield, we’d weaken ourselves at two places.’ ” But before it was all over, Willie would be at first base—just like Mickey.
The Giants were bad in 1967, winning ninety-one games and finishing second in the league but a full ten and a half games behind the eventual World Series winner, the St. Louis Cardinals. They were never in the pennant race, despite a red-hot 20–7 record during September. The Yankees were much worse, winning just seventy-two games and ending up ninth in their division, twenty games behind the Red Sox.
Mickey and Whitey Ford began the 1967 season as the last of the old guard from the Yankees’ glory years. Like Mantle, Ford had been struggling valiantly against the odds. In 1965 he had won sixteen games for a terrible team, but in 1966 his arm could no longer take the strain. He started just nine games, and though his ERA, 2.47, was excellent, he was able to win just two of seven decisions. In 1967 he lasted into the second month of the season before calling it quits.
For the first time since they had broken into the major leagues, both Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays were, from a baseball perspective, irrelevant. Both had 22 home runs. Mickey, sore and limping through every game, actually played more games than Willie, 144 to 141, though 131 of them were at first base. Willie, exhausted for much of the season and needing constant rest, hit just .263, eighteen points higher than Mickey, though Mantle, able as usual to work an at-bat for a base on balls, had finished with a .391 on-base percentage—fifty-six points higher than Mays.
