Legends: The Best Players, Games, and Teams in Baseball

by Howard Bryant

  Alex Rodriguez: Most seasons with 100+ runs batted in—14 (1996, 1998–2010)

  Lou Brock / Rickey Henderson: Most seasons leading the majors in stolen bases—6 (Brock: 1966, 1968, 1971–1974; Henderson: 1980, 1982–1983, 1988–1989, 1998)

  Cy Young (yes, the award was named after him): Most seasons with 20+ wins for a pitcher—15 (1891–1899, 1901–1904, 1907–1908)

  Ty Cobb / Pete Rose / Ichiro Suzuki: Most seasons leading the majors in hits—7 (Cobb: 1907, 1909, 1911–1912, 1915, 1917, 1919 [tied in 1912, 1919]; Rose: 1965, 1968, 1970, 1972–1973, 1976, 1981 [tied in 1968, 1970, 1976]; Suzuki: 2001, 2004, 2006–2010 [tied in 2008])

  Nolan Ryan: Most career no-hitters—7 (1973, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1981, 1990, 1991)

  *Different sources dispute whether Ty Cobb or Nap Lajoie won the batting title in 1910

  42

  JACKIE ROBINSON BECOMES A LEGEND

  On January 31, 1949, Jackie Robinson turned thirty. He was already famous, having been the first African American to play in the major leagues during the modern era two years earlier in 1947. For that, the history books would always remember him. In that first year, he was named the National League Rookie of the Year, and his team, the Brooklyn Dodgers, made it to the World Series, losing to the New York Yankees in seven difficult games. Robinson had already proven a great deal that first year. He proved blacks and whites could compete on the same field peacefully, which in 1947 many people—including many of his teammates—did not think possible. He proved he was strong enough to handle the responsibility of being the person who was going to change society.

  And, on the baseball diamond, he proved he was a superstar.

  Being a superstar means more than just putting up good statistics. Robinson played the game in a way that made kids and adults alike identify with him. He played with style. The fans loved his movements and would try to stand as he did, stationary at the plate, completely upright, the bat held high above his head, fierce and ready, waiting to strike. It was the kind of batting stance a coach would immediately try to correct, because his hands were supposedly too high, nearly even with his ear. The theory was that he wouldn’t be fast enough to swing the bat through the strike zone to catch up to scorching fastballs.

  For everyone else, the theory might have been right. For Jackie, it was completely wrong.

  Jackie’s hands were always fast enough, and when he would bring the bat slashing down, he could drive the ball to every corner of the field: singles to right, doubles to center, and home runs to left. On the playgrounds around New York and the rest of America, fans would try to hit just like him.

  When he was on base, he was even more exciting, wading slowly off first, drifting toward second, making the pitcher pay attention to him. The pitcher’s job is to focus on the batter, but when Jackie was on base, he became the action. Would he steal? Was he bluffing? The pitcher would throw the ball to first, yet Jackie would easily dive back to the base in time.

  Eventually the pitcher would get mad and lose his concentration. That’s when Robinson would take off for second . . . or he might have proven to be such an annoyance to the pitcher that he would make a mistake and throw a hittable pitch to the batter because he’d been too busy thinking about Jackie.

  Robinson would play the same mind games at third base, dancing down the line, everyone in the crowd anticipating that he would steal home. While base runners today rarely even attempt to steal home, Jackie Robinson stole home an incredible nineteen times in his career, including once in the World Series.

  Jackie Robinson was simply the most exciting player in the league.

  Beyond his on-field success, many fans loved him because they knew the heavy burden he was carrying by being the first African American player and how much courage it took to shoulder such responsibility. Fortunately, he wasn’t the only black player for long. By 1949, two years after Robinson’s debut, there were seven African American players in the major leagues. Robinson, however, remained the definitive symbol of change, both within the world of baseball and beyond.

