Willie Mays: The Embodiment of The Negro Leagues

“These men couldn’t do what I did because they didn’t have the chance. But they dreamed the dreams I did when they were 15, too. And they taught me and they gave me the combat training so that I could do it.” – Willie Mays on the Birmingham Black Barons.1

 

Performance can mean two things. Typically, when a baseball player is recognized for on-field performance, it’s about success, execution, achievements, and excellence. But performance can also refer to spectacle, exhibition, presentation, putting on a show. Regardless of which definition one chooses, Willie Mays was one of baseball’s greatest on-field performers.

At a time when major-league outfielders were taught to field groundballs on one knee, Mays charged them as if he was playing shortstop. He wore caps a size too big for his head so they would fly off when he ran the bases or chased down a fly ball, creating the illusion that he was moving faster. Every kid is taught the proper way to field a fly ball, but Mays was just as likely to catch the ball at his waist, over his shoulder, or barehanded. He made hard plays look easy, but also made easy plays look hard to keep fans in the stands on the edges of their seats, and he learned it all years before he ever stepped on a major-league diamond. “In the Negro Leagues, we were all entertainers,” Mays reminisced. “And my job was to give the fans something to talk about each game.”2

Mays was a multisport star in high school. In the fall, he was the starting quarterback for the Baby Hornets of Fairfield Industrial High School, a team that scrimmaged against college players. As a freshman, he made the team as a halfback, capable of breaking tackles and outrunning anyone on the field. The coach moved him under center because of his powerful arm and long fingers that let him effortlessly hurl accurate passes “sixty, seventy, eighty yards on a line,” according to a childhood friend’s recollection.3

In the winter he took his dominant athleticism to the basketball court, where he played with a quickness that few defenders could counter and a skyhook similar to the signature move that would take Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to the Basketball Hall of Fame decades later. Mays earned the top spot on the Birmingham World newspaper’s all-county basketball team after winning the Jefferson County scoring title by averaging just over 20 points per game and leading his team to a state championship.4

But even though it was only his third-best sport, it was understood that Willie’s future was in baseball. The Negro Leagues provided opportunity for Black athletes that neither football nor basketball could. With the exception of the Harlem Globetrotters, professional teams in both sports featured all-White rosters.5 “There were no blacks in the majors, but guys were making money in Negro Leagues,” Mays said. But then his outlook and his prospects changed. “It became real. I was in high school, about 15, when Jackie [Robinson] played his first year in Montreal.”6

The only other job the teenage Mays pursued was washing dishes. He was hired by a cafeteria but walked away after only a few hours. He went home and told his father, William Howard Mays Sr., that baseball was his only career plan. The elder Mays, a mill worker whose quickness and reflexes playing outfield in the semipro Industrial League had earned him the nickname Cat, accepted his son’s decision. “You play baseball,” he agreed, “and I’ll make sure you eat.”7

Fairfield Industrial High didn’t have a baseball team, so instead boys played on community teams. As a 10-year-old, Willie held his own on teams with 15-year-olds. As a seventh-grader, he joined Industrial League games when a team was missing players or the score was lopsided enough that neither team cared if a teen patrolled left field alongside Cat and other grown men. So, against other high-schoolers his own age, Mays was a force of nature.

Initially, Cat Mays had plans for his son to be a shortstop in the mold of Willie Wells. The legendary middle infielder was considered one of the greatest defensive shortstops ever but also won three home-run titles and led the Negro National League in all Triple Crown categories in 1930. That plan didn’t work out, however, because the boy’s arm was too strong. William “Cap” Brown, a first baseman for the Fairfield Gray Sox, a local sandlot team that showcased players who might one day play in the Industrial League, remembered, “He used to throw the ball down to me so hard it made my hand numb. I said, ‘We’ve got to put this joker in the outfield.’”8

It’s easy to understand how a coach would see the pitching mound as the best outlet to harness the teenager’s rocket-like throwing ability – and, in fact, several major-league scouts would feel the same in the years to come – but it was the last place Cat wanted his son to be. “He didn’t want me pitching or catching,” Mays explained. “He always tried to make sure I didn’t get hurt, and he wanted me to play every day. You can’t play every day if you pitch or catch.”9

The elder Mays also understood that a pitcher was vulnerable to the whims of his coach. An arm injury could end a pitcher’s career in the blink of an eye, and Cat didn’t trust high-school coaches, community volunteers, or sandlot managers to prioritize his son’s longevity above their own short-term success. Most of the kids on those teams were destined to a life of backbreaking labor in steel mills or coal mines, so what difference would it make if a teenager tore some ligaments in his shoulder throwing too many pitches on the way to winning a regional championship?

