The actress and

Willie Howard Mays Jr. could do it all. To many, he is the greatest baseball player of all time, greater even than Babe Ruth. He was, as scouts and other baseball people like to say, a five-tool player and the best five-tool player at that. He could hit for average, hit for power, run, field, and throw.

Buck, as some called Mays, batted .301 lifetime over his 23 big-league seasons and topped the .300 mark 10 times. He led the National League with a .345 average in 1954, the first of his two MVP campaigns. On July 18, 1970, he bounced a single through the left side of the infield at Candlestick Park for his 3,000th career hit. Mays retired with 3,293 hits. “I was able to hit to all fields,” he said. “I learned to get a lot of hits to right and right-center. You can’t pull everything or you’re in trouble.”2

Mays blasted 660 home runs for the Giants and Mets and led the National League in this category four times. He hit a career-high 52 in 1965, his second MVP season. Willie knocked at least 30 home runs in a season 11 times. When he retired, only Ruth and Henry Aaron had more homers. Through 2022, he was sixth on the all-time list.

He stole 338 bases, finished atop the leaderboard four straight years (1956-59), and reached the 30-homer, 30-stolen-base milestone in 1956 and 1957. He swiped at least 20 bags seven times, including in 1971, his age-40 season. As another indication of his great speed, Mays topped the circuit in triples three times and hit 20 in 1957.

Baseball’s “Say Hey Kid” may be most famous for his defense. He won a Gold Glove for 12 straight seasons. He assuredly would have won more, but the award was not given out before 1957. Fans and baseball people tell stories of the amazing way that Mays patrolled center field and his famous basket catches. What was his greatest catch? Many say it was his grab against Vic Wertz in the 1954 World Series. Yes, that was a good one. Mays, though, said he made an even better catch off a Bobby Morgan line drive in early 1952. “Defense was my thing,” Mays wrote in his book 24, published in 2020 and co-written with John Shea. “You might go on a streak at the plate and have some down days. But defense, you have to bring it every day.”3

The 24-time All-Star has said many times that the throw he made on the Wertz liner was better than the catch. In one game against the rival Los Angeles Dodgers in 1966, Mays recalled that he “almost threw for the cycle.” He doubled pitcher Don Drysdale off first base, threw out the speedy Willie Davis trying to sprint from first to third on Ron Fairly’s double, and nailed Maury Wills at home. “I had another guy at second, but Tito (Fuentes) dropped the ball. He felt bad about it, but I told him, ‘Don’t worry, that’s baseball.’”4

Mays grew up outside Birmingham, Alabama, the son of Willie Mays Sr. or “Cat,” a top ballplayer in the local industrial league. Willie attended Fairfield Industrial School and took classes for a career in the laundry business. He also joined his dad on the ballfield. Willie signed to play professional baseball with the Chattanooga Choo Choos, a minor-league club in the Negro Leagues, and soon earned a promotion to the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro American League. The New York Giants signed him in 1949. Giants scout Ed Montague said, “This was the greatest young player I had ever seen in my life or my scouting career.”

Willie Mays was part of that early wave of African American players who fought through bigotry following decades of segregation. He made his big-league debut just a few years after the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s shameful color line. Mays, along with Robinson, Don Newcombe, Roy Campanella, Larry Doby, and others changed baseball forever with their talent and determination. Willie Howard Mays Jr. elicited smiles and awe from fans at ballparks across the country.

It seems amazing that Mays won just the two MVP Awards. He deserved many more. Willie led the National League in Wins Above Replacement (WAR, admittedly a statistic created after Mays retired) nine times. Five times he posted an OPS (on-base plus slugging percentage) above 1.000, a superstar-level performance. So, why did the writers ignore Mays in the MVP voting? One reason is the final standings. The Giants won three pennants during Mays’ time with the team and that includes his rookie campaign of 1951, when he was promoted to the big club in late May and began his career in a 1-for-26 slump. (He still won Rookie of the Year honors.)

So often, the Giants played second fiddle in the National League pennant race to the Dodgers and St. Louis Cardinals. Mays’ club did beat out the Dodgers for the 1962 pennant, but that was the year Maury Wills set a major-league record by stealing 104 bases. Even so, Mays led the NL with a 10.5 WAR, while Wills finished at 6.0, an admirable figure but one not really as good as Wille’s. The statistically inclined sportswriter Rob Neyer says, “Mays was terribly neglected in the MVP voting” and adds, “Mays was probably the best player in the league six, seven, or eight times and just wasn’t going to win because the Giants weren’t winning the league.” Neyer also says, “It’s not difficult to make the case that Mays is even better than his WAR.”5 Durocher said it this way: “If somebody came and hit .450, stole 100 bases, and performed miracles in the field every day, I’d still look you in the eye and say Willie was better.”6

This book will add to the many already written about Mays, who remains an icon nearly 50 years after his retirement. Five Tools features dozens of articles that are original to the book. These include game stories that describe how Mays could take over a baseball game through both his talent and his baseball genius. Other pieces focus on Mays’ relationship with his managers, his days as a minor leaguer in Minneapolis, and more. Members of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) contributed all the articles as a way to both highlight and bring new perspectives on one of baseball’s most legendary players.

GLEN SPARKS is a lifelong Dodgers fan and also a fan of Giants great Willie Mays. He has worked on many books for SABR and wrote “Pee Wee Reese: The Life of a Brooklyn Dodger,” published in 2022 by McFarland. Sparks has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri. His wife, Pam, is a professional horticulturist. They live with their three cats (Lucy, Buster, and Kasper) and an assortment of tropical fish.

• Read more: Find all essays from Willie Mays: Five Tools in the SABR Research Collection online
• Games Project: Find articles on Willie Mays’s greatest games at the SABR Games Project
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• Paperback: Get a 50% discount on the Willie Mays: Five Tools paperback edition from the SABR Store ($17.95 includes shipping/tax; delivery via Amazon Kindle Direct can take up to 4-6 weeks.)

NOTES

1  www.artspander.com/articles/say-hey-says-it-all-about-willie.

2  Willie Mays and John Shea, 24: Life Stories and Lessons from the Say Hey Kid (New York: St. Martin’s, 2020), 246-47.

3  Mays and Shea, 240.

4  Mays and Shea, 243.

5  Mays and Shea, 270.

6  Bruce Herman, Hall of Fame Players: Cooperstown (Lincolnwood, Illinois: Publications International, 2007), 121.

“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.

A teenage Willie Mays with the Birmingham Black Barons. Mays’ father did not allow him to join the Black Barons full-time in 1948 until school was over at the end of May. (Courtesy of Memphis Public Library)

By consensus, it has been deemed that the Negro Leagues died in 1948. The last Negro League World Series was played that year. SABR’s book on the 1948 Homestead Grays and Birmingham Black Barons was titled A Bittersweet Goodbye. Seamheads, an authority on Negro Leagues history, does not go beyond 1948. When Retrosheet began doing individual game records, it began with 1948 and went backward.

As we begin to look at the statistics of Black ballplayers who broke into the American and National Leagues and view their records on Baseball-Reference.com, there is a gap. With Willie Mays, we know his record with Birmingham in 1948, and we know his record with Trenton in 1950. What happened in between?

In these paragraphs, the story begins to unfold of the Negro Leagues beyond 1948 and some of Mays’ early glories.

