FEBRUARY 22,2002 — THE DECREE — PAGE 5
Remembering the great Willie Mays
By DR. TERRY SMITH
IIVC English Professor Emeritus
Villie Howard Mays was the
;t exciting baseball player I
r saw in some 55 years of
ching baseball games. In all,
jlayed 22 years in the major
rues for the New York Giants,
Francisco Giants, and New
k Mets. He was among the
t of the African-American
)?ers who followed Jackie
linson into Organized Base-
He finished his career with a
.302 lifetime batting average and
ftO home runs. Only Henry
Aaron and Babe Ruth hit more.
He had speed as well as power,
IjEding the National League in
stolen bases four years in a row.
Roger Angell described him
b|st in his 1972 The Summer
Game: “One thinks of Willie
^ays, in the best of his youth,
TBtting at the Polo Grounds, his
ole body seeming to leap at
ball as he swings in an explo
sion of exuberance. Or Mays in
Bnter field, playing in so close
flat he appears at times to be
Etching the game from over the
Bcond baseman’s shoulder, and
^en that same joyful leap as he
Bkes off after a long, deep drive,
Snning so hard and so far that
e ball itself seems to stop in the
^ and wait for him.”
Arnold Hano’s A Day in the
teachers, first published in 1955,
®ntains an interesting — and
^ite insightful — portrait of
Bays at the very beginning of his
Bajor league career. The book re-
®unts the Giants’ 5-2 victory, in
first of a four-game sweep of
Cleveland Indians in the 1954
^orld Series.
Hano quotes Cleveland man-
iRer A1 Lopez on the subject of
Ways’ batting. In the Spring of
J954, Lopez was not particularly
Snpressed, saying after watching
Ways through spring training that
jMays was a .270 hitter who
jight hit .300, ... if he’d only
jam to bunt down the third base
|ne.” Lopez was probably think-
*g of the Mays of 1951 and 1952,
ihen he had hit .272 and .236.
Ways had spent most of the 1952
|nd all of the 1953 season in the
,vmy.
I Hano himself had the benefit
?f watching Mays’ spectacular
!954 season, when among many
ther accomplishments, he’d led
>e National League in both bat
ing and slugging percentage.
Nevertheless, Hano was not par-
icularly impressed, either, writ-
ng that “Mays does not inspire
f>v hones at the nlate as he used
to. This is foolish on my part,
because he is a far better hitter
now than he was when I felt that
with every swing he’d hit a home
run. I cannot help it; I harbor the
feeling that A1 Lopez was right,
that Mays is a .270 hitter who
might hit .300 with some luck. It
was against the rules that he hit
more than that in 1954, so undis
ciplined does he seem.” As it
turned out. Mays was a lifetime
.300 hitter with plenty of power.
Hano, though, locates Mays’
genius as a ballplayer in his field
ing, not his hitting. The first game
of the 1954 World Series pro
vides the perfect occasion for this,
involving, as it does, what was
immediately known as “The
Catch.”
Mays’ catch of Vic Wertz’s
eighth inning drive in deep right-
center field with the potential win
ning ran on base was one of the
central events of the game. Mays
taking Wertz’s drive over his left
shoulder as he approaches the
warning track just right of
straight-away center field is on
the cover of both editions of
Hano’s book.
Hano’s treatment of “The
Catch” is revealing. He says noth
ing of the length of Wertz’s drive,
but says that he had never seen a
ball hit as hard as Wertz hit this
one. Hano characterizes Wertz’s
drive as “not the longest ball ever
hit in the Polo Grounds, not by a
comfortable margin.” It may seem
surprising that the first thing Hano
says of his reaction to the hardest
hit he ever saw was “I was not
immediately perturbed.” But like
all Giant fans in 1954, Hano was
used to Mays’ ability to catch any
thing that stayed in the ballpark. I
listened to the regular Giants’ an
nouncers’ radio broadcast of the
game, and was surprised to read
in the papers the next day that
Mays had made an unusually dif
ficult play. Hano concludes that
“had not Mays made that slight
movement with his head as
though he were going to look back
in the middle of flight, he would
have caught the ball standing
still.” Not exacdy a routine catch,
but Hano and the Giants’ an
nouncers and I weren’t surprised
that Willie had caught up with
the ball.
Much of the time Hano spends
on Mays in his book is concerned
with Willie’s throwing. He de
votes two pages early in the book
to Mays’ practicing his throwing
from the outfield during pregame
warm-ups. He also comments on
a throw to third that Mays made
to hold Wertz to a double in the
tenth innine; “Here was the final
climaxing of an exhibition of
power, speed and accuracy that
must be unequalled in any sport.”
His throwing was surely the
most wondrous dimension of this
most wondrous ballplayer. Of ev
erything in Charles Einstein’s bi
ography of Mays, Willie’s Time,
I remember most vividly San
Francisco Giant manager Bill
Rigney’s instraction to young Gi
ant infielders: “When they hit it
to him, . . . .please go to a base.
Don’t confuse the issue by ask
ing me why. Just be there.” And
Paul Metcalf, with the instinct of
poets, titled his poem celebrating
Mays’ outfielding “Willie’s
Throw.” [Metcalf’s poem —
which commemorates another of
Mays’ famous fielding plays —
is most readily available in Rich
ard Grossinger and Lisa Conrad’s
Baseball I Gave You All the Best
Years of My Life (Fifth edition,
1992) or Tercalf’s Collected
Works, Volume Two, 1976-1986
(1997).]
Mays’ fielding genius — par
ticularly his throwing — distin
guished him from the other slug
ging outfielders of the 1950s and
1960s: Henry Aaron, Mickey
Mantle, Frank Robinson. Tommy
Henrich, New York Yankees out
fielder, once commented on the
difficulties of outfielding, saying
“catching a fly ball is a pleasure,
but knowing what to do with it
after you catch it is a business.”
More than a great slugger, more
than a fast man on the bases and
in the outfield, Willie Howard
Mays knew how to take care of
business.
Hear Ye, Hear Ye!
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