  As that symbol of change, Robinson carried different burdens, some known to the public, others not. One unknown at the time was that he had promised the Dodgers’ president, Branch Rickey, that he would not fight back during his first three seasons. He promised that if an opponent or even a teammate used a bad name because of the color of his skin, he would not retaliate. He promised that if an opposing player committed a dirty play against him, such as purposely driving his spikes into Robinson’s shins as he covered a base, he would not fight back. If the fans in hostile cities like Philadelphia or St. Louis called him or his family sitting in the stands names, he would not fight back. He promised to absorb all of the abuse, all of the hate that would be thrown at him, to prove that he could handle being the person who was going to change the game.

  In 1949, Rickey told Robinson he had kept his promise. Rickey said to Robinson, “Jackie, you’re on your own now. You can be yourself.”

  Free to be himself, Jackie Robinson took off, enjoying the best year of his career. He had always played the game very hard and physically, and now if someone argued with him, he didn’t have to just walk away. He could argue back. “Not being able to fight back,” he said, “is a form of severe punishment.”

  He won the batting title that season with a .342 average, led the league in stolen bases and sacrifice hits, and set personal bests in plate appearances, at-bats, hits, triples, RBIs, stolen bases, and batting average.

  With Robinson at his best, his teammates followed. The Dodgers by then had two more African American players on the team: catcher Roy Campanella and pitcher Don Newcombe. Together with other Dodgers stars like Duke Snider, Gil Hodges, and Carl Furillo, the Dodgers became one of the great teams of the 1950s.

  That 1949 Dodgers team won the National League pennant before losing the World Series to the Yankees in five games. The hurt of losing did not go away, but at the end of the season, Robinson was named National League Most Valuable Player for the first and only time in his career.

  The legend of Jackie Robinson would continue to grow as the years went by. Over a ten-year career, he appeared in the World Series six times. A lifetime .311 hitter, he was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1962, and would become a towering figure in history forever, far beyond his baseball achievements.

  His presence would always remain large. The Rookie of the Year trophy he won in 1947 would be renamed the Jackie Robinson Award. In 1997, fifty years after Robinson entered the majors, Major League Baseball permanently retired his uniform number, 42. No new players would ever again be handed Jackie’s number . . . except for one day each season, April 15, when every major leaguer commemorates the day one man changed the game, by wearing uniform number 42.

  Jackie Robinson would forever be remembered as an American hero, but the 1949 season showed America just what a great ballplayer he was as well.

  Jackie Robinson

  TOP TEN LIST

  Robinson’s entry into the major leagues in 1947 changed not only baseball, but American history. Many other players made historic contributions to baseball. Beyond Jackie Robinson, here are ten more names worth discovering.

  Roberto Clemente: Baseball’s first Latin American superstar.

  Satchel Paige: Superstar of the Negro Leagues who, at age 42, became the oldest rookie to debut in the major leagues.

  Babe Ruth: The first superstar in American team sports.

  Marvin Miller: Legendary leader of the Major League Baseball Players Association.

  Curt Flood: Outfielder who, in 1970, sacrificed his career to challenge baseball’s hundred-year-old rule that players could not change teams when their contracts expired.

  Hank Greenberg: Baseball’s first Jewish superstar.

  Branch Rickey: Legendary executive who invented the minor-league farm system and signed Jackie Robinson.

 
Larry Doby: First African American player in the American League.

  Jim Abbott: Born with one hand, pitched in the major leagues. Threw a perfect game.

  Toni Stone: Female infielder who played alongside men in the Negro Leagues.

  Willie’s Time

  THE GREATNESS OF WILLIE MAYS

  In the eighth inning of the first game of the 1954 World Series, Vic Wertz was ready to be a hero for the best team in baseball. His team, the Cleveland Indians, mashed everything in sight, including the Yankees, the team that had won the last five World Series in a row, and now at the Polo Grounds in New York, the Indians were about to claim Game 1 of the World Series against the New York Giants.

  There were two men on base in a 2–2 game with nobody out. Wertz hit a shot to deep center field. In most stadiums, the ball would have soared into the stands, but the Polo Grounds had the deepest center field in baseball history, some 485 feet to the back wall.