After 1948, two teams (the Homestead Grays and New York Black Yankees) left the Negro National League. To survive, the four remaining NNL teams combined with the six Negro American League teams to form a new league. The new 10-team league, called the Negro American League, had a limited schedule, with most games played on weekends. On August 14, 1949, the East-West All-Star Game was once again held at Comiskey Park and drew a good-sized crowd (31,097) to see the top players in the league. One player from that game, Jim Gilliam of the Baltimore Elite Giants, went on to have a great career with the Dodgers in Brooklyn and Los Angeles.

One Negro League player not in the game was Willie Mays of the Birmingham Black Barons. Why didn’t he play? There have been reasons given but nothing conclusive. One explanation was that he was back in high school. Another was that his mentor and manager, Piper Davis, and Birmingham team owner Tom Hayes were hiding him, fearful that teams in the White major leagues would steal him away, offering little or nothing in the way of compensation.1

But the real reason seems to be that, at the time the team was chosen in early July, Mays was in a slump and the outfielders chosen were having better years. Houston’s Johnny Davis was a top home run hitter in the league; Willard Brown of the Monarchs led the league in RBIs; Pedro Formental of Memphis led the league in triples; and Art Pennington of Chicago, who was replaced (after being sold to Portland of the Pacific Coast League) by teammate Lloyd Davenport, was among the league leaders in batting average.

How did Mays do in 1949?

The record is not yet complete; it looks as if he put his greatness on display almost from the start. Through June 5, he was batting .413.2 The Birmingham News, a mainstream daily paper, gave ample coverage to the Black Barons and included many box scores. On a rainy Sunday, May 8, the Black Barons hosted the Chicago American Giants in a doubleheader at Rickwood Field. Mays had three total hits and sparkled in the abbreviated second game, ended by curfew after five innings. His fourth-inning single broke a 1-1 tie as the Black Barons won, 4-1. He also showed off his arm, gunning down Jesse Douglas at home plate after grabbing a fly ball hit by Lonnie Summers.3

On May 10, Mays hit his first homer of the season as Birmingham lost to the Louisville Buckeyes (formerly the Cleveland Buckeyes), 7-5.4 The first game for which there is an available box score was played the next night; Mays doubled in a 4-3 win over the Chicago American Giants.5 On May 13 Birmingham completed its homestand with a 5-3 win over the Kansas City Monarchs (featuring Curt Roberts, Gene Baker, and Elston Howard). Mays singled and scored.

Mays did not accompany his team on its first road trip. His high school would not allow it. When the Barons returned home for a doubleheader on May 22, he was in the lineup for each game. Birmingham won by scores of 14-2 and 18-8 against Louisville, and Mays went 3-for-7 in the two games. His hits included a double in the opener. One of the pitchers he victimized was future San Francisco Giants teammate Sam Jones. Mays had four RBIs and a stolen base in the 14-2 game. He had a stolen base in the nightcap.6

On May 25 Mays, who walked in a run and singled and scored in another plate appearance, got raves for his glovework. Running at full throttle, he made a barehanded catch of a ball by the outfield wall in the 6-3 win over Louisville.7

Two days later, his school year complete, Mays joined the Barons as they traveled to Louisville8 before visiting New York. Birmingham faced the New York Cubans in a doubleheader at the Polo Grounds on May 29.

The New York Sunday News ran an article in late May 1949 reading: “The New York Cubans’ ‘$100,000 Infield’ will be scouted by aides of Carl Hubbell (of the New York Giants) when the Cubans oppose the Birmingham Black Barons in a twin bill which will open the local Negro American League season at the Polo Grounds today. Each of the infielders hit over .300 last season and led the league in fielding and in double plays.”9

That small article, buried in the sports section of the top circulation newspaper in the country’s largest city, gave notice that some extra sets of eyes would be in a position to take notice of Willie Mays’ first visit to the spacious center field that would be his home playground early in his career with the New York Giants.

The New York Age, a weekly Black newspaper, gave the games good coverage. Each game resulted in an 8-4 score. Birmingham won the opener, and the Cubans won the second game. In the ninth inning of the second game, Willie Howard Mays Jr. hit his first Polo Grounds home run. It was an inside-the-park homer, but there was no report as to whether his cap came flying off as he rounded the bases. Earlier in the game, he had singled in a run.10

After a game in West Haven, Connecticut on May 30, Mays made his first Brooklyn appearance on June 1, but it was not at Ebbets Field. It was at Dexter Park (located in nearby Woodhaven in Queens) against the Bushwicks, a popular semipro team that featured some veterans of the National and American Leagues. The Black Barons won, 7-4,11 hopped back on the bus and headed, after a game with the Springfield (Queens, New York) Grays on June 2 toward Baltimore to face the Elite Giants in Baltimore on June 3, Wilmington, Delaware, on June 4, and back in Baltimore on June 5 for a doubleheader. Then it was on to Philadelphia’s Shibe Park to face the Philadelphia Stars on June 6.

The bus seemed to be always in motion. There were stops at Chester, Pennsylvania (June 7), Petersburg, Virginia (June 8), and Asheville, North Carolina (June 9-10), and finally, on June 11 and 12, the Black Barons were back in Birmingham to face the Cubans. No sooner had they gotten home than they and the Cubans were back on the bus. The teams played a doubleheader at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis on June 13 and were back in Birmingham two days later, after a scheduled game in Memphis on June 14 was rained out. On June 16, it was on to Tuscaloosa. Such was life in the Negro Leagues.12

Mays’ next known home run came on June 19 at Birmingham’s Rickwood Field in the first game of a doubleheader against the Indianapolis Clowns. He went 2-for-5 and, in addition to the homer, knocked a double in a 12-5 first-game win. In the second game, a 10-8 loss, he was 1-for-4 with an RBI and a stolen base.13

A long road trip in late June took the Black Barons to Kansas City and a game against the Monarchs. The teams took the show on the road for three stops in Nebraska.

A teenage Willie Mays with the Birmingham Black Barons. Mays’ father did not allow him to join the Black Barons full-time in 1948 until school was over at the end of May. (Courtesy of Memphis Public Library)

Back at Rickwood on July 10, Mays had one of his best games with the Black Barons. He had five hits, including a double and the game-winning RBI, as Birmingham defeated the Philadelphia Stars, 13-12.14 On July 27 he put on another show for the home folks with four hits, including a triple. His fourth hit, a game-winning RBI single in the bottom of the ninth, broke a 5-5 tie.15

On August 5 against Baltimore at Rickwood Field, he had one of his better innings. In the top of the third inning, he threw out a runner at home plate and in the bottom of the same inning, he walked, stole second base and scored the tying run on a single by Ed Steele. Unfortunately for his team, Baltimore scored in the following inning and won the game, 3-2.16

On August 24 at Montgomery, Alabama, the quintessential five-tool player showed off his arm in spectacular fashion. The game was a marathon affair that lasted 15 innings. In the seventh inning, Mays snuffed out a Kansas City rally by throwing from the 387-foot sign in left-center to third base and nailing an advancing runner. Birmingham won the contest, 3-2.17 Mays hit his final home run of the season on September 23 as the Black Barons defeated the Buckeyes 7-1 at Rickwood Field. He also doubled in the game.18

By the time he hit that final homer of the 1949 season, Mays had gotten attention with a feature article in a predominant Black publication. On August 27, Russ Cowans acquainted his Chicago Defender readers with Mays, who was “coming up like a prairie fire.”19

Another type of fire broke out on Saturday, June 10, 1950. Mays had graduated from high school on May 25 and was traveling with the Black Barons to New York. As it was about to enter the Holland Tunnel, the team’s bus caught fire. The players escaped unharmed, but their equipment was consumed by the flames.20 The team played a doubleheader at the Polo Grounds the next day.