Cat Mays understood that young Black men were disposable in America. After a game for the Fairfield Gray Sox, a local sandlot team meant to showcase players who might one day play in the Industrial League, Cat saw his concern justified. Manager Cle Holmes put Willie on the mound, where he pitched nine innings and hit the game-winning home run, only to collapse from exhaustion after crossing the plate. Cat laid out an ultimatum: If you want Willie Mays on your team, keep him off the mound. Holmes put the teen in center field, where his legend grew beyond Jefferson County, even to other states.

In Tennessee, the lore of Willie Mays reached the ear of Beck Shepherd, owner of the Chattanooga Choo Choos of the Negro Southern League. The team served as a minor-league feeder for the Birmingham Black Barons. Shepherd offered a contract for the 1948 season, but Willie couldn’t join the team until he finished the school year. Cat drove his son to Chattanooga and dropped him off to join the team for the summer. Willie was initially penciled in at shortstop until he fielded a grounder in the hole and his throw took off the first baseman’s glove. He was moved to center field.

When the Birmingham Black Barons visited Chattanooga for a game against the Black Lookouts, Mays spoke with manager Lorenzo “Piper” Davis in a hotel lobby. The veteran infielder had heard rumors of the teenage phenom but had more insight into the boy, having played with and against Cat Mays since the two were in high school. He warned Willie about losing his eligibility to play high-school sports if he was caught playing baseball for money, but the teenager didn’t care. Understanding that the phenom had chosen his career path, Davis told Mays to have his father contact him if he was serious about playing ball for money.

In a June doubleheader in Memphis, Mays got attention after going a combined 5-for-7 with a home run as the Choo Choos swept the hometown Blue Sox.10 The same article that praised Mays indicated that Chattanooga would be playing in several Midwest cities in the coming week, such as “Ipsilanti [sic], Detroit, Dayton, South Bend, and Grand Rapids.” Bad weather on that trip forced several games to be canceled, which meant players, who were earning a percentage of the gate, didn’t get paid. Mays would later recall eating “stale bread and sardines … in Dayton, Ohio, at the time – I said to myself, if this ever gets over, I’m quitting.”11 When the team returned to Tennessee, Willie asked for bus fare home and never returned, ending his tenure as a Choo Choo after roughly a month.

Birmingham needed a fourth outfielder, and shortly after Mays returned from Chattanooga, Cat took his son to Rickwood Field for a tryout. Davis sent Willie out to shag fly balls. “I heard he had a good arm,” Davis recounted. “Then I saw him throw.”12 Any questions Davis had about whether Mays belonged on the team vanished.

Officially, Mays made his first start in the second game of a Fourth of July doubleheader against the Memphis Red Sox. According to legend, after his impressive tryout, Mays sat on the bench with orders from Davis to “watch. Watch what’s going on.” After a Black Barons win in the first game, Davis wrote “MAYS, LF” batting seventh in his lineup card for the second half. When some players complained, Davis gave them the option of “take off the uniform if you want to.”13 After the game, Mays was offered a contract.

Unofficially, it’s likely that he took part in some exhibition games played away from Birmingham prior to that doubleheader, using a fake name to preserve his eligibility to play high-school sports. The start shouldn’t have surprised anyone and if it was a secret that Mays was on the team, it was a poorly kept one considering that the morning of the game, the Birmingham News reported:

Willie Mays can pound the ball. … Outfielder Mays, a youngster who joined the club recently, shows promise of being a topnotch player, too. He can field with the best of them and packs plenty of dynamite for a man of his size.14

Some players took issue with Mays getting a start, primarily Jimmy Zapp, the regular left fielder. The doubleheader marked the end of the first half of the season, and Birmingham had clinched a playoff spot by finishing with the best record in the Negro American League. While the players saw the potential in Mays to be a superstar of tomorrow, he couldn’t hit a breaking pitch today. A playoff team needed production, not potential.

Mays signed a contract that paid him $250 per month, plus a $50 bonus for every month that he batted over .300.15 He wouldn’t earn the bonus during his first season, but Mays managed to win over his teammates with his infectious energy and defensive mastery. “Mays was a happy-go-lucky kid,” Zapp once said. “He didn’t act like a kid on the field. That was the difference. He acted like a veteran on that ball field. Other than that, Mays was a baby.”16

Davis would put him in as a defensive replacement for Bobby Robinson in center field, and when Robinson broke his leg, Mays became the regular starter. Even when he was batting below .200, he made an impact with his glove and arm.

First baseman Joe Scott recalled chasing a hit into the gap in right-center field. He got to the ball, but his momentum was taking him away from the diamond. Mays had also been running down the ball, and Scott relied on his teenaged teammate. “I sure couldn’t throw as well as him … so I just flipped it to him so he could throw it to second.”17 The runner retreated to first and settled for a single rather than challenge the high-schooler’s arm.

