Mickey and Willie

by Allen Barra

  Moments later Casey was in front of my locker, arms crossed, his eyes burning into mine.

  “Nice going, son. You sure fooled us. Next time I want you to bunt, I’ll give you the sign.”

  He had every reason to ship me down to the minors.18

  The story about bunting off Paige was a concoction on Mickey’s part, apparently told because he didn’t want to brag about his success off the legendary pitcher. In fact, Mickey hit a towering three-run homer off Satchel in the ninth inning, and the Yankees won, 15–2. Oddly enough, Mickey’s home run off the man who might have been the greatest pitcher in baseball history has been lost to history—or at least part of baseball history: it is not recorded in the pitcher-versus-batter section of Baseball-reference.com, but is noted in the box score of Retrosheet.com. Hank Bauer called it “the best wood I ever saw anyone get off Satch.”19

  Had Willie Mays not blossomed into one of the greatest players ever, it’s doubtful that writers would have later made the case that he was the major spur to the Giants’ incredible comeback during the last two months of the 1951 National League pennant drive. Most of the writers who made that case, most notably Charles Einstein and Arnold Hano, both of whom later wrote books on Mays, took their lead from Monte Irvin, the Alabama-born, New Jersey–raised star who became Willie’s biggest booster on the Giants. “I believe to this day,” Irvin told me in a 2009 interview, “that the main reason we made up those thirteen games [from the beginning of August] and caught up to the Dodgers and won that playoff was Willie. He just made everything seem better, more fun.”

  Like Crash Davis says in Ron Shelton’s great baseball film Bull Durham, “The reason you think you’re winning is the reason you’re winning.” But coming down the stretch in 1951, there were lots of reasons for the New York Giants to believe that they were winning, beginning with Monte Irvin himself. Irvin, who was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1973, did not make it to the major leagues until the end of the 1949 season, when he was already thirty years old, but in 1951 he hit .312 with 24 home runs and a league-leading 121 RBIs. According to Bill James’s complex Win Shares method, which awards players points for every offensive and defensive contribution, Irvin was the Giants’ most valuable player in 1951, followed closely by pitcher Sal Maglie, shortstop Alvin Dark, outfielder Bobby Thomson, pitcher Larry Jansen, shortstop Eddie Stanky, catcher Wes Westrum, and then Willie Mays.

  Which is not to deny that Mays made contributions that could not be measured by cold statistics. His teammates, black and white, loved him; his joy in playing the game was contagious, a quality much appreciated during those tense late-summer weeks of the pennant race as the Giants fought furiously to overtake the hated Dodgers. The press loved him too. As with Yogi Berra, they were amused by Willie’s love of comic books and loved his famous habit of calling out “Say hey!” even if the phrase appeared in their stories much more often than Mays said it in real life.

  It was during the heat of the pennant race that the myth of Willie Mays the innocent gained popularity as sportswriters referred to him as a “country boy”—though he had grown up in an industrial suburb and near the South’s greatest industrial city. Mays’s most recent biographer, James Hirsch, thinks that Willie, at least in this period, was “good-natured, shy, naive … untouched by cynicism. Mays all but shouted out his vulnerability.” Hirsch also maintains that Willie was “unschooled in city life,” but this is open to question. Willie knew Birmingham and its Fourth Avenue black culture fairly well, and by age nineteen he had not only barnstormed through many of the South’s biggest cities but had been to New York and seen Harlem up close. Mickey Mantle at the same age was not half so schooled in city life, though he proved to be a quick study.20

  Still, that’s the way New York sportswriters wanted to see Willie, and that’s the way the fans still remember him. Willie’s popularity propelled him into his first award. Not that his contributions as a rookie didn’t merit recognition. Roger Kahn admits, “We [the New York sportswriters] knew by the end of the season we were going to lobby for Willie as Rookie of the Year. He was just too damn popular not to win it. But looking back on it, I think we made the right decision.” They did. Despite his lack of Triple-A experience, Mays hit, in his first 121 big league games, a respectable .270 with 20 home runs and 68 RBIs, and his hitting was arguably even more impressive than that: after getting just one hit in his first 25 times at-bat, he hit nearly .290 for the rest of the season. If he was not the primary cause of the Giants’ incredible surge, he was certainly the embodiment of it.