  The ball kept going and going. The Giants’ center fielder, Willie Mays, kept running and running, 400 feet . . . 420 . . . 440. The two runners on base, Larry Doby and Al Rosen, raced for home to score the tie-breaking runs . . . Mays kept running . . . 450 feet . . . at an incredible 460 feet away, he reached out over his shoulder and caught the ball at full sprint. Over his shoulder!

  Not only did Mays make that incredible catch, but he also remembered to turn around and throw the ball back into the infield as the runners realized they had to scramble back to their bases. Rosen scurried back to first, Doby to second. No tie-breaking runs.

  In the box score, the ball Wertz hit was just another out. But in that one moment, the legend of Willie Mays was born.

  Mays’s catch in 1954 was more than half a century ago and is still considered the greatest catch in the history of the World Series. The old black-and-white footage of Mays running as fast as he could, seemingly hopeless before catching the ball, captures quite simply one of the greatest plays ever made on a baseball diamond—but for Mays, it was the kind of play he made all the time.

  Babe Ruth may have been baseball’s greatest showman at the plate. Yet Willie Mays was baseball’s version of Superman. He had the power of Ruth and the speed of Jackie Robinson. He could hit for average like the great Joe DiMaggio, for example, when he hit .345 in 1954 and won the batting title, but he also had a gift in that he made throwing and catching the ball look like the most exciting parts of the game. Similar to Ruth, Mays did it all with the kind of flair that excited fans of every age, and left them wanting to play baseball just like Willie did.

  • • •

  Willie Mays was born May 6, 1931, in Westfield, Alabama, and was almost instantly a star baseball player. He played football in high school, but even as a preteen, he began playing baseball against adults. In 1949, when Mays was eighteen years old, the Boston Red Sox sent a scout to look at Mays and consider signing him. Yet the Red Sox, particularly owner Tom Yawkey, were not comfortable with having an African American player on the team. Four years earlier, the Red Sox also had chosen not to sign Jackie Robinson. Not being signed by Boston was a huge disappointment for Mays.

  So Mays continued playing in all-black leagues as part of the Birmingham Black Barons. In the Negro Leagues, Mays almost immediately became the one to draw crowds to the stadium.

  Eventually, the New York Giants signed Mays and assigned him to their minor league team, the Minneapolis Millers, where Mays hit .477.

  Once he joined the big leagues, nothing changed—Mays set the pace. While he was a rookie in 1951, the Giants reached the World Series but lost to the Yankees. Then Mays was drafted into the US Army for two years, 1952 and 1953, spending those seasons in the military. Not coincidentally, the Giants failed to earn a shot at the pennant both seasons. But when he returned in 1954, he was spectacular—in addition to winning the batting title, he also hit 41 home runs, drove in 110 runs, led the league in triples with 13—and made that spectacular catch in the World Series. Willie won the World Series but wasn’t done, finishing off his stellar season by winning the National League Most Valuable Player Award.

  For much of his 23 years in the big leagues, Willie Mays was the show, and like Ruth, everyone could tell a story about something superhuman that he’d done at one point or another. There was “The Catch,” or the time in 1961 against Milwaukee when Mays hit four home runs in a single game. Or maybe it was the flair, the way he would catch a baseball at his waist rather than over his head—known as a basket catch. Or when he flew around the bases with the same speed he used to catch up to a fly ball.

  And Willie had the coolest nickname: “The Say-Hey Kid.” DiMaggio was “Jolting Joe.” Henry Aaron was “Hammerin’ Hank.” Mickey Mantle was “The Commerce Comet,” because he was from Commerce, Oklahoma, but none of those names were as easy and natural and fan-friendly as the Say Hey Kid.

  When the Giants moved to San Francisco in 1958, Mays was considered the greatest player in the game—even better than Mantle or Aaron or Ernie Banks or Frank Robinson—because he did everything great and had the flair to do it with style.

  Yet in California, the fans of San Francisco did not love Mays immediately, because he was still considered a New York star. The fans of San Francisco were waiting to give their collective hearts to a star who had only played in San Francisco.

