SPORT, December 1961
Willie Mays had played 116 games in the minor leagues and 155 in the major leagues when the Army interrupted his baseball career. Over that short haul, however, he had flashed skills that stamped him as a budding super-star and it was inevitable that people should begin comparing him to baseball’s all-time greats. One of the more direct comparisons took place in Dallas, Texas, shortly after Willie returned from military service in 1954.
The New York Giants were in town to play an exhibition game that spring day and Tris Speaker, the Hall of Fame outfielder, had come to the park to visit with them. A young reporter, aware of Speaker’s stature, approached him.
“Does Mays remind you of yourself?” the writer asked.
“Son,” Speaker said, “this is the first time I’ve ever seen Mays. I’d prefer not to answer that question for a while.”
Speaker is gone now. Willie is still very much with us. He is 29 now, about to become a ten-year man. Theoretically the ten-year mark is the dividing line between baseball’s boys and its grown men. There are many grown men. There are few supermen. Tris Speaker was a superman. How does Willie Mays compare with Tris and others of such supreme rating? It is a reasonable question now, one which commands attention and argument.
There can be no question that Willie Mays is, hands down, the greatest all-round player in the game today. There has been a reluctance by some San Franciscans to accept him as the best, but the rest of baseball has no reservations. Neither has Giant president Horace Stoneham. Last season Horace paid Mays a flat $85,000, baseball’s biggest player salary, more than matching any salary ever paid a player in one lump. Willie didn’t ask for it. Stoneham gave it to him—out of unqualified appreciation for what Willie has become.
“I sat with the man (Stoneham) maybe five minutes,” Willie said, “and he quoted me the figure. I said to him, ‘You think I ought to have that much?’”
And Stoneham answered: “Yeah. I’m giving it to you because you’re the best.”
And Willie, happy but humble, answered: “If you’re giving it to me because I’m the best, then I’ll take it.”
“You deserve it,” Stoneham said.
When you discuss Willie’s ability with fellows around the league, their analyses are as basically simple as Stoneham’s reasoning.
“He’s great,” said Del Crandall, the Braves’ catcher. “I’d pay my own way into the ball park to see Willie play. He does things nobody else does, and he does them regularly. He beats you every way imaginable. If there’s anything like a complete ballplayer, Willie is it.”
“There’s no doubt about it,” said Cleveland’s Harvey Kuenn. “Mays is the best player in the big leagues today.”
“He may be more than that,” said Johnny Temple, the demanding second-baseman of the Indians who has played in both leagues. “He may be the best who has ever played baseball.”
These extravagant statements were offered in the immediate aftermath of the 1960 All-Star games. In the games, Willie walloped a home run, triple, double and three singles in eight times at bat. His All-Star game lifetime batting average zoomed to .438. He was the All-Star of the All-Stars. His superb showing documented further his status as the best player in baseball.
For reasons of their own, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ scouting staff evaluated every player in the big leagues a while ago. Working under chief scout Alex Campanis, they set a point value on hitting, hitting for power, speed on the bases (stealing and going for the extra base), strength and accuracy of the arm and fielding. The results of the analysis were filed away until the Dodgers disclosed that they had been offered an unprecedented $1,800,000 for Frank Howard (billed as the next Babe Ruth) and six other young players. It appeared to be a fantastic sum, even for youngsters of such unlimited potential.
In a subsequent conversation with Campanis, a newspaperman suggested that perhaps price-setting on ballplayers was getting out of hand.
“I don’t think so,” Campanis said. “Not for players with such talent.”
“I figure,” said the newspaperman, “that of the $1,800,000 that you have mentioned, a million of it had to be offered for Howard. Would you say that there is really any ballplayer in the game today who is worth that much?”
“Only one,” the chief Dodger scout said. “Willie Mays.”
“How can you possibly figure that?”
“We did figure it,” Alex said. Then he disclosed the Dodgers’ secret appraisal, which, of course, was based on the old Rickey system of judging a ballplayer.
“Of all the players we rated,” Campanis said, “Mays is the only one judged to have a perfect score on every count. I know this. The Dodgers would be willing to pay $1,000,000 for Mays right now.”
Even in these inflated days, Al’s assessment of Willie is worth pause. It certainly serves as a springboard, not only for an evaluation of Mays in terms of dollars, but in comparison to such all-time greats as Ty Cobb and Hans Wagner.
Old-timers may be horrified over the audacity of the suggestion, but there now seems to be a basis for such comparison. For one thing, Mays is without a weakness. For another, he is likely to be around for another six years and should in that time build upon the skills that have made him worth at least $1,000,000. He is the most superbly equipped player of our age, with the possible exception of Joe DiMaggio, to lend both the talent and the longevity to a baseball career.
Mays, of course, will never match Cobb’s 24 years of big-league playing time or Ty’s .367 lifetime average. But from 1905 through 1928, Cobb, the man who collected 4,191 hits, was able to hit only 118 home runs. In 21 years, Wagner hit only 101 homers. Mays has averaged better than 30 a season. Furthermore, Cobb could not be rated over Willie as a fielder or thrower.
