by Allen Barra
Before the season, Mays asked Horace Stoneham for a ten-year, $750,000 contract. Obviously Willie had plans to stay with the Giants in some sort of front-office position for years after his playing days were over. He found out with a shock that, as John Matuszak’s football player says to Charles Durning’s coach in North Dallas Forty, “when we call it a game, you call it a business. When we call it a business, you call it a game.” Stoneham called it a business—loyalty in baseball was a one-way street. The player was expected to give it to the team, but the team could reject the player for whatever reason it chose. Despite Mays’s twenty-one years of service with the Giants, Stoneham double-talked Willie, telling him that the Giants’ board of directors was authorized to offer him only a five-year deal. It was the first time Willie had ever heard Stoneham say that important team decisions were made by the board of directors. He decided to turn down Stoneham’s offer and settled for a two-year contract as a player for $165,000 a season—not bad money for a player who had not hit over .300 in six seasons or more than 28 home runs in the last five.
The season began horribly for the Giants, and the team was scarcely out of the gate when communications problems developed between Willie and Giants manager Charlie Fox. Before the first game of a doubleheader, Willie handed the lineup card to the home plate umpire and, apparently miffed because he was not in the lineup, left the stadium without telling Fox. Fox fumed. A few days later, the Giants suffered three ugly losses to the New York Mets. They then traveled to Philadelphia. On May 5, while Mays was resting for a game with the Phillies, he took a phone call from a New York reporter he knew who told him of a red-hot rumor: the Giants had been talking to the Mets about a trade.
Willie was in shock. His first thought was not that the Giants had traded him but that Stoneham hadn’t told him. When he reached the ballpark, he found reporters not just from Philadelphia but from New York and other major league cities. He seemed subdued. “I’m not mad at anybody,” he told them. “They’re mad at me.”
And, “When your time is up, they tell you to go? That’s not fair.” After two decades of benefiting from benevolent paternalism, Mays had discovered what professional baseball was like for all other players.
The New York sports pages were once again alive with Willie Mays headlines: Willie was coming back to New York. Though he had played in the city for only a little more than five full seasons, many veteran sportswriters were proclaiming him the most popular ballplayer in the city’s baseball history. There was something to be said for their argument.
The actual terms of the deal were hidden in the stories. The Giants received some cash—some reported the sum was $100,000, but the Giants never confirmed that, implying that the actual amount was much less—and a pitcher named Charlie Williams, who would last eight years in the big leagues. Williams spent the rest of his career with San Francisco, winning 23, losing 22, and gaining his dollop of fame as the answer to a trivia question: who was the man traded for Willie Mays? Back in San Francisco, Horace Stoneham gave a teary press conference in which he blamed the trade on the Giants’ financial woes and their financial difficulties on having to compete with another team in the Bay Area. (At the same time, the other team, Charlie Finley’s Oakland A’s, was poised in 1972 to win the first of three consecutive World Series, so the economy must have been doing a bit better on the eastern side of the Bay.)
It didn’t take Willie long, though, to understand that there was an upside to the trade: New York wanted him back with a passion. The Daily News’s Dick Young, perhaps the one writer in New York who was the biggest cheerleader for both Mays and Mantle, expressed the city’s sentiments when he wrote, “When there’s a chance to get Willie Mays, don’t quibble about a decade or two.”22 The wave of emotion that greeted Willie upon his return was unlike anything seen in New York sports history.
Yankees fans had regarded Mickey Mantle with unconditional love only from 1961 through the end of his career, but no baseball fan in New York withheld anything from Willie. Joe DiMaggio had alienated fans for a while when he held out for more money during the war; some who had followed Joe’s career closely felt that it was only in his last few seasons that Yankee fans began to acknowledge his true greatness. In any event, as Roger Kahn put it, “what Yankee fans felt for DiMaggio was awe, not love.” Lou Gehrig was booed occasionally for not being Babe Ruth, and Babe Ruth was often booed early in his Yankee years for being Babe Ruth—that is, for striking out too much, losing his temper with fans and his manager, and not being the kind of ballplayer John McGraw, New York’s most revered manager, thought he should be.