  That finally changed in 1962. San Francisco couldn’t help but adore Mays when he hit 49 home runs and drove in 141 runs, leading the Giants to their first-ever World Series after leaving New York. Not only had the Giants won the National League pennant, but they had beaten their rivals, the Dodgers. The Giants wound up playing the Yankees in the World Series that year and lost in seven hard-fought games, but baseball in San Francisco had finally been played on the big stage, and Mays was the center of attention.

  It wasn’t just that Mays was flashy, fun and exciting, but that he also amassed the kind of statistics that challenged the all-time great players. Mays hit 52 home runs and won another MVP Award in 1965, and it began to look like he might have a chance to catch Babe Ruth’s all-time record of 714 home runs, the most celebrated record in baseball. Years of running full-speed and throwing himself into the game with everything he had caught up with him, though, and 1965 turned out to be his last great full season.

  Still, there were moments when Mays would show glimmers of greatness, like in 1971 when he turned forty years old and led San Francisco to the playoffs. Then at age forty-two, after 22 seasons in a Giants uniform, Willie was traded back to New York, to the Mets, where he would wind up playing in one final World Series, this one against Oakland.

  When his career ended after the 1973 season, his lifetime stats were unreal: .302 average, 3,283 hits, 338 stolen bases, 12 Gold Glove Awards, and 660 home runs. Yet none of the statistics ever properly described Mays. And it’s not simple chance that many people have called Mays “the perfect ballplayer.” To understand his greatness, you had to have seen him play. As Ted Williams once said, “They invented the All-Star Game for Willie Mays.”

  That pretty much says it all.

  Willie Mays

  TOP TEN LIST

  Willie Mays was considered the perfect ballplayer—the ultimate “five-tool” player. Here are ten more players with all the tools, who could 1) run, 2) throw, 3) field, 4) hit for average, and 5) hit with power.

  Barry Bonds, PIT-SF (1986–2007)

  Ken Griffey Jr., SEA-CIN-CHW (1989–2009)

  Mike Trout, LAA (2012–present)

  Henry Aaron, MIL-ATL (NL), MIL (AL) (1954–1976)

  Roberto Clemente, PIT (1955–1972)

  Dave Winfield, SD-NYY-CAL-TOR-MIN-CLE (1973–1995)

  Rickey Henderson, OAK-NYY-TOR-SD-LAA-LAD-BOS-NYM-SEA (1979–2003)

  Mickey Mantle, NYY (1951–1968)

  Joe DiMaggio, NYY (1936–1951)

  Derek Jeter, NYY (1995–2014)

  Too Good

  SIX
YEARS OF SANDY KOUFAX

  Years back, when a player was so good that his statistics were practically beyond belief, others used to call him a “cartoon,” meaning he could make baseball look so easy that his play resembled a cartoon, just like Bugs Bunny striking out the Crushers. Today, they call a player of the same caliber a “video game”—the kind of player who makes big-league baseball look like an Xbox game.

  From 1961 to 1966, there was no better pitcher in the modern game than Sandy Koufax, the great left-hander of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Koufax was the greatest comet in the history of the game, shining bright and traveling fast across the horizon. For those six seasons, Koufax illuminated the night and just as quickly as he appeared, he was gone.

  When Koufax arrived, as a nineteen-year-old, he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers, a team that played not far from where he lived. Koufax was super-talented, but he was also wild. When he pitched, no one, not even he, knew where the ball was going to go. In three years, he appeared in 62 games with Brooklyn, starting occasionally, never quite living up to the enormous future forecast for him by the organization. Koufax was just a kid, but he was expected to be a star, and in Brooklyn he was not. In 1958, the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles and Koufax was given a permanent role in the starting rotation for the first time. Everyone knew he threw hard. Everyone knew he had a fantastic curveball that looked like it was heading to the moon when it left his hand, before somehow dropping right over the plate. What no one knew was when or whether Koufax could control where the ball was going. In 1958, Koufax led the league in one statistic: wild pitches, with 17. It went this way for three more years. Even when the Dodgers won the World Series in 1959, Koufax was a talent, but not yet great. Certainly not a cartoon or video game.