Mays became so adept at covering the outfield that his teammates would get caught taking it easy. During one game, Davis chewed out left fielder Zapp and right fielder Ed Steele in the dugout for “running that boy’s legs off.”18 When Mays was in center, the two corner outfielders played closer to the lines and for every ball in the gaps, they’d yell, “Come on, Willie!” and watch the teenager do what he did best.

On his first road trip, Mays learned that playing ball was not all it took to be a ballplayer. Davis did all he could to protect his prospect, having him room with the following day’s starter since the pitcher wouldn’t be out carousing the night before a start. “We had 25 guys on the club, and all 25 would put me to bed every night. I didn’t get to meet many girls that way, but I got plenty of sleep,” Mays later joked in his Hall of Fame speech.19

Davis and the rest of his teammates didn’t want Mays to get a reputation. As quickly as word of his talent could spread, rumors of laziness, belligerence, complacency, drunkenness, or any other negative trait that White scouts might use to justify not giving him an opportunity to play in the majors would proliferate even faster. While some of them would one day play for White teams, the Black Barons recognized that Mays was positioned to do something none of them ever could, and they weren’t going to let him spoil it.

Word of Mays’ talent was, in fact, spreading. Two weeks after making his official debut, he was the third Birmingham hitter spotlighted in an article previewing a weekend series against the Cleveland Buckeyes in Ohio. After touting Artie Wilson, the Black Barons’ shortstop, who was leading all of baseball with a .412 batting average, and Davis, who was hitting .373 and leading the team to a playoff berth as a first-year manager, the Newark Advocate predicted that “the new utility outfielder, Willie Mays, only turning 17 years of age, will be a sensation within the present baseball season.”20 When the team rolled into Chicago, Abe Saperstein was in the stands. The founder of the Harlem Globetrotters was now scouting for Bill Veeck’s Cleveland Indians, but also had connections to the New York Giants. Davis made certain that Saperstein, who was there to report on Wilson, knew about Mays.

Among the highlights Saperstein may have caught was a long drive by Chicago American Giants catcher Quincy Trouppe to deep center field. He rounded first and sprinted into second for what he thought was an easy double, only to be tagged out by a waiting Wilson. “Mays got it,” he informed the dumbfounded batter.21

A month earlier, Trouppe had contacted Mays after getting a hot tip about an up-and-coming outfielder with a tremendous arm. He offered him a tryout in Chicago. When Cat Mays sent the American Giants a letter asking for $300 a month, the team made clear that no teenager was worth that much money and passed. When Trouppe’s hit went to the wall in center, Mays saw a chance to show what he was worth. He bolted in all the way from left, hollering at Robinson to let him take it, and rifled the ball to Wilson for the out, leaving Trouppe to reflect how the American Giants had let him slip through their fingers.

In Cleveland, Davis decided it was time for Mays to learn a new lesson. Mays dug in against veteran right-hander Chet Brewer, who drilled the young player with a fastball to the arm and sent him sprawling to the dirt. Davis shouted as he walked down from the third-base coaching box and even gave his crying outfielder a little kick, but didn’t make any effort to help him to his feet.

“These men gave me my combat training,” Mays reflected decades later. “And what was combat training in the Negro Leagues? It was getting knocked down and either laying in the dirt and crying or getting up again.”22

“Boy, do you see first base?” Davis barked. “Get up and go down there, and the first chance you get, you steal second, and then third.” Mays did as he was told and scored on a fly ball. When he returned to the dugout, Davis told him, “That’s how you handle a pitcher.”23

However, Davis may have been the one handling the pitcher. The two were old friends and former teammates and, though he never admitted it, it’s more than likely Davis asked Brewer to plunk his rookie to see how Mays would react.24 Both Brewer and Davis told this story for many years, laughing off the suggestion that they’d been in cahoots.

During a game against the Kansas City Stars, a feeder team for the Monarchs, another Negro League legend cast his eyes on Mays for the first time and saw the potential for greatness. Stars manager Cool Papa Bell, years past his prime, recognized much of his own playing style, his speed and defensive range, in Mays. But the teen had a powerful swing capable of clearing the most distant fences, which Bell never possessed, and while Bell was certainly capable of throwing out baserunners from the outfield, his arm strength paled compared with that of Mays. He begged the Monarchs to sign Mays away from Birmingham and let him tutor the young outfielder for a year.

Monarchs owner Tom Baird refused. The Ku Klux Klan member, who had purchased the team from founder J.L. Wilkinson earlier in the year, didn’t trust Black players from the South25 and wasn’t going to spend hundreds of dollars for the services of an Alabama outfielder who hadn’t even started his junior year of high school.

