“You can’t hit the pitchers there,” Mays, a scared minor leaguer in 1951, said over the phone to Durocher, who would later become his manager. “Do you think you can hit .200-.700 for me?” Durocher asked Mays, who had a .477 batting average in Minneapolis. Mays could.
A few weeks later, the Giants put Mays, who was 0-12 at bats in the major leagues, up to bat from 60 feet, 6 inches away against Warren Spahn, who was on his way to becoming the winningest left-handed pitcher in baseball history. Mays hit his 660th career home run. “That first 60 feet was a hell of a pitch,” Spahn said after the game. Years later, he would say, “If I’d only struck him out, I might have fired Willie for good.”
In 1963, in a game that may never be played again, Spahn, then 42, and future Hall of Famer Juan Marichal, then 25, both pitched 16 shutout innings. Marichal threw 227 pitches, Spahn 201. The Giants won, 1-0, on a walk-off home run by Spahn that you can probably guess who hit.
Mays, whose mother died during birth to her 11th child, grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, a city that the Rev. Martin Luther King deemed the worst big city in America for race relations. As a teenager, Mays played professionally for the Birmingham Black Barons and listened to them on the radio, the white team’s play-by-play announcer who gained notoriety in the 1960s after Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor used water cannons and police dogs on student protesters in 1963, terrifying a nation that helped pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “He was a pretty good announcer,” Mays recalls.
In some ways, Mays was too good for his own good. His athleticism and playfulness, such as playing stickball with kids on the streets of Harlem, fostered the impression of a childlike man who could easily take on grown men. He was called a “genius.” Oh? Exceptional hand-eye coordination is a natural gift. But hitting a round ball moving horizontally and vertically at 95 mph consistently and consistently with a round bat is anything but natural. Mays made the extraordinary look ordinary, which led to an underestimation of his craftsmanship and intelligence.
Even as a rookie, he reached second base, deciphered the opposing catcher’s pitching signs, and told the Giants dugout that, for example, the third in each sequence was the actual sign. His baserunning “instincts” were actually meticulously honed skills. Though he played center field, he would practice his infield before the game, reminding himself where the infielders should be positioned to cut off the outfielder’s throws. Then, when he got a hit, if the infielders were out of position, he could get an extra base. Early in the game, Mays would intentionally swing and miss at easy balls, thereby encouraging the pitcher to throw them in a crucial at-bat late in the inning.
Mays and Yankee Mickey Mantle (born in 1931, like Mays), who played less than a mile from the Giants’ Polo Grounds in the early 1950s, lit up the baseball world in a decade when baseball was undoubtedly the national pastime. (During the decade when Americans first started watching television, the NFL and NBA were second only to boxing in popularity, and at least a quarter of American men regularly watched “Friday Night Fights” and other games.)
In the 1954 World Series, Indians pitcher Vic Wertz hit a pitch from Don Riddle 483 feet into the wall of the Polo Grounds, the deepest center field in baseball, where Mays caught it. Riddle, who played in the game only to pitch to Wertz, reportedly said simply, “I got my man,” by hitting a Ruthian smash into the hands of the only player capable of catching it.
Baseball fans are a contentious bunch, but no one doubts that Mays is one of the six best fielders in baseball. And yet after his first home run off Spahn, Mays went 0-for-13 and 1-for-25. Even the baseball gods need time to figure things out.