  Fate spared the twenty-year-old Willie Mays one huge test: in Game 3 of the National League Championship Series, when Bobby Thomson hit his immortal ninth-inning home run off Ralph Branca, Willie was kneeling in the on-deck circle. In the clubhouse after the game, Durocher walked over to Mays with a big smile on his face and told him he was surprised that, with the bases loaded, the Dodgers’ manager, Charlie Dressen, hadn’t had Branca walk Thomson and pitch to the rookie. “I’m glad he didn’t,” Mays replied. “I didn’t want the pennant hanging on my shoulders.”21 In truth, Mays had a terrible playoff—1-for-10 in the three games, striking out three times and making an error in the outfield. In the biggest game of the season, he was 0-for-3 at the plate.

  Champagne corks went off in the Giants’ clubhouse like firecrackers on the Fourth of July. Willie had his first taste of champagne—it was the first alcohol he had taken since Cat forced him to try some Jack Daniels back in Fairfield. He got sick and never drank champagne again. A few days earlier, when the Yankees had clinched the American League pennant, Mickey Mantle, not yet twenty, and egged on by his new pal, a utility infielder named Billy Martin, had drunk a bit too much champagne. He loved it.

  The 1951 New York Yankees needed no ninth-inning playoff miracles to win their pennant, finishing five games ahead of the Cleveland Indians in the American League. Back from Kansas City, Mickey Mantle resumed his play in right field and did just fine the rest of the season. In 96 games, he hit .267 with 13 home runs and 65 RBIs, just three fewer than Mays, who had batted 123 more times.

  The day after Thomson’s home run, the emotionally exhausted Giants prepared to face the Yankees in the Bronx. Two baseball fathers, Mutt Mantle and Cat Mays, who would never know how much they had in common, were at Yankee Stadium to watch the first World Series game either had ever seen in person. (They had had the thrill of their lives the day before at the Giants-Dodgers playoff game at the Polo Grounds.) When an exuberant Willie emerged from the visitors’ dugout, he was stunned. “I saw Joe DiMaggio for the first time.… I spotted him on the field surrounded by reporters, but I was too shy to go up and introduce myself. A photographer came over to me and asked if I would pose with Joe for a photo. ‘Why would he want to take a picture with me?’ I asked. The photographer brought me over and introduced us. I got the chance to talk with him for just a few minutes, a dream come true.” Willie had no way of knowing it, but the couple of minutes he chatted with his idol was probably more time than Mickey had talked with Joe all season long. “That was the only time I got to see my boyhood hero play. And it was the only time when we posed for pictures when we were both playing.

  “There was another ball player there, though, with whom I was destined to be compared over the years—Mickey Mantle … even though he was the rightfielder in 1951, he was going to be the centerfielder for many years to come.… He was the lead-off batter in the series. As luck would have it, I had an effect on his career.”22

  A good hour and a half before the first pitch, someone thought it would be a great idea to bring the two teams’ celebrated rookie outfielders together for a photo opportunity. And so Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays, the purest products ever produced by baseball, met for the first time and, bats on their shoulders, grinned like the schoolboys they practically were.

  Mickey, a wad of bubblegum stuck in his apple cheek, grinned while Willie, still exuberant despite the apocalyptic playoff series with the Dodgers, joked with th
e photographers. They had, of course, heard of each other: Mays had been seeing Mantle’s name in the sports pages since spring training, and Mantle had heard of Mays from Minneapolis Millers players and coaches during his brief visit to Minneapolis with the Kansas City Blues. “When I was up there,” Mickey told Roger Kahn years later, “that’s all I heard about. ‘You should see Willie Mays field, you should see Willie Mays hit, you should see Willie Mays run the bases.’ It was the first time I heard something that I was going to hear quite a bit over the next decade: ‘Boy, I hope you turn out to be half the ballplayer Willie Mays is.’ ”23

  Had they known each other a little better, or if Mickey had not been quite so shy, they would have had much to discuss: their love of Westerns, their enthusiasm for shooting pool, and having a father for a baseball coach. But the two rookies, both understandably awed by being at the World Series in New York, smiled, shuffled their cleats, and said little to each other.