When the Monarchs and Black Barons met in August, the Monarchs proved too much for Birmingham and won the series, which led to a playoff series between the two for a bid to the Negro League World Series. But Mays showed that his hitting was improving. He slapped a leadoff single to start the third inning of the first game of the series and scored on a single by Wilson. And his talent was beginning to draw the attention of “White folks’ ball.”

The Black Barons derived their name from the city’s White minor-league team, the Birmingham Barons, whose name was inspired by the coal and steel barons who built their wealth on the labor of families in and around Birmingham. The teams shared Rickwood Field, though the Barons owned the ballpark and the Black Barons paid them rent.

The Barons were the Double-A Southern Association affiliate of the Boston Red Sox. One might think this would give the Red Sox some sort of edge on courting Mays, but the team seemed to have no interest.

Barons GM Eddie Glennon pleaded with Boston’s front office to send scouts who could watch Mays in action. They could arrive in town a few days early, take in a Black Barons game, and still have time to watch the Barons. Al LaMacchia, then a pitcher for the Barons, saw Mays play while recovering from a broken wrist, but his enthusiastic scouting report failed to spark any interest.

The Red Sox went on to be the last major-league team to integrate when they added Pumpsie Green to their 1959 roster, 13 years after Jackie Robinson signed with the Dodgers. LaMacchia summed it up nicely: “You’d have to be a horseshit scout to pass up Willie Mays.”26

On their way home from a season-ending series against the American Giants, the team took a detour through Missouri. The Indians were playing the St. Louis Browns and Satchel Paige was starting for Cleveland on September 4. The Browns were one of only two teams in the majors that still had segregated seating,27 so the team’s view may not have been the greatest, but for the first time in his life Willie Mays got to see a Black player in a major-league game.

The Monarchs came to Birmingham to open the NAL championship series. Since the teams’ last meeting, Mays had continued to improve his game. He was now the regular starting center fielder and had raised his average from .222 to .246 in the last month. Davis displayed his confidence in his rookie when he turned in his lineup card with “MAYS, CF” written in the cleanup spot.

The Black Barons won the series, with Mays contributing key hits, timely RBIs, and superlative defense. Birmingham went on to face the Homestead Grays, and though they lost the series four games to one, the one victory was a showcase for Willie Mays’s talents. He robbed Bob Thurman of a sure double at the center-field fence, threw out Buck Leonard going from first to third on a single, and hit a comebacker through the pitcher’s legs for the game-winning RBI in a 4-3 final.

With the season over and school back in session, many of Mays’ classmates were upset that their star quarterback had abandoned their team.28 The principal threatened to suspend Mays for not taking his education seriously, but Cat and Willie’s aunt intervened and forged an agreement that school would come first and Willie would play only weekend home games the following spring.

Before leaving to play winter ball in Puerto Rico, Davis made a special arrangement for his rookie star. A barnstorming tour featuring Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella would be coming through Birmingham, and Davis made sure Mays would be in center field for the locals. Mays doubled for one of his team’s only two hits but demonstrated that he belonged on the same field as two men who would win four of the next seven National League MVP Awards.29

There was no official Rookie of the Year Award in the Negro Leagues, but that didn’t stop Mays from being labeled such. The Alabama Tribune bestowed the title, and declared Davis the Manager of the Year.30 When the team opened training camp the following March, “Willie Mays, the rookie find of last season” was listed among the returning veterans,31 and when the school year was nearing its end, it was predicted that “fans will swarm into Rickwood tomorrow just to see the kid who was named as rookie of the year in 1948 turn on the astonishments.”32

As the 1949 season approached, the team had undergone a few changes, the biggest of which was that Artie Wilson’s contract had been sold to Cleveland. That move prompted a protest by the New York Yankees, which, in turn, played a role in the team that ultimately landed Mays.33 The other big change was to be expected. Mays was the starting center fielder with Robinson now in left.

While front offices’ opinions on the likelihood of his making the majors differed, Mays was known to every team. Even while playing only weekend home games, “Birmingham’s school-going centerfielder,” as the Pittsburgh Courier identified him, was making national news for making “a perfect throw [that] cut down [Jesse] Douglass [sic] at the plate trying to score after Lonnie Summers hoisted out.”34

The Sunday before the final three days of the school year, the Birmingham News reminded fans that Mays, who had “become one of the sensations of Negro baseball … and many figure he is marked for the majors in another year or so,” would “become a full-fledged Baron, eligible to play games on the road as well as at home” after “school is out the coming Wednesday.”35 A charity game to raise money for a hospital to serve Birmingham’s Black community was promoted with the promise that “fans will have a chance to see the sensational Willie Mays perform in the Black Barons centerfield. … Many observers believe Mays is a clinch for future major league stardom.”36

With school out, Mays could join the team for its Eastern road trip, where he would play center field for the first time and hit his first career home run, an inside-the-parker, in the New York Cubans’ home ballpark, the Polo Grounds. Despite having been aware of Mays for almost a year, the New York Giants declined the chance to talk to him yet as they knew he was still untouchable. Major-league rules didn’t allow teams to sign players until after they graduated from high school, but that didn’t stop teams from looking at Mays.

