Mickey and Willie

by Allen Barra

  Cat Mays got Willie started as a ballplayer; Piper Davis made him into a professional ballplayer. Precisely when that process started isn’t clear. In Mays’s 1988 memoir, he said that, in 1947, “my education as a baseball player took on a new dimension under Piper. He taught me two key lessons, one about fielding and the other about hitting.”12 Davis taught him that when playing the outfield he should charge a ball hit through the infield, especially with a runner on second base; this would enable him to get momentum on throws to home. He told Willie not to try to throw the ball home on a line but to bounce it, as the ball would pick up speed when it skipped off the ground. Mays soon found that his enormous hands made it easier for him than most other outfielders to bare-hand a ball hit on the ground, which saved him a split second in firing home. The hitting tip Davis gave Willie helped correct his stance: turn more toward the pitcher and stand straighter, Davis said, instead of turning his shoulder toward home plate when he crouched down. He could see the ball better by opening up his batting stance.

  Piper also gave Willie some solid off-field advice: to always dress well and take pride in his appearance (which he demanded of all his players). “If you’re looking good,” he told his young charge, “the girls will look at you. And if you’re looking decent, you don’t have to talk as much.”13

  But when exactly did Piper teach Willie these things? Though Piper knew Willie through his association with Cat, there is no recorded evidence that he worked with him before Willie joined the Black Barons—and when was that? To hear Mays tell the story, the process began when he bumped into Piper at a Chattanooga hotel in 1947. But in a 1987 interview, Piper Davis told me, “I first coached Willie in 1948 when he was just seventeen. I’d already heard about him from the guys who had played with him and against him in pickup ballgames. It was in Chattanooga that I met him, and he was still in high school.”14

  Whose memory was faulty—Willie’s or Piper’s? James Hirsch, Mays’s most recent and most comprehensive biographer, places the momentous Chattanooga meeting in 1948. Accepting the year as 1948 makes it easier to piece the rest of the story together.

  Sometime in the summer of 1948, the Black Barons were in Chattanooga for a game with the Black Lookouts.a While leaving the Martin Hotel for the ballpark, Piper saw a familiar young face. “Boy,” he said, startled to see Cat Mays’s boy Willie, who had just finished tenth grade, in the hotel lobby, “what are you doing up here?” “Playing for the Grays,” Willie told him. That got Piper angry. “You know, if they catch you playing out here you won’t be able to play high-school sports.” Willie told Piper he didn’t care. While his friends and classmates were sweating it out with part-time summer jobs making perhaps $8 or at best $10 a week, “I was making about a hundred dollars a month.”15

  Or at least that’s the version Willie told his biographers for many years, but the story doesn’t add up. The team Willie claimed to be playing for, the Fairfield Gray Sox, did play out of town occasionally, but they were a community sandlot team. And Willie wasn’t staying at the Martin Hotel on a sandlot team’s pass-the-hat change. Nor would Piper Davis have cared if Willie was just playing sandlot ball.

  But if he wasn’t playing for a sandlot team, what was Willie doing in Chattanooga? James Hirsch doesn’t mention Willie’s playing for the Gray Sox in the summer of 1948, but says Mays was playing for Beck Shepherd’s semipro Chattanooga Choo-Choos. The Choo-Choos were part of the Negro Southern League, definitely a cut above sandlot ball, although not up to the level of the Black Barons’ Negro American League. Choo-Choos players weren’t paid regularly, but the team did sell tickets, and the players were paid through a combination of gate receipts and pass-the-hat. Playing for a team at that level would almost certainly have ended the seventeen-year-old’s amateur status if anyone back in Birmingham heard about it. If so—and that explanation is the only one that fits all the known facts—then Willie was fibbing to Piper Davis, and Davis knew it.

  The truly odd thing is that Willie would maintain the lie long after high school. In fact, he maintained it for decades, telling journalists and biographers that he was in Chattanooga playing for a traveling sandlot team when in fact he was playing semipro ball. As late as 1988, he was still telling it to Lou Sahadi—as if it was still important to him that Piper, who died shortly before the book came out, never know he had lied to him.