Willie Mays remained with Birmingham until he was acquired by the Giants organization on June 21, 1950.21 In his last game with Birmingham, on June 17, he doubled during a 7-1 win over the New York Cubans.22 Reports of games were not as thorough in 1950 as they had been the prior year but during his last 20 games with Birmingham, from May 24 through June 17, Mays had four doubles and four home runs. Per an article in the Chicago Defender, his 22 RBIs placed him second in the league.23

After less than a year in the minor leagues, Mays joined the Giants in May 1951 and, on May 28, 1951, on the eve of the second anniversary of his first homer at the Polo Grounds, he hit the first of his 660 National League homers.

ALAN COHEN chairs the BioProject fact-checking committee, serves as vice president-treasurer of the Connecticut Smoky Joe Wood Chapter, and is a datacaster (milb first-pitch stringer) for the Hartford Yard Goats of the Double-A Eastern League. His biographies, game stories and essays have appeared in more than 65 SABR publications. The subject of his earliest Baseball Research Journal article was the Hearst Sandlot Classic, at which Willie Mays participated in a home-run-hitting contest in 1957. His story of Mays’ return to the Polo Grounds in 1962 with the Giants was first published as part of the SABR website’s First Games Back project. He is currently involved with the Retrosheet project on Negro League Games, including Mays’ games with Birmingham from 1948 through 1950. He has four children, nine grandchildren, and one great-grandchild and resides in Connecticut with wife Frances, their cats Ava and Zoe, and their dog, Buddy.

SOURCES

Of the many biographies of Willie Mays, the following is particularly helpful in showing the development of Willie Mays with the Birmingham Black Barons from 1948 through 1950.

Klima, John. 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 A. Wiley and Sons, 2009).

NOTES

1  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 A. Wiley and Sons, 2009), 215.

2  “Carl [sic] Mays Regains NAL Batting Lead with .413,” Chicago Defender, June 18, 1949: 16.

3  “Black Barons Lose [sic], 6-2, 4-1,” Pittsburgh Courier, May 14, 1949: 24; “Black Barons Cop Twin Bill,” Birmingham News, May 9, 1949: 18.

4  “Buckeyes Break 5-Game Loss Streak,” Louisville Courier-Journal, May 12, 1949: 11.

5  “Black Barons Edge Chicago, 4-3” Birmingham News, May 12, 1949: 48.

6  “Black Barons Win Two, Play Wednesday,” Birmingham News, May 23, 1949: 14.

7  “Black Barons Win Benefit Tussle, 6 to 3,” Birmingham News, May 26, 1949: 49.

8  “Barons Blank Buckeyes 7-0,” Louisville Courier-Journal, May 28, 1949: Sports, 5.

9  “Spies to Eye Cubans,” New York Sunday News, May 29, 1949: 33C.

10 “League-Leading Cubans Split 2 as Scantlebury Strikes Out 10,” New York Age, June 4, 1949: 33.

11 “Bushwicks Drop Arc Light Opener,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 2, 1949: 21.

12 The itinerary for this road trip appeared in “Birmingham Black Barons to Play Normal Red Sox Here June 16,” Alabama Citizen (Tuscaloosa, Alabama), June 4, 1949: 7.

13 “Black Barons Split Pair with Clowns,” Birmingham News, June 21. 1949: 21.

14 “Mays’ Single Gives Black Barons Win,” Birmingham News, July 11, 1949: 18.

15 “Black Barons Nip Memphis Red Sox,” Birmingham News, July 28, 1949: 42.

16 “Baltimore in 3 to 2 Victory Over Barons,” Atlanta Daily World, August 9, 1949: 5.

17 Charles Littlejohn, “Black Barons Nip Kansas City, 3-2,” Montgomery Advertiser, August 25, 1949: 16.

18 “Black Barons Defeat Buckeyes Easily, 7-1,” Birmingham News, September 24, 1949: 9.

19 Russ J. Cowans, “Move Over, You Vets, Willie Mays is Coming Up Like a Prairie Fire,” Chicago Defender, August 27, 1949: 14.

20 “Black Barons Lose Bus, Equipment but Win Two of Three,” Birmingham News, June 13, 1950: 26.

21 “Giants Sign Black Barons’ Willie Mays,” Birmingham Post-Herald, June 22, 1950: 20; “Mays, Black Barons Star, Is Going Up,” Birmingham News, June 22, 1950: 18.

22 “Mays Bats in Four/Black Barons Win, 7-1,” Birmingham News, June 18, 1950: 44.

23 “Willie Mays Sparks Barons on Big Spree,” Chicago Defender, June 24, 1950: 17.

Birmingham Black Barons center fielder Willie Mays was not originally who scout Ed Montague was looking at for the New York Giants.1 On Alex Pompez’s recommendation to the Giants’ director of minor league operations, Jack Schwartz, he was looking at Barons first baseman Alonzo Perry for the Sioux City (Iowa) Soos, the Giants’ Class-A affiliate in the Western League.2

John Saccoman wrote in Mays’ SABR biography: “In a 1954 letter to Tim Cohane, the sports editor of Look magazine, Giants scout Eddie Montague stated that he was scouting the Black Barons first baseman, Alonzo Perry, for the Giants’ Sioux City Class-A club, when Mays caught his eye. He said, ‘[T]his was the greatest young player I had ever seen in my life or my scouting career.’”3

Montague and another Giants scout, Bill Harris, went to see Mays at Rickwood Field in Birmingham. Leo Durocher wrote in his book Nice Guys Finish Last that Montague reported, “[T]hey got a kid playing center field practically barefooted that’s the best ballplayer I ever looked at. You better send somebody down there with a barrelful of money and grab this kid.”4

Multiple teams had their chances to sign Mays. In 1949 a Pittsburgh Pirates scout offered the Barons $2,000 to sign and convert Mays from an outfielder to a pitcher. The Boston Braves sent its scout Bill Maughn, and owner Lou Perini offered the Barons $7,500 for Mays in 1949, but there was a major-league rule that did not allow teams to sign players while they were still in high school. Mays graduated from Fairfield Industrial High School on May 31, 1950.

The Braves sent another scout, Hugh Wise. Wise watched Mays get one hit in a doubleheader on May 21 and said that one day was enough. The Braves did not make an offer because they had recently spent more than $100,000 to purchase outfielder Sam Jethroe from the Brooklyn Dodgers. Dodgers scout Wid Matthews said in 1949 that Mays could not hit curveballs. A second Dodgers scout, Ray Blades, was sent to see Mays in 1950. The Dodgers already had three established stars: Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe, and Jackie Robinson. The White Sox hired John Donaldson as their first African American full-time scout. He recommended Mays, but they did not listen to his recommendation to sign him. The Red Sox sent scouts Larry Woodall and George Digby, but the Red Sox did not sign Mays because they signed the Barons’ Piper Davis. The Yankees sent Bill McCorry and he had the same evaluation as the Dodgers’ Matthews: that Mays could not hit a curve. Altogether, six teams had a chance to sign Mays before the Giants had their chance.