Bill Maughn, a scout for the Boston Braves, remembered watching Mays throw out a runner on a ball fielded by Robinson. A batter banged a hit off the scoreboard in Rickwood Field, and Robinson scooped it up. Mays ran over yelling for the ball and “be-doggoned if the left fielder didn’t shovel pass like a football player,” he said with amazement. “The centerfielder threw out the runner trying to go from first to third.”37

The White Sox also took interest when John Donaldson, a former Negro League pitcher and the first Black scout hired by a major-league team, rated Mays above his other top prospects, Ernie Banks and Elston Howard.

Glennon finally cornered a scout who’d come to assess the Barons and their competition and persuaded him to stick around one more day to see Mays. The scout graded Mays with an A or A+ in all five categories: hitting, power, running, throwing, and fielding. Scouts rarely gave A+ ratings, which translated to a prediction that the prospect would be a “superstar” and “a consistent MVP candidate and the best at his respective position in the major leagues”38 in any category, much less all five.

The Red Sox did eventually make a move to get Mays, though indirectly. General manager Joe Cronin approached Davis and offered to buy his contract with an agreement that he could finish the 1949 season with the Black Barons and join Boston in 1950. The idea was that Mays would be more likely to go to a team where his mentor could be his roommate in the minor leagues.39

By mid-June, Mays was batting .421. When the Black Barons traveled to Kansas City for a rematch of the previous year’s NAL championship, the Kansas City Star wrote, “Major league scouts have labeled Mays as the greatest young prospect they have seen in action.”40

Mays was held out of the 1949 East-West All-Star Game, as was the Monarchs’ Howard. Both players’ owners already had suitors for their contracts and worried that putting them on the biggest stage possible ran the risk of souring any deals in the works.

Meanwhile, Artie Wilson, whom the Indians and Yankees had been fighting over earlier in the season, was now with neither team. Instead, he was in California, playing for the Oakland Oaks of the Pacific Coast League.41 The dispute had been ugly and complicated, and Birmingham owner Tom Hayes came out of the experience embarrassed and irate with the Yankees brass. He vowed to never work with them again. In fact, if he had the opportunity to gain some revenge by refusing to sell them a highly prized prospect no matter what they offered and, even better, sending said prospect to another New York team out of spite, that was exactly the sort of thing he would do.

When summer ended, Mays returned to school and the baseball season concluded without a Negro League World Series. Again, Mays proved himself capable of playing with major-league stars in the barnstorming game against Robinson and Campanella, who called Branch Rickey after the game and urged him to send Dodgers scouts to assess Mays. He was told Wid Matthews, one of Rickey’s most trusted scouts, already had and returned the verdict that Mays couldn’t hit a curveball.42 Matthews, who’d labeled Jackie Robinson a “hot dog” and expressed “reservations” about his on-field demeanor when he’d scouted him in 1946,43 and who, as general manager of the Chicago Cubs, was accused of being slow to integrate the team, earned a reputation “that he didn’t care for Black players.”44

That winter and the subsequent spring were just a countdown to graduation. Davis left for spring training with the Red Sox. He wasn’t allowed to dress and shower with the White players, instead using the visitors’ locker room on practice days, and the umpires’ on game days. He was assigned to their Double-A affiliate in Scranton, Pennsylvania – the team to which Boston hoped to send Mays – where he wasn’t allowed to stay in the same hotels as his White teammates.

On May 15, a week and a half before Mays graduated, the Red Sox released Davis to avoid paying a bonus to Birmingham. Boston bought his contract for $7,500 with the agreement that Hayes would get another $7,500 if he remained with the franchise beyond the 15th. There was no guarantee that having the man who’d become like a second father to Mays on their payroll would have landed them the phenom, but cutting that man over a few thousand dollars and letting him return to Birmingham and tell the Black Barons of his treatment guaranteed that the dream outfield of Ted Williams and Willie Mays would never be.