But with Willie Mays, it was a matter of pure love from the first time they saw him step onto a ball field. Even Brooklyn Dodgers fans had cheered him just before he left for the Army. Many sportswriters around the country were indignant that the Giants had shown such lack of respect by trading him; they apparently forgot that Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth had been traded near the end of their careers and that the Dodgers had been willing to trade Jackie Robinson to the hated Giants.
Part of Mets fans’ enthusiasm—they were, after all, mostly former Giants and Dodgers fans—stemmed from knowing that Willie had had a pretty good year in 1971 and a repeat performance would be a big boost to the team. (Mays’s 18 home runs and 23 stolen bases from the season before could have been team highs for the ’72 Mets, for whom John Milner paced the team in homers with 17 and Bud Harrelson led in stolen bases with just 12.)
Sportswriters and fans, however, were overlooking some cold, hard facts. The first was that the Willie Mays who came to the Mets in 1972 was light-years from the Say Hey Kid who had gone west with his team fifteen years before. Right after the trade was completed, the Giants manager, Charlie Fox, had told the San Francisco Chronicle’s Glenn Dickey, “They should have traded him five years ago. I’m supposed to be the manager, but I f_____g had to come to him every day and say ‘Willie, can you play today?’ ”
The year before, Dickey had written in his column: “Mays is certainly the best and most exciting ballplayer of his generation. But he sheds his greatness like a cloak when he leaves the playing field, the Willie Mays myth not to the contrary. You know the myth, created by New York: Mays, the ‘Say-Hey’ Kid, a happy-go-lucky fellow with a kind word for everyone. Try that on an autograph-seeking kid who has been brushed off, a sportswriter who has been cursed, a manager who had tried to exercise authority, a black who had tried to get Mays to speak out against racial inequalities as Hank Aaron, Bill White, and Bob Gibson do.
“Mays always had an idolatrous press, but that has not made him cooperative. He talks only to the sycophants and those he thinks can help him. Questions from the others are met with obscenities or silence.… Giants managers are hardly more fortunate. They know they must give Mays preferential treatment or Willie will become fatigued or beset by one of his mysterious ailments.”23 New York sportswriters knew little of the bad humor that had festered in Willie during his last few months with the Giants, and the ones who did either ignored it or simply blamed the Bay Area sportswriting establishment, which the New York crowd had pretty much been hostile to since the Giants went west.
On May 12, Willie Mays came to bat to ecstatic applause from a Shea Stadium crowd against, of course, the San Francisco Giants. There were only about 35,000 in the stands because rain had threatened to cancel the game. It was the final game of a three-game set, and fans were already murmuring at, if not actually booing, manager Yogi Berra for not having played Willie earlier. (When a pinch-hitting opportunity came up in the first game, Berra went with the percentages and sent up the left-handed hitter John Milner.) The uniform looked odd on Mays—the Mets cap was Dodger blue with the Old English “NY” that the Giants had worn—but there was the number 24 on his back, and that’s what mattered. (Outfielder Jim Beauchamp had been wearing number 24 but graciously turned it over to Willie, becoming number 5.)
Giants pitcher “Sudden Sam” McDowell smiled at his former teammate and then proce
eded to walk him when a curve just missed on a 3-2 count. The second time around, McDowell fanned Mays. In the fifth inning, with the score tied at 4–4 and Don Carrithers on the mound as the drizzle turned into a hard rain, Willie connected with a curveball and drove it on a line into the left-field seats. Grinning, his old teammates blocked his path around the bases; after touching home plate, he instinctively headed toward the San Francisco dugout before realizing his mistake and trotting back. The Mets won, 5–4. It was the only bit of magic anyone would see in Shea Stadium that season.
Willie didn’t do badly in 88 games with the Mets over the remainder of the 1972 season. He hit .250 with 8 home runs and 11 doubles in 244 at-bats. With or without him, the Mets were caught in a spiral of mediocrity that had begun the year after their 1969 “miracle” year, and they finished third in the NL East for the third consecutive year, thirteen and a half games out of first.