On June 22, 1951, “with an outlay of $15,000, of which the Birmingham Black Barons will receive $9,000 and the player $6,000, the New York Giants outbid five major league clubs.”5 According to an August 15, 1951, Sporting News article, “the Black Barons [were] temporarily low on ready cash because their bus had gone up in flames in the Holland Tunnel after a New York game.”6 Birmingham general manager Eddie Glennon thought Mays could be a pitcher because of his throwing arm. Barons manager Vic Harris wanted him in the outfield so he could play every day.

Mays was sent to the Trenton Giants of the Class-B Interstate League instead of Sioux City because of racial issues. He wrote in his autobiography, Say Hey: “But Sioux City was not the place for me at the moment. The city was in an uproar because they had buried an Indian in a whites-only cemetery only a few days before. The farm club refused to take me, fearing the consequences and ‘bad’ publicity. I was surprised, but I guess I should have been shocked. I had never heard of anything like that before. Then again, I had never played outside the Negro Leagues either.”7

He wrote that his train ride from Birmingham to Hagerstown “seemed like an eternity that spring day in 1950. I kept fumbling with the bag of sandwiches that Aunt Sarah had made for me, but I was too nervous to eat. Look out the window, look at the bag, look at the hands. This ride was different. This was taking me to organized ball – the first big step in living out my boyhood dream of playing in the majors someday. … I had that chance now and I couldn’t wait to play for Trenton – so much so that I even skipped my senior prom so I could there early.”8

Mays was greeted by Trenton Giants radio broadcaster Bus Saidt at the Hagerstown train station. He met his manager, Chick Genovese, at Hagerstown Municipal Stadium. Mays wrote that Genovese was “someone who would be important to me in my first experience with so-called organized baseball. He greeted me warmly and made me feel comfortable.”9

Mays was not in the Trenton starting lineup on June 23. Jason Arnoff wrote that “Len Matte also told Bill Klink about the time after Willie Mays first joined the team for a game in Hagerstown, Maryland. Before the game Matte was working with Trenton manager Chick Genovese, who was hitting fly balls to the new player Mays. Chick Genovese was hitting fly balls all over the outfield forcing Mays to run hither and yon to catch the balls. After watching Mays catch balls in far-flung parts of the outfield, Genovese turned to Matte and said, ‘This guy has the kind of reflexes no one else has.’”10 Tom McCarthy wrote in Baseball in Trenton, “there is no doubt that Mays refined his famous basket catch in the Negro Leagues and in the minor leagues, but some credit Matte for helping Mays with the basket catch.”11

Mays also recalled his first professional weekend with Trenton in Hagerstown: “I was the first black in that particular league. And, we played in a town called Hagerstown, Maryland. I’ll never forget this day, on a Friday. And, they call you all kind of names there, “n****r” this, and “n****r” that. I said to myself – and this is why Piper Davis came in – in my mind, “Hey, whatever they call you, they can’t touch you. Don’t talk back.” Now this was on a Friday. And the Friday night I hit two doubles and a home run; they never clapped. The next day I hit the same thing. There was a house out there in the back there, I hit that twice. Now they started clapping a little bit. You know how that is, you know, they clapped a little bit. By Sunday there was a big headline in the paper: “Do Not Bother Mays.” You understand what I’m saying? They call you all kinds of names. Now this is the first two games I played. By Sunday, I come to bat, they’re all clapping. And I’m wondering, wait a minute, what happened to the Friday, what happened to the Saturday? This is running through my mind now.”12

Mays added the following: “What I didn’t get over was the long train ride that had brought me there. Although I did feel good during batting practice – I hit six or seven balls over the fence – in the game or for the rest of the four-game series. I started my organized baseball career oh-for-Maryland, and I in a segregated town, to boot. I wondered whether my showing confirmed some of those rednecks’ feelings that I wouldn’t do well in the big-time. What a way to start. And then after the game I found I couldn’t stay with the team at their hotel. The club had already made arrangements for me to spend the weekend in a small hotel for blacks.”13

He stayed at the Harmon Hotel in a segregated section of Hagerstown. James S. Hirsch wrote in his book, Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend: “Mays wasn’t particular about hotels, but he had never been separated from his teammates before. He knew about segregation, but his segregation had always been collective – with friends, relatives, or teammates who derived strength and pride from their unity. Now he was segregated and alone.”14

Some of his teammates noticed this and sometime after midnight, there was a knocking on his window. Three of his teammates, including outfielder Bob Easterbrook, climbed the fire escape and were entering his room and checking in on him. The players stayed, slept on the floor in Mays’ room, got up at 6 A.M., climbed out the window, and went to back to the Alexander Hotel. No one said anything about the late-night visit and no else had any knowledge. He slept soundly on his first night in the minors.

Mays reflected that “Chick Genovese took a special interest in me. I wouldn’t have had a better manager for my first year in organized ball, and since he was a former outfielder, it made the whole thing that much better. … Chick quickly sized up my problem over the first few games: I was pressing. He made me aware of what I was doing, and told me just to relax and not over swing – the base hits would come.”15

He later added in his autobiography that “Chick was my biggest rooter. He always watched over me. He knew about the effect that segregation was having on me, and he also knew there was nothing he could do about it. But there were things he could do in his own way. I didn’t show it, and I never spoke about it, but maybe he could sense my loneliness and anxiety. There were times when he’d eat with me in a kitchen in a restaurant, either in Hagerstown or Wilmington, so I wouldn’t be alone. Those were moments I still treasure. It was the first time I had been off by myself somewhere, for even when I was on the road with the Barons in a segregated situation, at least all of us were segregated at the same time in the same place.”16

Mays made his Trenton debut vs. the York (Pennsylvania) Roses on June 26. He contributed two hits in the 4-3 win in front of 1,321 at Dunn Field. Defensively, “Three of his five putouts were remarkable catches, with throws to third base and home plate illustrating his exceptional throwing arm. In the third inning, he sped backward and leaped high enough to spear a long fly with his bare hand, much to the amazement of the onlookers. It was quickly realized that an unusually gifted player had joined the Trenton team.”17 Jason Arnoff writes that “Bill Klink, in The Ol’ Ball Game, first quotes Eric Rodin, Trenton’s right fielder that day. Rodin describes York’s Bill Biddle hitting a ball to deep center field, a ball that would have carried over the fence. He assumed that Mays would not catch the ball. However, Mays did get to the ball, but as he reached up with his gloved hand, the ball went by his glove. Rodin continues, ‘but his reflexes were such that he went up with his bare hand against the fence, caught the ball and came down.’”18

On June 28, Mays hit his first professional home run, a grand slam, in a 21-8 win on the road against the Sunbury Athletics.