  Willie was most certainly making good money playing ball, but he wasn’t being truthful as to how he was doing it. He didn’t want to offend his teachers and friends at Fairfield Industrial, but between high school football and basketball and semipro baseball, it was no contest. He liked being the center of attention at high school football and basketball games, but the money he made playing baseball made him even more the center of attention at school. He could dress a little sharper, always had money for dates, and was happy to lend a dollar here or there to a pal in need.

  Willie Mays had known Piper Davis for years and idolized him. Piper had played with Willie’s dad on the TCI’s industrial league team and was at least as good as Kitty Cat—some thought Davis was even better. Davis, after all, was everything Willie hoped to be—a professional baseball player and a big local celebrity. And now the coming of Jackie Robinson had opened Willie’s eyes to the possibility of becoming a great deal more than that. On that day in Chattanooga when Piper saw the teenager in the hotel lobby, Willie told Piper that he wanted to be a Black Baron, that it was something he had dreamed of his whole life. Piper nodded and smiled, assuming that the sight of Willie wearing the “B” cap of the Birmingham Black Barons was inevitable. (The Black Barons’ distinctive Triple-B in old English letters, prized by Negro League fans today, was adopted by the team in 1948.)

  All through his professional life, Willie had extraordinarily good luck. His association with Piper Davis was a case in point; a better mentor and a better manager could not have been found. Davis knew a blue-chipper when he saw one, but he was wary of giving Willie a tryout because he didn’t want to draw flak for recruiting a high school student. A week after Piper bumped into Willie in Chattanooga, he saw him again in Atlanta, where the Black Barons were scheduled to play the Black Crackers. Well, thought Davis, that settles it. Cat and Willie have decided that Willie’s going to make money playing baseball whether his school approves or not. Piper told Willie to have Cat call him when he got back to Birmingham.

  Cat called Piper, who told him there had to be one hard-and-fast rule: if Willie played for the Black Barons, he had to drop high school sports. Davis told Willie to be at Rickwood Field at noon the next Sunday, July 4, when the Black Barons were scheduled to play a doubleheader against the Cleveland Buckeyes. Willie got there half an hour early. There were no new uniforms. He was given a worn jersey and pants. He tried them on in the clubhouse and found that they were too big, but thought better of complaining. On the back was a number that would become the answer to a popular trivia question: 21, Willie Mays’s first number in professional baseball.

  Willie had no way of knowing that he was lucky to even be allowed to dress in the clubhouse. That season, Barons owner Gus Jebeles had brought in Eddie Glennon, a dynamic Irishman from Philadelphia, to be the team’s general manager. Glennon understood that integration was good for baseball and instituted a policy for treating the Black Barons with respect—a policy that included allowing them to change in the clubhouse. Prior to Glennon, the Black Barons had to change at home, in hotels, or on the team bus on the way to and from the ballpark.

  A jittery Willie took ribbing from the older players (and they were all older, many as much as ten to twelve years older). Black veterans, like their white counterparts, loved to tease rookies. They knocked his cap off his head and flung his glove around the clubhouse and on the field. (Unlike Mickey, Willie had no trained dog to do his fetching.) In his first Negro League game, he never left the bench, nor did he say a word to anyone. Davis gave him no special attention except to put a hand on his shoulder in the first inning and tell him to watch
what was going on. The team’s spirits were high after a victory in the first game, but Willie sat there, glum and silent, wondering when he would be a part of it all. A half hour before the second game, as the players sat in the clubhouse drinking sodas from ice-filled coolers, Davis quietly put his hand on Willie’s shoulder and told him he’d be starting. Nearly sixty years later, Mays sat in Rickwood Field and described to me how he felt: “A few months earlier my dad had said to Piper Davis, ‘Willie wants to be Joe DiMaggio, but he hasn’t learned to hit a curve ball.’ Piper just smiled and said, ‘Oh, he’ll learn.’ After Piper told me I was going to play, I sat there thinking to myself, ‘Well, now we’re going to see if I can hit a curve ball.’ ”16

  When one of the veterans discovered that “that little boy” would be starting in left field, he openly questioned Piper’s judgment; Davis quietly asserted his authority and told him that Willie would be starting.