Mays returned to the Black Barons as a full-time player, but everyone knew it would be for a limited time. “The big question on the club right now is can the Black Barons keep the youthful Willie Mays all summer?” wrote the Birmingham News.45 “Mays may not be making many more appearances with the Black Barons, as it is known that several big league scouts are watching him closely. The Boston Braves and Chicago White Sox are reputed to have the inside track.”46

Like the Red Sox, the Braves lost their chance to field a future Hall of Fame pairing in the outfield of Mays and Hank Aaron when the team refused to approve Maughn’s request for $15,000 to purchase the contract from Hayes. The team was also considering Mays as a pitcher, which may have left him less inclined to sign.

On June 11, the Black Barons were on their annual East Coast road trip. Their bus entered the Holland Tunnel in New York City, but it didn’t come back out. One by one, players began to smell smoke. The driver pulled over and everyone leapt out before flames consumed the vehicle that had shown Mays the world for two summers, along with their uniforms and equipment. When the team reached the ballpark, they were forced to borrow the Cubans’ gray road uniforms and wear them inside out.

An obituary of Black Baron first baseman Alonzo Perry identified him “as the player the New York Giants came to scout and discovered Willie Mays.” He related the story that “Carl Hubbell of the Giants began following me. He saw Willie and asked me who was the kid we had in centerfield. I told him ‘Willie Mays.’”47 This was a Giants’ myth, repeated often enough to almost seem true. But the notion that Mays was “accidentally” scouted or that Hubbell was oblivious about one of the most coveted prospects in baseball is laughable.

Rather, the huge home-run hitter Perry provided cover for Hubbell, who’d been well aware of Mays for almost two years and had seen him play on multiple occasions. Hubbell worried about word spreading that the Giants were close to signing Mays, so instead muddied the waters by letting it get out that they were interested in Perry, giving a reason for their scouts’ sudden interest in Black Barons games.

Ed Montague was one of several big-league scouts in Birmingham for a high-school all-star game on Friday, June 16. During the game, Maughn tipped him off to check out the Black Barons’ center fielder the following day.

Montague had never seen Mays play before, and since there were no records of his being scouted because the Giants wanted to keep their interest in Mays a secret, the scout may have believed he’d discovered the future superstar. “I had no inkling of Willie Mays,” Montague later claimed, “but during batting and fielding practice, my eyes almost popped out of my head. … This was the greatest young ballplayer I had ever seen in my scouting career.”48

Willie Mays played on Saturday, hitting a single and a double with four RBIs against the Cubans, unaware that he was playing his last Negro League game as his future was being negotiated while he was on the field. The Giants agreed to pay $15,000 – $10,000 to Hayes and $5,000 to Mays – to acquire the 19-year-old, reported as “a record price paid for a Negro player.”49 Montague approached a freshly showered Mays in the clubhouse, awed by the towel-clad player’s physique, and asked if he would like to play in for the Giants.

The rest of the Black Barons found out the next day when their center fielder wasn’t in the clubhouse to suit up for Sunday’s doubleheader, and the newspapers reported later in the week that “the New York Giants have purchased the contract of Willie Mays, sensational Birmingham Black Barons centerfielder.”50

Though he left the team and the league behind him, Mays would never leave the lessons he’d learned, and for more than two decades, he would show major-league fans and owners all that segregation had made them miss.

JAKE BELL is a former sports journalist, a children’s author, and was briefly a media relations intern in the press box of the Milwaukee Brewers, but now he writes and edits government documents. He lives in Baltimore, 2.8 miles from Camden Yards.

 

Author’s note

This has been the most frustrating, most interesting, and most fun project I have tackled for SABR to date. As with much Negro League-related research, records don’t always exist and one is reliant on oral histories and imperfect memories. Timelines don’t always match up, details change from one telling to another, statements can be misunderstood, and misstatements get repeated by others. For example, Mays tells a reporter he’s been playing baseball professionally since he was 14, referring to the first time he was paid to play a game with the Industrial League, and the reporter assumes he means that he joined the Black Barons at 14, spreading the story that Birmingham had a 15-year-old center fielder in the 1948 World Series, which gets stated as a fact by Buck Leonard and others in later interviews and becomes a throwaway line in Ken Burns’s Baseball documentary.

The epitome of this would be the tale Mays has often shared – and that some readers may have been upset to see excluded – of hitting a double in his first ever at-bat against Satchel Paige during a game against the Kansas City Monarchs in Memphis.

The story goes that after Mays slid into second, Paige asked his third baseman to let him know “when that little boy comes back up.” When Mays later walked to the plate for his next at-bat, Paige informed him that he was “not going to trick you. I’m going throw you three fastballs and you’re going to sit down.”51 He did exactly that, much to Willie’s delight.

Unfortunately, it’s unclear when – and if we’re being honest, if – this showdown took place. Paige signed with the Cleveland Indians on July 7, 1948, three days after Mays made his Black Barons debut. Paige was also pitching for the Kansas City Stars, not the Monarchs, in 1948. This seems a minor detail, but it points to the larger problem of the story’s evolution.