Willie Mays and John Shea wrote in the book 24 that “Trenton second baseman Harry ‘Ace’ Bell said that Mays was a target of insults in other cities, including Sunbury, Pennsylvania, where the Philadelphia A’s had a farm team. Many of these fans around the league hadn’t seen an African American play ball and were offended or even enraged by the notion of an integrated team. Mays turned heads with his elite performance and passion and began to soften some long-entrenched feelings of resistance and even hatred. Bell was impressed with how Willie rose above the abuse and focused on playing ball. ‘Willie was such a nice kid,’ Bell said. ‘He was friendly with everybody, and he would praise everybody. He’d be your best fan. And you could tell right away he could hit. There wasn’t anything that fooled Willie. I’m sure his Birmingham team had a better bunch of ballplayers than what Trenton had.’”19

Mays and Shea added: “‘We had guys looking out for him, making sure he had a room and transportation,’ said Bell, who joined the team about the same time as Mays, after graduating college. ‘A lot of places wouldn’t accept a black person. Wilmington, Hagerstown. He had to go to a different part of the town. Three or four of the kids volunteered to find a place for him in those cities. They made sure he had a room. It was always in the black section. That’s how Willie lived when we were on the road. That’s the way it was at the time.’”20

Mays, according to Say Hey, “lived in a boarding house on Spring Street in Trenton, which was five blocks from Dunn Field. The room was fine. On the road, though, the Giants, thinking I was lonely by myself, sent Trenton a pitcher named Jose Fernandez. His father was the manager of the New York Cubans. They played their home games in the Polo Grounds. We didn’t get along too well. He was a hot dog from New York and I was a country boy. One evening he didn’t wake me up in time to make the team bus and Chick jumped all over him. Fernandez didn’t last long. He was gone in a month. I was happy again.”21

Traveling on the road on the team’s bus, Genovese would try to have his players sing songs. Hirsch wrote that “Mays would start off with ‘Clarence the Clocker,’ and soon everyone would join in. In Mays’ eyes, the bus rides were no different than those he had taken with the Black Barons, teeming with goodwill and camaraderie, young men who loved baseball and dreamed of making it to the big leagues. In 1950, white Americans across the country denied blacks equal treatment on buses, but on the Trenton Giant bus, Willie Mays received special treatment. In need of rest, he would pile the duffel bags in the back, lie down, and sleep.”22

Saccoman wrote that “Mays also recalled a catch he made in Trenton in 1950. He said that Lou Heyman of Wilmington hit a ball 405 feet to dead center and he caught it barehanded, bounced off the wall, and threw the ball all the way home on the fly.”23 Mays added, “Nobody knew about it because it was just another game in a small town.”24

Within a month, Hagerstown fans warmed up to Willie as well. On July 19, Hagerstown Daily Mail sports columnist Dick Kelly wrote that Willie Mays was now turning in “a very credible performance” and “making the grade in fine style with the Trenton Giants.”25

Hirsch wrote that “Mays experimented on the field. During batting practice, he saw how close he could play in center while still being able to track down deep flies. On ground balls, he realized that if high grass or soft ground balls slowed the ball, he could reach hits in the gap while also snaring low line drives that would otherwise go for singles. For years, Mays would walk on the outfield grass before a game and throw a ball down to determine if the surface was fast or slow.”26 He added that “Mays thought he had already mastered baseball strategy, but Genovese, along with Trenton Giants general manager Bill McKechnie, expanded his education. Sitting on the bench before game or riding on the bus, the two men fired questions at Mays.”27

Genovese would send the Giants reports on Mays’ progress. For example: “He’s a major league prospect. Possesses strong arms and wrist, runs good, has good baseball instinct. Wants to learn. Should play AAA ball next year.”28 Giants owner Horace Stoneham also noticed and would visit with some of his staff to Trenton more than once to see Mays.

Mays wrote about the origins of where “Say hey!” came from: “My teammates started to call me Junior, and I began to relax, even though I was only nineteen years old. I’d often shout back, ‘Say hey!’ whenever I wanted their attention. These were all new people to me and I didn’t know their names. ‘Say hey!’ was guaranteed to get them to listen to me.”29

As the season progressed after his first professional weekend in Hagerstown, Mays kept calm when opposing pitchers sometimes threw at his head. However, “this time I just glared back at the pitcher and he got my message that he couldn’t intimidate me. As if that wasn’t enough, Eric Rodin, the next batter, did something whose message couldn’t be mistaken. After I made out, Rodin, a big rightfielder, laid down a bunt toward first base, attempting to run into the pitcher and knock him down when he tried to field it. Luckily the ball rolled foul. Who knows what would have happened? Here I was the first black ballplayer in the league’s history, and my teammate was ready to start a fight with someone over me. Even though the ball was foul, both benches emptied onto the field. It was a show of strength and support for me by my teammates, and it cleared the air.”30

Mays wrote in his autobiography: “I never believed in playing the game in a halfhearted way. And I suppose that because I put so much of myself into every at bat, every fly ball, every throw, every stolen base, that all these exertions took their toll. That first year I played hard, too. Near the end of the season, in fact, I collapsed from fatigue after playing a string of doubleheaders. One day I was so wiped out that they called for an ambulance. I’d go after every ball hit into the outfield – crashing into fences, falling on the ground, just running my head off – and think nothing of it. The other outfielders didn’t mind it at all. In fact, Mo Cunningham, our left fielder, used to kid me. He’d yell, ‘Plenty of room, Junior! We’ll let you know where the fence is.’”31

In his autobiography, Mays noted the racist epithets and profanities directed at him. He wrote that “Len Matte, our catcher, told me that he’d take care of any trouble and that I shouldn’t get involved. It was good advice. As the season wore on, there was less and less incidents and curses, until I didn’t hear them anymore. I knew, anyway that I wouldn’t be back in this league next year. I would be leaving Trenton for Minneapolis, the Class AAA in the American Association. Triple A ball was only one step from the majors.”32

Trenton finished with a 73-65 record and in fourth place, nine games behind the Wilmington Blue Rocks (Philadelphia Phillies). The Giants were 42-36 after Mays’ debut. The 42 wins after his debut were the fourth-best in the league. However, they lost 4-1 to Hagerstown in the postseason semifinals. In a February 24, 1954, Sporting News article, Genovese said, “Junior meant about three places in the standings for our club. Without him we’d finish seventh. With him we made fourth place.”33

Mays hit over .400 for most of the Trenton season, but finished with a .353 batting average, a .510 slugging percentage, and a .438 on-base percentage in 81 games. Despite not making his debut until June 25, he was voted to the 1950 Interstate League postseason all-star team along with three teammates, first baseman Robert Myers, shortstop Tomas Korczowski, and pitcher Joseph Micciche.34 Two of his teammates, right-handed pitcher Rinty Monahan (1953 Philadelphia Athletics) and outfielder Eric Rodin (1954 Giants), reached what was then termed the major leagues.35 Defensively, he led the league with 17 outfield assists. He also boosted attendance at Trenton’s Dunn Field, and whenever a runner took off from first base to second on a single, the crowd would rise in unison in expectation of a spectacular gun-down by Mays to third or home.36

“Chick’s final words to me that season were, ‘Willie, you’re going to make a lot of money one day. I hope I helped you.’”37

Mays was invited to Giants spring training in 1951 and started the season for the Minneapolis Millers of the Triple-A American Association before making his National League debut on May 25, 1951, some 11 months after making his debut in Trenton.