  Mays’s first at-bat as a professional was against Chet Brewer, an experienced right-hander who began his career with the Kansas City Monarchs in 1925 at age seventeen—exactly Willie’s age as he stood in the batter’s box. Mays, in his first professional game, wasn’t overwhelming. He was merely trying to get good wood on the ball and establish his swing against more experienced pitchers. He got two hits in his first game, both singles—one an opposite-field blooper, the other a line drive. Piper Davis was justified in front of his team. After the game, he offered Willie the only contract he would get before becoming the property of the New York Giants—a handshake from Piper Davis and an agreement to pay him $250 a month plus a $50 bonus for every month he hit over .300. Willie failed to earn that bonus, but soon that would be irrelevant.

  Although Mays was, as Piper Davis liked to say, “the greatest natural ballplayer I’ve ever seen,” what his father had told Davis turned out not to be a joke. Willie couldn’t hit a curveball. He would bat just .262 in twenty-eight games for the Black Barons that season. No one expected much more; in fact, young Mays delivered much more than was anticipated. No one thought Willie would hit professional pitching right away. As his teammate Jimmy Zapp put it, “No one is born with the ability to hit a curveball. That comes with experience.”17

  Willie played with a flare and exuberance that was unusual even for a league where entertainment was essential to survival. The Negro Leagues received no financial help from the major leagues, nor were their games, except for a few teams in big cities, broadcast on radio. They survived on ticket sales, which meant that baseball wasn’t just a matter of winning, it was a matter of winning while looking good. Willie had not yet mastered the technique of running out from under his cap, and he wouldn’t start using his signature basket catch until years later when he was in the Army. But fans loved the way he lunged into a pitch and the force with which his huge wrists and powerful forearms could send line drives into the outfield gaps.

  Though he was not yet an accomplished base stealer, his wide sweeping turns at first base and his daring when going from first to third, or second to home, ignited crowds. In the field, the hours of shagging fly balls paid off. Piper had no intention of letting such a magnificent arm go idle in the infield; he put Willie in left, where he seemed to cover both his position and a large chunk of center field as well, and the fans held their breath in anticipation when he zoned in on a fly ball and a runner on third prepared to tag up.

  Things went smoothly with the Black Barons until school started in the early fall. No one had taken notice of Willie’s having played ball for pass-the-hat money, nor had anyone found out about his brief foray into semipro ball. (It’s possible that, like many other black players, Willie had used aliases while playing on the road.) The Black Barons, though, weren’t just another team. They were the pride of black Birmingham, the best-known black sports team in the entire South. There was no way Willie could play for them without detection. “My playing for the Barons,” he said in his memoir, “created an uproar at Fairfield Industrial. The principal, E. J. Oliver,b didn’t like it at all—and neither did my classmates. They felt I was letting them down. I was not permitted to play any high-school athletics while I was getting paid by the Barons. The kids at school felt I had sold them out, but look at the chance I had been given—to play baseball, and to get paid for doing it.”18

  Though some would characterize his actions as selfish, Mays was absolutely correct. A chance like the one he’d been given—a chance he had earned—came along once in a lifetime. Willie did not owe Fairfield Industrial or anyone else the benefit of his athletic talent and hard work.

  Principal Oliver called a meeting with Cat and Aunt Sarah. Oliver, who had graduated from the Tuskegee Institute with honors, was adamant on the subjects of tradition, discipline, and the value of education, but he was also a very practical man, and he had no intention of killing a golden calf. He wanted to hear from Willie’s guardians that Willie was serious about receiving his diploma. That established, a deal was worked out: Willie could not travel with the Black Barons, but would be allowed to play in home games; in return—and this was really what Oliver was aiming for—Willie would play football, the big revenue sport in every Alabama high school, white and black.

  And so, with the deal worked out between Willie’s father and Fairfield Industrial, the last obstacle that could have kept Willie Mays from becoming the greatest all-around baseball player in history was removed. Even the restrictions that Principal Oliver had demanded on road travel would soon be overlooked. It was as if fate itself was rooting for Willie Mays.