Sometimes the double comes off a fastball, sometimes a breaking ball. In an earlier autobiography, Mays implied he got his hit off Paige’s “hesitation pitch” and that he struck out on three swings in each of his ensuing three at-bats, but “I never saw a fastball from him, only those crazy curves and other soft stuff.”52 Even earlier, in his 1972 autobiography, Mays says only, “I got to hit against Paige one game. I was one for two.”53

It’s possible Mays and Paige faced off, perhaps when Paige was barnstorming and Mays was playing for a community team or an Industrial League squad, but not as a Black Baron and a Monarch, respectively, and certainly not in the playoffs, as some versions of the story suggest. It seems likely that the retellings of the event were influenced by Buck O’Neil’s story of Paige facing Josh Gibson in the 1942 Negro League World Series.

I’ve done my best to reconcile conflicting timelines and acknowledge some of the discrepancies in the endnotes.

 

SOURCES

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author accessed Baseball-Reference.com, Seamheads.com, and The Sporting News via Paper of Record, and consulted several other sources including:

Greene, Lee. Willie Mays: A Baseball Life (New York: Scholastic Book Services, 1972)

Holway, John. Voices from the Great Black Baseball Leagues (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2010)

Say Hey, Willie Mays!, directed by Nelson George, HBO Sports/Major League Baseball Productions/Company Name/Zipper Bros Films/Uninterrupted, 2022

 

NOTES

1  Owen Caufield, “Mays Says Thanks to Black Leagues,” Hartford Courant, June 25, 1981: D3.

2  James Hirsch, Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend (New York: Scribner, 2010), 46.

3  Hirsch, 30.

4  Hirsch, 30; Allen Barra, Mickey and Willie: Mantle and Mays, the Parallel Lives of Baseball’s Golden Age (New York: Crown Archetype, 2013), 54.

5  Even as football and basketball began to integrate during Willie’s high-school years – in 1946 and 1950, respectively – the decision to pursue a career in baseball remained paramount due to football or basketball requiring that Mays play in college first.

6  Willie Mays and John Shea, 24: Life Stories and Lessons from the Say Hey Kid (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2020), 27.

7  Hirsch, 32.

8  Roger Shuler, “‘Say Hey Kid’ Has Little Good to Say about His Hometown,” Birmingham Post-Herald, September 17, 1981: B6.

9  Mays and Shea, 23.

10 “Choo Choos Take Pair from Memphis Blue Sox,” Chattanooga Daily Times, June 14, 1948: 10. The first record of Mays playing for Chattanooga appears roughly two months earlier in a recap of a game played in Macon, Georgia, between Chattanooga and the Newark Eagles: “Choo Choos, Champs in 12-Inning, 1-1 Tie,” Chattanooga Daily Times, April 20, 1948: 13. This article, however, raises some questions. For starters, it identifies the Eagles as “champions of the [Negro] American League.” The Eagles won the Negro League World Series in 1946, but moved from the American to the National League in 1947, where they finished second in the standings. Further, according to both Hirsch and Klima, Mays was not allowed to play for Chattanooga until after the school year ended, and April 19, 1948, was a Monday while school was in session. On pages 44-45 of Willie’s Boys, Klima quotes former Black Barons second baseman Tommy Sampson as claiming he included Mays on a traveling team after the 1947 season, and that they played the Eagles in Macon, but then he lost Mays to Chattanooga. In the same paragraph, Klima indicates, however, that Mays has no recollection of ever playing for Sampson.

11 Hirsch, 33.

12 John Klima, Willie’s Boys: The 1948 Birmingham Black Barons, the Last Negro League World Series, and the Making of a Baseball Legend (Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2008), 91.

13 Willie Mays and Lou Sahidi, Say Hey: The Autobiography of Willie Mays (New York: Pocket Books, 1988), 23; Hirsch, 43; Klima, 97. While Klima’s book correctly identifies Memphis as the opponent, the others have Mays debuting against the Cleveland Buckeyes with starting pitcher Chet Brewer. That matchup didn’t happen until a few weeks later.

14 “Black Barons Face Red Sox in Twin Bill,” Birmingham News, July 4, 1948: 18.

15 Mays’ contract is archived at the Memphis Public Library and Information Center. In 1972 Mays claimed these amounts were $70 per month with a $5 bonus every month he batted over .300. Willie Mays and Charles Einstein, Willie Mays: My Life In and Out of Baseball (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1972), 69.

16 Klima, 105.

17 Klima, 99.

18 Klima, 152.

19 Joseph Durso, “A Legend Named Willie,” New York Times, August 6, 1979: C6.

20 “Barons, First Half Negro Champions, Here Thursday,” Newark (Ohio) Advocate, July 20, 1948: 9. This included both the National League and the American League.