Trenton moved to Sunbury, Pennsylvania, for the 1951 season. Minor-league baseball returned to Trenton in 1994, replacing London, Ontario, as a Detroit Tigers affiliate. Mays became the third player overall with Trenton ties and the first by the baseball writers’ vote to be inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.38

Mays returned to Hagerstown on August 9, 2004. The Frederick News-Post’s Joshua R. Smith wrote: “There was a large reception at the Clarion Hotel. When he was introduced by Suns General Manager Kurt Landes, a green curtain parted and Mays emerged, tipping his Giants cap before sitting down to hearty applause. Mays then spoke, telling the audience he was glad he returned, so he could see what the town was all about. ‘Before I start crying,’ he said, ‘I better pass for a while,’ motioning to Landes. Mays then lifted his glasses and dabbed tears as the fans rose again.”39

Landes made two announcements before going to Hagerstown Municipal Stadium. Mays’ Giants uniform number 24 would be retired and Memorial Boulevard would be renamed Willie Mays Way.40 Smith wrote that “Mays arrived in a white Buick, and the anxious crowd cheered when he opened the door to step out. ‘I didn’t really think I would get the ovation I received today,’ Mays said. ‘It’s wonderful.’ Moments later, still wearing his suit jacket, Mays fired a strike for the game’s ceremonial first pitch. Just inside the gate to the field, the mayor’s wife, Gann Breichner, talked about how this was the best day of her husband’s career. She said she knew Mays would return to Hagerstown if he was approached correctly. ‘He’s a man with a big heart,’ she said.”41

Allen Barra wrote in his book, Mickey and Willie: Mantle and Mays, The Parallel Lives of Baseball’s Golden Age: “It was all the same to him where he played, but he had one objection to Trenton: the league was Class-B. No one could ever be certain how the Negro Leagues stacked up to the different levels of white minor leagues, but the Barons, Willie told Charlie Einstein, played better baseball than he saw at Trenton (and probably baseball as good as he later saw in Triple A). ‘No one really got to know how good the players were in the Negro League since the press’ – meaning, of course, the white press – ‘never covered the games. But I knew I was so much richer from it. I didn’t realize that my leaving was another nail in the coffin of all-black baseball.’”42

Genovese said after Mays played for him in 1950: “Junior is the best-looking young player I’ve seen in many a day. I played in Louisville when Duke Snider was at St. Paul and always thought Duke would become a tremendous hitter. Willie doesn’t have Duke’s power, but he can do everything else better. I believe he has the strongest, most accurate arm in baseball. I have not seen Carl Furillo, but I cannot believe any human can out-throw Mays. It’s a low line strike every time, no matter how far out he may be. Mays in time will be an outstanding hitter. He hits straight away most of the time, and while you would not call him a real power hitter, he is always getting a piece of the ball, and sometimes will hit it a helluva ways. He hasn’t seen any pitching yet, because he was too good for our league, but I predict wherever he goes he will, in a short while, learn to hit pitching.”43

STEVEN M. GLASSMAN has been a SABR member since 1994 and is the secretary of the Connie Mack-Dick Allen Chapter. He wrote articles for Greatest Comeback Games and Baseball’s Biggest Blowout Games. Steven also contributed articles for the SABR Convention Games Project and the Century Committee for the 1921 season. Altogether, he has written six Games Project articles. Steven also wrote eight SABR Convention articles, most recently “The Hidden Potato Trick” (SABR 50). The Temple University graduate in sport and recreation management is currently the director of sports information at Manor College in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania. Steven is also an entertainment staff member/phanstormer for the Philadelphia Phillies, statistics crew member for the Trenton Thunder, and game day staff member for the Trenton Terror. He also serves as first-base coach/scorekeeper for his summer league softball team. Steven was also certified Microsoft Office Word 2016. He has attended Phillies games since the 1970s. Born in Philadelphia, Steven lives in Warminster, Pennsylvania.

SOURCES

In addition to the sources mentioned in the Notes, the author referred to https://www.baseball-reference.com/ and https://www.retrosheet.org/ for box scores, play-by-plays, and other pertinent information.

NOTES

1  Montague was a Giants scout in 1942-1943 and 1946-1981.

2  Pompez previously recommended Monte Irvin and Hank Thompson to the Giants.

3  John Saccoman. “Willie Mays,” SABR BioProject, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/willie-mays/.

4  Saccoman.

5  “Giants Outbid Five Clubs for Mays, Negro Prospect,” The Sporting News, July 5, 1951: 41.

6  Clay Felker, “Mays Dynamite at Bat, Magnet in Field,” The Sporting News, August 15, 1951: 3.

7  Willie Mays with Lou Sahadi, Say Hey: The Autobiography of Willie Mays (New York: Pocket Books, 1988), 40.

8  Mays with Sahadi, 41.

9  Mays with Sahadi, 43.

10 Jason Aronoff, Going, Going … Caught! (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2009), 152.

11 Tom McCarthy. Baseball in Trenton (Charleston, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing, 2003), 31.

12 Academy of Achievement, “Willie Mays Biography – Academy of Achievement,” accessed February 26, 2023. https://achievement.org/achiever/willie-mays/#interview.

13 Mays with Sahadi, 43.

14 James S. Hirsch, Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend (New York: Scribner, 2010), 66.

15 Mays with Sahadi, 43.

16 Mays with Sahadi, 44-45.

17 Randolph Linthurst, “Willie Mays’ First Season,” https://sabr.org/journal/article/willie-mays-first-season/. This article was originally in SABR’s Baseball Research Journal in 1974.

18 Aronoff.

19 Willie Mays and John Shea, 24 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2020), 53.

20 Mays and Shea, 53.

21 Mays with Sahadi, 46. According to his Sporting News player contract card, Fernandez joined Trenton on June 29, 1950, went on the disabled list on July 20, was reinstated on July 31, and was released on September 18.

22 Hirsch, 68-69.

23 Saccoman.

24 Aronoff.

25 Jacob Kaplan, “‘Oh-for-Maryland’: When Willie Mays Said Hey to Hub City,” Boundary Stories, June 22, 2017, https://boundarystones.weta.org/2017/06/22/oh-maryland-when-willie-mays-said-hey-hub-city.

26 Hirsch, 69.

27 Hirsch, 69.

28 Hirsch, 69.

29 Mays with Sahadi, 43-44.

30 Mays with Sahadi, 45-46.

31 Mays with Sahadi, 47.

32 Mays with Sahadi, 47.

33 Joe King, “New Spirit on Club as Mays Marches Back From Army,” The Sporting News, February 24, 1954: 5.

34 Adam Hyzdu (1996), Dernell Stenson (1998), Raul Gonzalez (1999), Zoilo Almonte (2012), and Trey Amburgey (2018) are Trenton outfielders who were voted to the Eastern League Postseason All-Star team.

35 Rodin was in the same outfield with Mays, playing one inning with him on September 12, 1954, vs. the St. Louis Cardinals. He entered the game as a defensive replacement for Mays for the final three innings against the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field on September 21, 1954. Rodin pinch-hit for Mays and remained in the game for the final six innings at the next day’s game.