  * Willie Mays once told me that the name of Davis’s hometown was “Piper-Coleanor.” He was sure of it, he said, and all the players on the Black Barons knew that to be the name of the town. I haven’t been able to find any other reference to Coleanor or what it means.

  † Neither Mickey nor Willie played much high school baseball, which didn’t get much coverage in the local presses in Alabama and Oklahoma. Most of the games were played during the summer when the kids weren’t at school, and in the fall football dominated. The level of competition in high school simply wasn’t good enough to attract players of Mantle’s or Mays’s ability. Mickey’s cousin Max recalled that nearly every time he saw Mickey bat for the Commerce Tigers he was walked.

  ‡ He would go on to play eighteen seasons in major league ball, twelve with the White Sox, and be chosen for nine All-Star teams. Many thought that if not for Yogi Berra, Lollar would have been regarded as the best catcher in the American League in the late 1940s and through the 1950s.

  § Two years later Ken and Mickey would sign their first professional contracts; twelve years later Ken’s brother Cletis would become Mickey’s teammate on the New York Yankees, and in 1964 Ken, the NL’s MVP, would lead the Cardinals to the World Series against Clete and Mickey.

  ‖ According to Baxter Springs legend, the spot where Mantle hit the mammoth home run—or home runs—can be located just a few feet from a sign on the local Civil War tour that reads: ON OCTOBER 8, 1864, wILLIAM QUANTRILL, WITH 300 GUERILLA REBEL TROOPS, FORDED SPRING RIVER NEARBY TO ATTACK FT. BLAIR.

  a Most teams in the Negro American League were named after the white team in their city; Birmingham’s white team was the Barons, the black team the Black Barons. In Atlanta, the Southern Association’s white team was the Crackers, the NAL team the Black Crackers. In Chattanooga it was the Lookouts and the Black Lookouts.

  b In two earlier memoirs, Willie refers to his principal as E. T. Oliver.

  5

  A Dream Come True

  While Willie Mays was becoming a professional, Mickey Mantle was scraping by. Early one morning after a Whiz Kids game, Mickey and Nick Ferguson bumped into a couple of teammates, Rex Heavin and his brother Charlie (aka “Frog”), who were poking around under the wooden grandstands looking for the same thing: loot. The word took in a lot of territory. It could be baseballs that had not been recovered by ball shaggers (Barney would pay up to 50 cents for each usable ball brought back to him), cans or bottles that co
uld be returned for two-cent deposits, loose change that had fallen from spectators’ pockets (a “jitney,” as a nickel was called, was highly prized), or anything else that might be of value. On one scavenger hunt a new Rawlings glove was found, on another a $5 bill. When one of the boys was hard up, another was happy to loan him a jitney or two. Within a year, Mickey would be loaning out jitneys and have enough left over to buy himself a car.

  During a break near the end of the 1948 Whiz Kids season, Mutt took Mickey and Nick to a tryout camp for the St. Louis Browns in Pittsburgh, Kansas. After the long drive, the Oklahomans were hugely disappointed when it rained all day. What Mickey could not know at the time was that he had been dealt a major break: given the Browns’ desperation, they might have signed the soon-to-be seventeen-year-old on the spot and tied him up for the rest of his major league career.

  The 1948 Whiz Kids were loaded. One group of players formed a virtual team within a team—Barney called them the Barney Barnett All-Stars. Barney matched them against the best teams he could find, including semipro clubs and, on some occasions, college teams. In a game against Northeastern Oklahoma Junior College, Mickey, hitting against a right-handed pitcher named Max Buzzard, a prospect of the New York Yankees, belted a long home run over the right-field wall in the first inning. In the third inning, he came up to bat again against Buzzard, this time hitting from the right side. (Mutt had advised Mickey to occasionally bat right-handed against right-handed pitchers if only to keep in practice, there being so few southpaws around.) He drove it well over the left-field wall.

  These were good times for Mickey. He was maturing quickly, and his eye-hand coordination was so good that he was a match for even older, experienced pitchers.

  Willie found the pitchers in his league a little tougher. For one thing, Negro League pitchers were meaner. They had to be—they were professionals. Pitchers were far less likely to knock hitters down at a college or semipro level—they simply weren’t as hungry as the professionals, especially black professionals.