21 Klima, 108.

22 Caufield, “Mays Says Thanks.”

23 Hirsch, 46

24 When Mays relates this story, the plunking comes in his second at-bat as retaliation for a home run in his first at-bat. Mays’ only official home run of the 1948 season was hit off Brewer, but it came in a later game.

25 This bit of racist rhetoric was rooted in the practice of selling slaves who acted disobediently or harbored any other trait a slaveowner might find objectionable to other plantations to the south, where treatment would be more harsh the farther south one went. This practice was the origin of the threat to “sell someone down the river,” as Mississippi was commonly known to be the worst state for treatment of slaves. Years after emancipation, racists began positing that Blacks living in Deep South were less intelligent, less capable, less civilized, less whatever-nonsense-they-wanted-to-spout than their Northern counterparts because they were descended from what they perceived as the worst stock of slaves.

26 Klima, 144.

27 The Washington Senators were the other team.

28 Though he wasn’t eligible to play any longer, when the team would play out-of-state games against teams that wouldn’t recognize him, Mays would sometimes put on a different jersey and use a fake name and throw a 50-yard touchdown or two.

29 Mays would win one of the other three.

30 Emory O. Jackson, “Hits and Bits,” Alabama Tribune (Montgomery), December 31, 1948: 8.

31 “Black Barons Open Spring Drills March 21,” Birmingham News, March 6, 1949: C-5.

32 “Black Barons and Buckeyes Collide Today,” Birmingham News, May 22, 1949: C-6.

33 Or, more accurately, the teams that didn’t.

34 “Powell’s Seven Hit Pitching Wins for Barons,” Pittsburgh Courier, May 14, 1949: 24; “Black Barons Lose, 6-2, 4-1,” Pittsburgh Courier, May 14, 1949: 24.

35 “Black Barons and Buckeyes Collide Today,” Birmingham News, May 22, 1949: C-6.

36 “Black Barons to Play Negro Hospital Benefit Contest,” Birmingham News, May 24, 1949: 20. On a side note, the article mentions that “Jefferson County has no Negro hospital now. There are only 574 hospital beds for Negroes, of the county’s 2,286, although Negroes make up 34.7 percent of the county population.”

37 Klima, 195.

38 Klima, 199.

39 The signing may have also just been a publicity stunt. Since the color line had been broken, some teams were accused of having a quota for how many Black players they would sign, but Boston was beginning to attract attention for not signing any. The signing of Davis checked a box serving only to silence critics who “could no longer charge that the Red Sox organization had never signed an African American.” Bill Nowlin, ed., Pumpsie and Progress – The Red Sox, Race, and Redemption (Burlington, Massachusetts: Rounder Books, 2010.)

40 “A Series with Barons,” Kansas City (Missouri) Star, June 26, 1949: 3B.

41 The dispute over Wilson’s contract had stemmed from a simple problem. The Yankees didn’t want Wilson – or any other Black players, frankly – but they also didn’t want talented players going to their competitors. When they got word that Cleveland was looking to buy Wilson, the Yankees claimed that Wilson and the Black Barons agreed to sell him to New York, which both the player and the owner denied. When the league awarded Wilson to New York, the Yankees turned around and sold him to Oakland. Cleveland had paid Hayes $15,000 for Wilson’s contract. When Wilson was instead given to New York, Hayes was unable to pay back the money until the Yankees paid him, which wasn’t for several months.

42 Campanella was frustrated by the shortsightedness of the scouting report. “Who ever heard of a 17-year-old hitting a curveball?” Bob Broeg, “Campy, a Man Paid to Play a Boy’s Game,” The Sporting News, July 24, 1971: 20.

43 Lee Lowenfish, Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 368.

44 Klima, 22.

45 “Black Barons Play Memphis Wednesday,” Birmingham News, May 30, 1950: 23.

46 “Black Barons Battle Stars at Rickwood,” Birmingham News, June 7, 1950: 34.

47 Bill Lumpkin, “Memories Abundant of ‘El Gigante Azul,’” Birmingham Post-Herald, September 18, 1982: B3.

48 Joseph Durso, “A Shaking Rookie Who Became a Wonder,” New York Times, September 21, 1973: 29.

49 “Mays, Black Baron Star, Is Going Up,” Birmingham News, June 22, 1950: 18.

50 “Mays, Black Baron Star.”

51 This quote can be found in a GQ interview and two biographies. Jason Gay, “Willie Mays Comes Home,” Gentleman’s Quarterly, February 1, 2010; Mays and Shea, 35; Hirsch, 47.

52 Mays and Sahidi, 20.

53 Mays and Einstein, 32.