The major leagues’ first players’ strike, which began on April 1, 1972, gave Willie Mays an opportunity to have his one heroic moment as a union member, the only known time he stood up to baseball’s authority figures.
Gaylord Perry was the Giants’ rep, and Mays, because of his national fame and popularity, had been asked to be the number-two man and had accepted. Perry was suddenly unable to meet his obligations, for personal reasons, and Willie surprised his fellow reps by stepping up to bat. Many players feared that the veterans would not have the conviction or patience for a long work stoppage, and soon tensions were running high among the player reps. During one particularly emotional meeting, Willie surprised them all by asking to speak. Marvin Miller recalled that “the room was silent. Willie told everyone, ’I know it’s hard being away from the game, and our paychecks and normal lives. I love this game, it’s been my whole life, and I know I’m risking a chance to play in what might be my final season. But we made a decision in Dallas to stick together, and until we’re satisfied we have to stay together. If we don’t hang together, everything we’ve worked for will be lost.” Miller said that Mays was eloquent, empathic, and unwavering. The player reps passed the word on, and the strike continued. On April 13, an agreement was reached.§
One of the most important victories in the 1972 strike was that it brought arbitrators into baseball for the first time. In 1976 that change would result in Peter Seitz overthrowing the reserve clause that had bound players to one team for life. Miller said that his greatest regret was that “I hadn’t become the Player Association head ten or twelve years earlier” (he began in 1966). “I would have loved to have seen what Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Sandy Koufax, and Henry Aaron would have pulled in as free agents in their primes.”24
Mickey tried a stint as a baseball color man for NBC, but it was short-lived. Curt Gowdy, a fellow Oklahoman, tried to help him prepare for talking on national TV, but “it was an embarrassment. To say Mickey’s heart wasn’t in it would be an understatement. In truth he had quite a lot to say about what happened on a baseball field, but he was hampered by what he regarded as lack of intelligence and was reluctant to say anything that might be interpreted as a criticism of other ballplayers. He once told me, ’Shit, man. By the time I was twenty, baseball was an easy game for me to play. I felt like I had already been playing my whole life. Maybe it ain’t so easy for some one else.”25 There was another problem: everyone knew he was often inebriated before going on the air.
Mickey spent most waking hours getting drunk or being hung—over. In December 1972, the Yankees sent out a letter to former players. Bob Fishel, director of the business and ticket offices, cheerfully informed Mickey that “1973 marks the 50th anniversary of Yankee Stadium, and we are going to have a season-long Golden Anniversary celebration. We hope to mark the occasion on our Old Timer’s Day, Saturday, August 11, as well as on individual dates during the season.
“We thought it would be interesting to learn from you what you consider your outstanding event at Yankee Stadium. In many cases the answer is obvious, but because we are writing a large number of your former team mates, we’re asking you to answer this question for us.”
Recipients of the letter were asked to complete this sentence: “I consider the following my outstanding experience at Yankee Stadium.” Mickey’s response, handwritten, was “I got a blow-job under the right field bleachers by [i.e., beside] the Yankee bull pen.”
The form continued: “This event occurred on or about: (Give as much detail as you can).” Mickey responded, “It was about the third or fourth inning. I had a pulled groin and couldn’t fuck at the time. She was a very nice girl and asked me what to do with the come after I came in her mouth. I said, ‘Don’t ask me, I’m no cocksucker.’ ”
Signed: “Mickey Mantle* The All American Boy.”
Mantle’s “outstanding event” was not mentioned at the Old-Timers’ Day celebration. Collectors have offered up to $10,000 for his original note.
Willie showed up for the Mets’ 1973 spring training a day late with so much tape around his knees that, according to Roger Kahn, “some of the writers thought he looked like Mickey Mantle.”26 He was eager to play, he told the writers, but added, “If I can do it my way.” The Mets were managed by perhaps the only New York baseball legend who could have rivaled Mays in both respect and affection, Yogi Berra. Yogi was, and remains to this day, the winningest player in New York, having played on more pennant winners (fourteen) and won more World Series (ten) than any other ballplayer. He had also won more MVP Awards than Willie, three to two. In the process, Yogi had transformed himself into a folk hero, largely through his own infectious good nature but also through the diligent work of sportswriters who rewrote much of what he said into “Yogisms.”