36 Mays with Sahadi, 47.

37 Mays with Sahadi, 47.

38 These are the Hall of Fame inductees who have a connection to Trenton: Bill McKechnie (1962 Veterans Committee) was the Trenton Giants general manager in 1950. Goose Goslin (1968 Veterans) was the player-manager of the Trenton Senators from 1939 through 1941. Walt Alston (1983 Veterans) was the player-manager of the Trenton Packers in 1944 and 1945. Frank Grant (2006 Veterans) played second base for the 1889 Cuban Giants of the independent Middle States League. Derek Jeter (2020 BBWAA) played five games for the Trenton Thunder (New York Yankees) as part of a rehabilitation assignment from July 7 to July 11, 2003, and two games from July 2 to July 3, 2011. Bus Saidt broadcast Trenton Giant games on WBUD from 1947 to 1950. He began working for the Trentonian in 1964 and then the Trenton Times in 1967. He was posthumously given the 1992 BBWAA Career Excellence Award.

39 Joshua R. Smith. “Willie Says Hey to Hagerstown,” Frederick (Maryland) News-Post, August 10, 2004, https://www.fredericknewspost.com/archives/willie-says-hey-to-hagerstown/article_75611b9e-9ea3-5eae-86b8-8802d49cec91.html.

40 Mays wore uniform number 12 for Trenton. Jackie Robinson’s uniform number 42 was universally retired in 1997. It not known if Hagerstown retired any more numbers after Mays’ in 2004. The retired number is on the right-field wall.

41 Smith.

42 Allan Barra, Mickey and Willie: Mantle and Mays, The Parallel Lives of Baseball’s Golden Age (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2013), 112-113.

43 Joe King, “Willie Changes Giants’ Gloom into Grins,” The Sporting News, February 24, 1954: 5-6.

Willie Mays with the Minneapolis Millers in 1951. (SABR-Rucker Archive)

The New York Giants purchased the Minneapolis Millers in 1946. It took five years for Minneapolis fans to fully process the impact.

A charter member of the American Association in 1902, the Millers had a rich history that extended to the final decades of the nineteenth century. The locals had the chance to cheer on many players at cozy and quaint Nicollet Park who ended up in the Hall of Fame. Some were on their way up, such as Roger Bresnahan and Red Faber, although more were veterans who had already established their credentials in the majors, including Rube Waddell and Zack Wheat. Such was the nature of the minor leagues then, prospects combined with those hanging on as long as their talents could earn them a living.

However, the stalwarts were those who never reached such lofty levels but returned year after year – Henri Rondeau, Joe Hauser, Spencer Harris – and were familiar stars to loyalists.

Mike Kelley had operated the Millers since 19241 before being one of the last of the independent owners to turn his operation over to a major-league team. The Millers had had loose affiliations in the past, such as with the Boston Red Sox in 1937-38. However, the team was not fully stocked with players under the control of a parent team. The relationship did give Minneapolis fans the chance to see Ted Williams, who spent a season with the Millers in 1938 and won the league triple crown.

But the 1946 sale was a break toward the Millers being a team used for player development rather than an entity in their own right.2 The fans got an inkling of what was to come with Harold “Tookie” Gilbert. After signing as a 17-year-old with the Giants, he was assigned to the Millers in 1947, too high a level as it turned out. Gilbert did better at lower levels and was back in Minneapolis in 1950. After only six games, the Giants brought him up to the majors, which again proved too much for him. Minneapolis writers used Gilbert as a cautionary tale against rushing a talented prospect too fast, and Gilbert also served as a warning to fans – even if they didn’t yet realize it – that life as a farm team would be different.

Willie Mays, on the other hand, began playing professional baseball while still in high school. He was proving himself on the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro American League. After Mays graduated from Fairfield Industrial High School in 1950, the New York Giants signed him and sent the young star to Trenton, their farm team in the Class-B Interstate League, in 1950.3 Clearly ready for more, New York placed him with Minneapolis, one of their top farm teams, in 1951.

The Giants had two Triple-A teams in 1951, the Millers and the Ottawa Giants in the International League. The Giants had abandoned Jersey City as a Triple-A team after the 1950 season and kept one of their farm teams in Ottawa in 1951. It was the last year the Giants had two Triple-A teams. SABR members Charlie Bevis and Mark Davis provided insight into why Mays went to Minneapolis rather than Ottawa – that the Giants lacked a commitment to the Ottawa team, having it play on a makeshift diamond within Lansdowne Park, which was the home of the Ottawa team in the Canadian Football League – and that Minneapolis seemed a natural pick over Ottawa for a prospect of Mays’ stature.4

The Giants were committed to Mays, even keeping him from playing winter ball in Cuba.5 Whether it was fear of injury or some other reason for keeping Mays out of winter ball,6 the Giants clearly thought he was ready to perform at the highest level of the minor leagues.

It didn’t take long for others to concur.

As their homestead was being pummeled by mid-March snowstorms,7 the Millers gathered in sunny Sanford, Florida, and opened their exhibition season with a split of games with the Ottawa Giants. Mays homered in one of the games and knocked himself out crashing into the outfield fence in the other. The next day, Halsey Hall provided the first reports on Mays in the Minneapolis Tribune: “You watch him run and throw and hit and you are on his side in a minute, although nobody has thrown many curve balls at him yet and he’s still a green pea in the organized realm. … Willie is lithe, beautifully muscled, just under six feet, weighs 170 pounds and doesn’t vary five pounds in his weight off and in season. Righthanded all the way, he has great power to right center and here the dear old memory of Nicollet’s fences in that direction come back.”8

As the Millers won 13 of 19 spring-training games, Mays led the way with a .408 batting average, 5 home runs, and 29 runs batted in. Minneapolis opened the regular season with a circuit through Columbus, Toledo, Louisville, and Indianapolis. Mays hit .352 in those 13 games.

“Any worry about Willie Mays has just about evaporated,” wrote Halsey Hall as the Millers prepared for their home opener. “He has made a swing through the East now, has faced all kinds of pitching, has been held hitless in only one game. … His throwing for power has lived up to reputation. … His throws are not ‘arches.’ Rather, they are power-laden, even when he throws to put the ball into the hands of a receiver on the ground.

“We think you’ll like Willie.”9

For a time, it had appeared that Minneapolis’s Nicollet Park would be a relic of the past by 1951. It was still a relic – but one with a few years left in it.

In late 1948 the Minneapolis Baseball and Athletic Association (essentially the New York Giants) bought land just west of the Minneapolis city limits and announced plans for a new ballpark for the Millers. The Giants said they hoped to have an 18,000-seat stadium ready by 1950.10 For some reason, a new ballpark on the site never happened. A common perception is that a moratorium on building sports facilities during the Korean War was the reason. However, it doesn’t explain why construction (which likely would have been allowed to continue) hadn’t started by the time the National Production Authority issued its moratorium nearly two years later.11

Whatever the reason, the Millers were still at Nicollet Park. Beyond the inviting nature of Nicollet’s fences, referred to by Halsey Hall in a preceding paragraph, its location off Lake Street and Nicollet Avenue provided a convenient locale for Willie and other players to live.