It is appreciated here that there is no real way to dredge up the brilliance of the past to compare it with Mays’s brilliance of the present. Yet a case can be made for Willie’s right to stand at least close to the top. If our post-World War II era of baseball has produced anybody worthy of being mentioned in the same breath with Cobb, Wagner, Ruth, Speaker and such, Mays must be that player. There have been, in all of baseball history, few men who could do so many things well the way Willie does.
In 1954 Willie led the National League in batting with a .345 average. He also led the league in triples with 13 and in slugging percentage with .667, and was voted the Most Valuable Player. In 1955 he was the home-run king with 51. In 1956 he led both leagues in stolen bases with 40. Going into the 1960 season, Mays’s slugging percentage of .590 was the highest among active players in the National League. Only Ted Williams’ .634 surpassed Willie’s figure.
A statistical survey of Mays’s accomplishments, as impressive as it is, scarcely tells the full story of his value. The full flavor of the wonders Willie works on the ball field cannot be expressed with cold numbers.
A simple catch, for instance, counts the same in the box score as the impossible ones Willie makes. A simple throw which catches a runner taking an extra base is no different when recorded arithmetically than some of the super-specials Willie pulls off.
You can show in figures that Willie led the league in stealing bases from 1956 through 1958, but no mathematician has yet devised a system to show how many extra bases he’s taken by stretching a single’ into a double or a double into a triple or by scoring from second base on an infield out.
There is no measurement for his daring when he defies concrete walls as he leaps for a catch. Unfortunately a doctor cannot apply an instrument to the arm of such as pitcher Wilmer Mizell to determine how much his blood pressure rises and efficiency lowers when Willie is on base. Mizell, remember, is a lefthander, who normally should be able to control a base-runner leading off first. Willie, however, is no ordinary base-runner.
All of these are not so-called intangibles. They can be seen, even if they cannot be recorded.
It is the measure of Mays’s artistry and his recently reached maturity that this is a day-in, day-out thing with him. Injury, illness or indisposition don’t deter him. Even in 1960, when the San Francisco team earned a dubious distinction as “Flop of the Year,” Willie continued his wondrous ways. Such unwavering accomplishment is an earmark of greatness.
The explanation for the continued brilliance may be that baseball is Willie’s way of life. He is no longer the simple child of nature who came up to the Giants and lived for a while in a world of laughter and games. He is an elder statesman, fully aware of his responsibilities to his team and to himself. But his enthusiasm hasn’t wavered, even if his instinct for saying and doing the right thing at the right time has become more acute.
During the Giants’ 1959 pennant rush, which unfortunately faltered in the closing days of the season when Sam Jones alone couldn’t carry the pitching staff, a significant incident took place in the dressing room, which reveals much about Willie.
The Giants had just completed a vital head-to-head meeting with the Braves, and with only eight games left in the pennant race, San Francisco held a two-game lead. It was one of Willie’s most satisfying days in a trying season. He had batted in five runs, gone four-for-four and finally moved his average above .300. In the locker room afterward, a San Francisco writer said:
“You’re playing ball now the way Willie Mays plays.”
“I don’t think that’s a fair remark,” Willie said. “I only know one way to play. It’s easy to say I’m playing like Willie Mays when I get four hits.”
“What I mean,” the writer said, “is that you’re running into walls, making great catches and all that.”
“Listen,” Willie said, “I’ve been doing that every day for eight years. It didn’t just start.”
It seemed hardly necessary for those of us who had seen Mays in his early days in New York to be prodded by that reminder. We had seen him go hitless through his first 13 times at bat in 1951 after being called up from Minneapolis, where he had hit .477 in 35 games. In his first game at the Polo Grounds, he belted Warren Spahn for a home run high over the roof of the left-field stands. Then he went 12 more times without a hit before winging the Giants to their “Miracle of ’51” and starting himself on the way to Cooperstown.
Only ten days before the game with the Braves in 1959, it had been disclosed that Mays had been playing for one month with the little finger of his right hand broken—another indication of his determination. He had kept it secret from his teammates. Manager Bill Rigney and trainer Doc Bowman of the Giants were the only ones who knew of the injury. I found out about it on September 10.
I had come into the dressing room to congratulate Mays after he led the Giants to a 7-2 victory over the Pirates. Willie deserved congratulations. He had hit his 27th home run of the season and had scored another run by going from second to home on an infield grounder. Mays’s running had been typical for him, but his flinch at my handshake was not.
I turned his hand over and looked at his finger. It was grotesquely bent and badly swollen. “It’s broken or fractured,” Willie said simply. “Don’t say anything about it. I can’t swing right. I’ve been throwing myself at the ball, but I don’t want anybody knowing about it. I don’t want anybody to think I’m setting up an alibi.”
“What did the doctor say?” I asked.