That Berra was a disciple of the game who took playing, coaching, and managing very seriously escaped many players, especially Mays, who picked right up with Yogi where he had left off in San Francisco with Charlie Fox. In his 1974 book, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Glenn Dickey summed up what no New York writer would say about Willie: “As a Met, Mays’s behavior toward manager Yogi Berra was the same as that towards the Giant managers. He left the club in spring training without consulting Berra. He was fined upon his return; half of the fine, said one writer, was for leaving, the other half for returning. During the regular season, he was on the disabled list early. When he came off—ironically against the Giants in San Francisco—he spent one game up in Giants broadcasting booth … instead of on the bench with his teammates. The next week Berra put his name on the lineup card without consulting Willie. Mays not only didn’t play, he went home—again without permission.”27 Tug McGraw would later recall that Mays and Berra “had a tough time as far as the lineup went, and a lot of times Willie didn’t want to come to the ballpark at all.”‖
Winning, though, like love, covers a multitude of sins, and much to their surprise, the Mets rallied from a midseason slump and a near swoon in September to make it to the NL playoffs against the Cincinnati Reds. Few noticed that Willie, hitting .211 in 209 at-bats, had done almost nothing to put them there. He had lost nearly all his speed and range in the outfield, and his throwing arm was so bad that on one occasion he had to relay the ball back into the infield with an underhand toss. For the first time he failed to be voted onto the All-Star team or to be chosen by the NL manager, Sparky Anderson, for the additional roster. Chub Feeney, the NL president, made a special dispensation to include Willie on the team. Mays was at first indignant and declined, but after thinking it over for a day he decided to go.
The Mets prevailed against a superior Reds team for the pennant and then extended the powerful Oakland A’s, led by future Hall of Famers Reggie Jackson, Catfish Hunter, and Rollie Fingers, to seven games in the World Series. Willie had one more crack at World Series greatness, and he made the most of it. In Game 2 at Oakland, Willie came to bat in the twelfth inning of a tie game with runners on first and third and two outs. Fingers tried to whip a slider past him in the late-afternoon shadows. Willie lashed a one-hopper over Fingers’s ou
tstretched glove; trying to hustle out of the box, he stumbled ingloriously and lost his cap on a major league ball field for the last time. He stayed on base and later scored on an error. The Mets won, 10–7. The A’s fans—or at least Giants fans who had come to see an A’s World Series game to get a final look at Willie Mays—gave him a standing ovation. Mays was just 2-for-7 in the Series, and the hit in Game 2 produced his only RBI.
It is one of the great statistical oddities in the baseball record books—for it is teally no more than that, an oddity—that Willie Mays played in only 20 World Series games and batted 71 times without hitting a single home run. And in one of the oddest contrasts, Mickey Mantle, whose prime years paralleled Willie’s, hit 18 World Series home runs, a record that still stands.
The single off Rollie Fingers was satisfying, but one wishes there was something greater, more heroic, to the close of Willie’s career. Unlike Mickey, Willie did not wait until the off-season to announce his retirement. On the morning of September 20, he made the announcement on NBC’s Today Show. At 3:00 that afternoon he held a press conference at Shea Stadium’s Diamond Club. “I thought I’d be crying by now,” he said as he held back tears, “but I see so many people here who are my friends, I can’t. Maybe I’ll cry tomorrow.” He enumerated his reasons for retirement, which were as negative as Mickey’s had been five years earlier: “When you’re forty-two hitting .211, it’s no fun.… I just feel that the people of America shouldn’t have to see a guy who can’t produce.” He squashed rumors that he might take a big league managing job: “Managing is hard work, and I don’t want that.” Then, stopping to nod at Yogi, “and I don’t want to be a coach and just stand out there like an Indian.”