  Roger Kahn recalls his colleagues mumbling questions to each other such as “Is Mantle a little broader across the shoulders?” and “You think Mays’s forearms are bigger?” and “Who’s supposed to be the fastest?” (the consensus at the time was Mays) and “Who do you think would win a home run contest?” An unknown photographer snapped several shots of Mickey and Willie together, after which they laughed, shook hands, and went back to their locker rooms.

  Having finally brought them together, the forces that had shaped their lives and careers seemed almost at once to erase the paths that had brought them there, as if to guarantee that their likes would never be seen again. The Negro League World Series that Willie had played in just three years before had ceased to exist; the Negro Leagues themselves were rapidly fading. So too was the highly competitive, finely tuned minor league farm system that Mantle had come up in; though it would produce many more fine players, Mickey would be the last superstar nurtured in the Yankees’ minor league network. And within a few years, the world of industrial league baseball that had honed their skills at such an early age would all but disappear from the American landscape.

  In Game 1 of the World Series, the rookies were a combined 0-for-8 as the Giants won, 5–1. The next day the Yankees came back to win, 3–1, though Willie was once again hitless while Mickey got his first World Series hit in two at-bats and scored a run. In the fifth inning, with the Yankees leading 2–0, Willie lofted a fly ball to right-center—not the pop-up it has often been described as but a fairly good shot that, had it gone perhaps another ten feet, might have been in the gap for an extra-base hit. Casey Stengel had told Mickey to run down fly balls hit in that area because “the Big Dago can’t get there anymore.” But DiMaggio did get to this one and called Mantle off. Mickey caught his cleat on an open drainpipe as he stopped, tearing up his knee and forever destroying the possibility that he would be the greatest player baseball had ever seen.

  For many years Willie Mays made no mention that he had been the one who hit the fateful fly ball. Charles Einstein, who would come to know Willie better than any other writer, was of the opinion that Willie simply didn’t know what he had brought about until another writer told him about it several years later. But by 1988, Willie—or at least his coauthor Einstein—seemed to have a complete memory of what had happened: “From that day on, Mickey seems to be marked with a sort of pity; people were forever saying ‘Just think what he could have done if his knees weren’t bad.’ But Mickey had a great career anyway. Nonetheless, I felt bad about the accident.”24

  It’s possible that an unknown Yankees groundskeeper, the man who left the drain uncovered, committed one of the most devastating errors in the annals of baseball. And Willie Mays was an unknowing assistant.

  * Roger Kahn recalls having a conversation with Durocher in a hotel lobby when a well-known Hungarian film actress walked by, tapped him on the arm, and called him “Dah-ling.” “Fucked her last night,” Durocher said to Kahn as the actress walked away (personal interview, January 2010).

  † For his part, Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis denied that the owners were prohibiting blacks from playing in the big leagues.

  ‡ Not counting a one-inning stint with the Kansas City A’s in 1965 in which owner Charlie Finley generously gave Paige an opportunity to qualify for an increased pension by playing in another decade.

  9

  “Greetings”

  The Yankees, even without Mantle in the lineup after his injury, won the World Series, as they always seemed to in those years.

  But nothing could dim Willie’s enthusiasm. Two days after the World Series ended, Willie and his dad boarded a train at Grand Central Station bound for Birmingham’s Terminal Station. Despite the Yankees’ victory, the twenty-year-old had no regrets. In his coat pocket he carried a World Series check for the staggering sum of $5,000, the most money ever given to players on a losing team. He also left New York with assurances from Roger Kahn, Red Smith, and other prominent New York writers that he would soon be named National League Rookie of the Year. (They were right; Mays would become the third consecutive black player to win the NL’s award, and the fourth in five years; it took sixteen years for a black player to win the honor in the American League.) What could possibly go wrong?

  No sooner had he walked into Aunt Sarah’s house in Fairfield than he found a letter that began with the word “Greetings.” Willie, like millions of American boys, wasn’t sure exactly where Korea was. Now it looked like he might be going there. Willie shrugged and decided to have as good a time as possible while he waited to see what happened. He jumped into his friend Herman Boykin’s car, and they drove to Big Tony’s pool hall, where he got a hero’s welcome from his boyhood pals. His friends slapped him on the back and told him that they’d get those Yankees in the World Series next year. The next day he bought furniture, appliances, and groceries for Aunt Sarah and for his mother, who had nine children and a husband out of work.