“I haven’t seen a doctor,” Willie said. “They asked me to, but I didn’t want to. I want to stay in and play. I can help the club in the field, even if I haven’t been helping them much at bat. They need me. I know the old man (president Stoneham) would want me to play if he knew, and that man’s been as good to me as any man I’ve ever known. There ain’t much more to the season and this is no time to be out. I don’t care if I hit .200, so long as I do something about helping us win. If they put the finger in a cast, I wouldn’t be able to play.”
“Who knows the finger’s broken?” I asked.
“Doc and Rig, I guess,” Willie said, “but I only told Doc. I didn’t tell anybody else.”
It developed that the finger had been jammed into the ground a month earlier as Mays slid back into first, beating a Cincinnati pickoff play.
“The day after he was hurt,” Bowman said, “we had a technician standing by all day for an X-ray, but Willie just refused to go. We haven’t said a word about it because Willie wanted it that way. He isn’t the kind to alibi. He just wants to play.”
“Willie doesn’t think I know about it,” Bill Rigney said. “Willie didn’t want anybody to know because he didn’t want anybody thinking he was looking for an excuse.” Willie never has sought an excuse. Nor has he ever sought praise. His nature is such that he does not believe any ball has ever been hit that he cannot catch. He doesn’t believe that broken bones should slow him or that walls should stop him. He has not been as gay or carefree since. the Giants left New York for San Francisco, yet basically, he is the same Willie. In small Seals Stadium, where the Giants first played after their transcontinental shift, Mays had little roaming room in center field. He adjusted. In Candlestick Park, where the Giants moved in 1960, the wind blows from left field to right, making it almost impossible for a righthanded batter such as Mays to pull pitches for home runs. Willie adjusted again. He changed his swing, punching balls into center, right center and right, and all year he was up with the league’s leading hitters.
“Wouldn’t this break your heart?” he said, the first day he realized the futility of trying to pit his power against the push of the Candlestick Park gales.
It sounded like Willie was discouraged, but he really wasn’t.
“The way I feel,” he said, “is that there are a lot of ways to win games. If I can go along and hit .300 and play defense, then I’m having a better year than if I hit .340. The club knows that. That’s why they gave me the raise. The game’s more than hitting. They don’t pay me what I’m getting only because I’m a hitter.”
The last sentence of that quote is really the only way to gauge Mays in the fullest, to see him in his proper perspective against Aaron, Mathews, Mantle, Banks, Musial, Williams and DiMaggio of this era and the immortals of yesteryear. Willie can do everything that can be asked of the perfect ballplayer. Twenty years from now, when time will have lent enchantment to today’s heroes, basic facts will not be altered. They will have to say in the cold, brutal light of truth that Mathews was only ordinary in the field and Mantle too inconsistent. Banks did not steal bases, and Musial could not throw. Williams could not run, and his fielding was only adequate.
Only DiMaggio, when all the records are in, will honestly rate a mention in the same breath with Willie. And even Joe, although he had the speed, never was a base-stealer.
They will talk of Joe’s consistency, the way he could lift a team, the grace of his movements and, of all things, they will remember his 56-game hitting streak. Willie has no record-breaking achievement to match DiMaggio’s consecutive string, but will anyone ever forget the catch Willie made on Vic Wertz’s smash in the eighth inning of the opening game of the 1954 World Series? Willie caught that ball, his back to the plate, 440 feet away, in front of the centerfield bleachers. That was the most memorable, but there was one in 1951, which set the pattern for what was to follow. It demonstrated for the first time that the difficult is easy and the impossible merely a little harder when Mays is involved.
The Giants were playing the Brooklyn Dodgers at the Polo Grounds, and the game was tied in the eighth. The Dodgers threatened with one out. Billy Cox, a fast man, was on third and a runner was on first, when Carl Furillo slashed a line drive into right center. Willie raced toward the ball, his cap flying from his head as he stretched out in what seemed a wasted effort to catch a certain extra-base hit.
He caught the ball, though, with his body facing the right-field foul line. Cox tagged up. Willie was in as unlikely a position for a throw as it is possible to be for a righthanded throwing outfielder trying to cut off a run at the plate. He spun completely around and, almost blind, let fly. The throw carried unerringly to the catcher without a bounce and Cox was out.
“The play is impossible,” Furillo screamed later. “He had to be lucky to make it.”
When somebody later asked Willie if it was the greatest play he had ever made, Mays answered in the honest simplicity that is second nature to him: “I just want to make them. I don’t want to compare them.”
In the papers the following day, one reporter wrote: “Mays made one of his routine spectacular catches.”
What applied in 1951 still applies a decade later. Mays can now be measured against the greatest. Superlatives, splurged recklessly on the sports pages, belong when they are used to describe Willie. He plays with superlative skills.
Leo Durocher once said of him: “Willie is everything that everybody’s ever been, all rolled into one.”
Rogers Hornsby, one of baseball’s most demanding judges, disagreed. “Can’t say anything yet,” Hornsby said. “Wait until the guy’s been around ten years and then we’ll see.”
Ten years have passed and people have seen. Willie, the experts agree, belongs with the greatest of all time. Before he is through, he may very well be the best.