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Recently in Salon People

Nothing Personal
Did Little John make Robin Hood's quiver shiver?
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People Feature
Inside baseball
Willie Mays talks about stickball in Harlem, today's best players and his ban from the game.
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Mark O'Brien: Lifestyles of the blind and paralyzed
From age 6, the writer, poet and subject of the Academy Award-winning "Breathing Lessons" had the use of just one muscle in his right foot, one muscle in his neck and one in his jaw. He used them to steer his monster machine and to bang with a stick on the keys of a computer -- to write, cajole, editorialize, storm, cry, laugh and rage.
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[07/12/99]

Complete archives for People

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Willie Mays | page 1, 2, 3, 4

As a 20-year-old rookie, Mays fought his promotion from the Triple-A Minneapolis Millers to the New York Giants in 1951. He told Giants manager Leo Durocher he couldn't hit big-league pitching yet. Durocher reminded him he was batting .477 with Minneapolis, and asked simply, "Do you think you can hit .2-fuckin'-70 for me?" After Mays went 1-for-25 in his first six games with the Giants, the rookie collapsed in tears by his locker (tears figure prominently in stories about Mays; the high-strung perfectionist was prone to fainting spells and mysterious bouts of nervous exhaustion, for which he was twice hospitalized during his career). Durocher put his arm around the young center fielder and gave him a pep talk. Then he moved him down to eighth in the batting order, and Mays took off. He wound up National League Rookie of the Year, batting .2-fuckin'-74, with 20 home runs and 68 RBIs, and the Giants went to the World Series.

The city and the media fell for the speedy center fielder with the big bat and the squeaky voice. Photographers found him in Harlem, where he lived, playing stickball with neighborhood kids, before and after games. The stories about the stickball-playing rookie were affectionate, but depicted him as a childish, almost cartoonish figure, an image Mays never entirely lost. Some of the images were even more pernicious. In his rookie year the Sporting News ran a cartoon about the new star, captioned in dialect: "Ah gives base runners the heave ho!" and "Ah aims to go up in the world."

Mays was drafted by the U.S. Army after one year in the majors, and the Giants did poorly without him. It was the two-year Army stint, plus his 12 years playing at San Francisco's windy Candlestick Park, that cost him a shot at Ruth's home-run record. Do the math: Mays finished his 22-year career with 660 homers, an average of 30 a season. Give him just 25 each for the two years he was in the service and he's up to 710 (the Babe hit 714), and give him another 5 a year for time served at Candlestick -- the renowned graveyard for long fly balls that would be homers anywhere else -- and he would have hit 770, surpassing even Hank Aaron's 755.

But that's focusing on what he didn't do. Mays is best remembered for what he did: He's among baseball's top 10 all-time leaders in home runs, RBIs, hits, runs scored and total bases. He stole more bases during his career than his recent rivals for greatest living player -- Ted Williams, Aaron and DiMaggio -- put together. He led the league in home runs three times, and in stolen bases four years in a row. He was Most Valuable Player in 1954 and 1965. He holds some offbeat records, too -- for hitting the most home runs in extra innings (22), and being the only player in history to hit a home run in every single inning through the 16th.

Yet when people lucky enough to have seen him play talk about Mays, they don't trade in records and statistics. They describe him as a perpetual-motion machine, a one-man show of nonstop agitation and cogitation, at the plate and in the field, a danger to his opponents from the first at bat to the last out of every game he played.

"He would routinely do things you never saw anyone else do," says Giants president Magowan, who saw him play at New York's Polo Grounds in his rookie year. "He'd score from first base on a single. He'd take two bases on a pop-up. He'd throw somebody out at the plate on one bounce. And the bigger the game, the better he played."

But for every anecdote about the way Mays used his bat or glove, there's at least one about the way he used his brain. "He played in the days before you had computerized printouts and videos and all the stuff we have now to tell you what a guy does against you," says Dusty Baker. "And still there was nothing he couldn't do." Mays had an encyclopedic memory, Baker says, for the pitchers he faced, and their pitches. He was known to swing at good pitches, and even strike out if there was no one on base, early in a game, just to fool the pitcher into throwing the same pitch in a dangerous situation later -- when he'd nail it.

Conservative pundit and baseball devotee George Will lists Mays among the smartest and best-disciplined players in baseball history. But he "received a lot of semi-disparaging praise as a 'natural,'" Will wrote in "Men at Work," because of "the residue of racism." Mays was stealing other teams' signs as a rookie, Will notes, and he routinely stayed on the field when the other team took infield practice, partly for the extra conditioning, and partly to watch the way his opponents positioned themselves when fielding, so he could know when to try for an extra base during the game.

His managers, from Durocher onward, sooner or later learned to leave him alone and let him call the shots in the outfield and at the plate. Some reporters, and occasionally his teammates, thought they were coddling their superstar. But when Herman Franks, who managed the Giants in the mid-1960s, was asked why he often deferred to Mays so frequently, he put it this way: "Because he knows more about those things than I do. You got any hard questions?"

Next page | When he came to California from New York in 1958, fans booed him