  He also bought a new Mercury convertible in his favorite color, green; what had become of the green Mercury he bought with his signing bonus nearly two years earlier isn’t known, but there were plenty of male relatives in the family who would have had good use for it.

  No sooner had Willie unpacked than he prepared to cash in on his new fame. Ten days after the final game of the World Series, he was playing for Roy Campanella’s Major League All-Stars in a barnstorming tour of black southern ballparks. Their opponents were the best players from the rapidly declining Negro Leagues; some of the best young players, such as Henry Aaron and Ernie Banks, would soon be joining Mays and Campanella in the big leagues, but for the rest—meaning just about anyone over the age of thirty, including some of Willie’s old teammates with the Birmingham Black Barons—there was little hope of a career in professional baseball.

  On Thursday, October 25, Willie and the rest of Campy’s team headed back to Birmingham for a parade in Willie’s honor. The city of Birmingham had announced that October 27 would be “Willie Mays Day,” and Campanella’s All-Stars would play the Black Barons at Rickwood Field following an afternoon parade. The game was played, and a grinning Roy Campanella, who had needled Willie unmercifully early in his rookie season, presented him with a trophy.

  The parade, though, never came off. Police Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor canceled the parade permit—or at least several journalists, black and white, who showed up for the parade along with thousands of black and white baseball fans assumed that it was Connor’s doing. Among them was Birmingham News columnist Alf Van Hoose, who for the next forty years was happy to tell anyone sitting next to him at the Alabama-Auburn game or any other sporting event how Connor had “embarrassed and humiliated Alabama’s greatest athlete.”* If Willie had thought for a moment that playing in a World Series for a major league team in New York had made him a privileged black man in Alabama, he was rudely awakened.

  Before Thanksgiving, Willie reported to the Selective Service office and applied for a 3-A “hardship” exemption. He had, after all, eleven dependents,
including a swarm of stepbrothers and stepsisters. The request was rejected. Willie didn’t complain until thirty-seven years later in a memoir: “The Army claimed they weren’t making a special case out of me, but I don’t know of many people with eleven dependents who were being called up then.”1 His point was valid, but the Army stuck to its rules for hardship cases: it refused to exempt Willie because he didn’t live in the home of the people being claimed as dependents. In Willie’s case, the point made no sense, as he could hardly have been playing ball and earning the money to support his relatives had he been living at home. Unlike Mantle, Mays passed his physical with ease but failed the aptitude test2—he later claimed to have flunked it on purpose, which is almost certainly true. Because he was a high school graduate—in fact, one who had finished in the top half of his class—the draft board told him to take the test again, and the second time he passed.

  The Giants had ended the 1951 season full of anticipation; after all, Willie Mays was poised to become the best young player in the National League. But as their 1952 spring training camp opened, spirits were dampened at the knowledge that their budding star would soon be leaving for the Army. The mood went from gloom to doom when Monte Irvin suffered a nasty ankle break. Willie ran from the dugout, cradled Monte in his arms, and burst into tears. According to a writer named Carl Lundquist in Baseball: The Fan’s Magazine, Leo Durocher was equally distraught, “as agonized as if the injury was to his own leg, loudly demanding of the fates, ‘Why did it have to happen to him? Why couldn’t it have been me? We don’t need my ankle!’ ”3

  The Giants might have survived the loss of either Irvin (who had batted .312 in 1951 and led the NL in RBIs with 121) or Mays, but not both. The 1952 season would become one of those bittersweet what-ifs for Giants fans as the team finished just four and a half games behind the Brooklyn Dodgers in the pennant race—the presence of either Irvin or Mays could well have closed that gap. In retrospect, of course, perhaps the larger what-if applies to Willie’s legacy, specifically to the homers he didn’t hit in 1952—and in 1953, for that matter. It’s entirely possible that those missed years stopped him from breaking Babe Ruth’s career record of 714 home runs.