Willie rented a room at 3616 4th Avenue, within walking distance of the ballpark. Across the street from Mays lived two other Black players on the Millers, Ray Dandridge and Dave Barnhill.12 Andy Sturdevant, then a columnist for MinnPost, wrote that the players were “living in one of the centers of black life in the Twin Cities in the 1950s. The neighborhood’s business and residential district was located around 38th Street and extended north and south several blocks. Forty-Second Street was the boundary ‘– the neighborhood to the north of 42nd Street had one of the highest percentages of black residents in the city,’ according to one study by the city, with the neighborhood to the south almost entirely white. It was one of a few areas in the Twin Cities where African Americans owned their own houses in the postwar boom years, when the Twin Cities’ black population grew by 60 percent. … In the early 1950s, the neighborhood was home to a large number of black-owned shops, banks, groceries, community centers and churches.”13

The weather in early May wasn’t conducive to baseball, but nearly 6,500 fans showed up for the home opener, a Millers victory stopped by rain and poor field conditions in the last of the seventh. “Willie Mays said howdy do as bombastically as any newcomer in history,” wrote Hall. “He got three hits, made a sparkling catch against the flagpole, unfurled a typical throw.”14

A week later Mays made an incredible catch of a drive hit by Louisville’s Taft Wright. “Willie Mays turned scoreboard boy,” wrote Hall. “In the third inning the young genius looked like he was hanging up numbers as he leaped almost to the level of the big league board for a fly ball, banged into the wall and doubled a runner at second base. It will rank as one of the greatest catches you will ever see.”15

Meanwhile, Wright put his head down and hustled into second base, assuming he had a stand-up double, and was incredulous when the umpire informed him he was out. Wright remained at second until manager Pinky Higgins came out and told him that Willie indeed had caught the ball.16

Not many people saw the catch by Mays; attendance for the game was 1,351. In the nearly three weeks the Millers were home, the average attendance was under 2,700. Unpleasant weather kept the crowds down, and many fans planned to see the new phenom when temperatures warmed up. They were in for a surprise.

Throughout the homestand, Mays thrilled those who braved the cold with his bat and his glove in addition to the excitement he generated on the basepaths. He kept it up when the Millers departed for games in Milwaukee and Kansas City. With another two hits on May 23, Mays had a batting average of .477 with 8 home runs, 38 runs, and 30 RBIs in 35 games. It was too much for the parent club to ignore.

The next day, the Giants decided it was time to promote Mays. The Millers were in Sioux City for an exhibition game when Willie got the word. Mays said that Giants manager Leo Durocher had seen him during spring training and told him he would be up later in the year. “I didn’t expect to come up that quickly,” Mays said, “and I didn’t want to come up.”17

Mays was comfortable with how he was playing with the Millers and fearful of how he would do in the majors. He started slowly with New York; he was hitless in his first three games before homering off Boston’s Warren Spahn in the next one. Another drought followed, and his batting average slipped to .0476 (compared with .477 with the Millers), and dropped a bit more before he turned it around. He hit .274 with 68 RBIs in 121 major-league games. Mays received the National League Rookie of the Year Award in 1951 and played 23 seasons in the majors, the greatest baseball player ever in the opinion of many.

Mays wasn’t the first, but to that point he was the most significant, player to be plucked in midseason by the parent club.18 Giants President Horace Stoneham tried to mollify the Millers fans with a quarter-page letter – which appeared beneath ads for United Sewing Service, Farmer Jones Store, and Knaeble’s Home Furnishers and Funeral Directors – in that Sunday’s Minneapolis Tribune. “We appreciate his worth to the Millers, but in all fairness Mays himself must be a factor in these considerations. Merit must be recognized. … Mays is entitled to his promotion, and the chance to prove that he can play major league baseball.”19

Stoneham’s message struck a positive chord with the Tribune, which printed an editorial three days later that read, in part, “… we have not witnessed such a tender observance of the amenities since Alphonse first bowed to Gaston in the comic strips. Stoneham thought that the Mays incident deserved an explanation, and so he explained it in poignant phrases calculated to thaw the coldest fury of the Miller baseball fan. … Give credit to Horace Stoneham – he was gentleman enough to spread a little epistolary balm and ointment on the wounds opened up by Willie Mays’ departure.”20

Whatever balm the fans felt, it was not epistolary, and reporters shared the cynicism. After a call-up of another player (Hank Thompson) by the Giants later in the season, Halsey Hall wrote, “Let [Millers general manager] Rosy Ryan and [manager] Tommy Heath have the gold removed from their teeth and send it to the New York front office. They’ll get it sooner or later anyway.”21

Dick Cullum echoed Hall’s sentiments and starkly spelled out what minor-league baseball had become:

“Baseball on the Triple-A farm is mere exhibition training and is not being conducted with an earnest effort to win games.”22

Mays made a few more playing appearances in Minnesota, in exhibition games at Nicollet Park and Metropolitan Stadium, which became the Millers’ home in 1956. He also played for the National League, in the 1965 All-Star Game. Mays returned for one last exhibition game, against the Twins in 1971, in which he played an inning in center field and one inning at each infield position.23

One of the largest crowds of the season came to the Met for that exhibition game. As a pair of 16-year-old cousins waited for the gates to open, one spotted an older man who appeared to have the same look of anticipation as the teenagers. One of the younger fans thought about asking the man if he had seen Willie play for the Millers. I’m still sorry I didn’t.

STEW THORNLEY joined SABR in 1979 and became motivated to do research and writing. He began researching the history of the Minneapolis Millers, whom Willie Mays played for in 1951, and in 1988 had his first book published, On to Nicollet: The Glory and Fame of the Minneapolis Millers.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Charlie Bevis, Mark Davis, Rod Nelson, Gary Fink, Richard Musterer, and Steve Gietschier among others for providing interesting and valuable information in response to the many queries I had on SABR-L, the SABR listserv.

NOTES

1  Kelley had been a player-manager with the St. Paul Saints in the early years of the American Association. He left St. Paul to become manager of the Minneapolis Millers in 1906 and was suspended by the league after twice attacking the integrity of umpires. He was eventually reinstated and spent many more years with St. Paul before returning to Minneapolis in 1924.

2  In a final act of independence (or perhaps defiance), Kelley acted on one final brainstorm that produced a record crowd for Nicollet Park. Moving up a game with the Saints from later in the season to create a Sunday doubleheader on April 28, 1946, Kelley then ordered the ushers not to close the gates and to let all who desired to see the game in. The result was a paid attendance of 15,761, with 5,000 of those fans on the field, some within 10 feet of the baselines. Special ground rules had to be implemented and all balls hit into the crowd were ruled doubles. The Millers and Saints ended up with 24 doubles in the twin bill as the Saints swept the doubleheader.

3  James S. Hirsch, Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend (New York: Scribner, 2010), 65. Hirsch said Mays went to Trenton in a Class-B league although the Giants would have preferred one of their Class-A affiliates. However, Hirsch says one of the affiliates was in the Southern Association, which included Birmingham. “The Giants weren’t about to send their prize recruit into the heart of the Old Confederacy,” Hirsch wrote. The other Class-A team was in Sioux City, Iowa, but “Racial tensions had been simmering there since an American Indian had been buried in a cemetery for whites, and the Giants feared the arrival of a black baseball player could plunge that town into turmoil.” Note: The Giants did not have a farm team in the Southern Association in 1950; their other Class-A club was in Jacksonville, Florida, in the South Atlantic League. Both the South Atlantic League and Southern Association had a number of teams in the Deep South. Not only that, the South Atlantic League did not integrate until 1953, the Southern Association not until 1954 and then only briefly. For more, see John Thorn’s Baseball Integration Timeline, https://ourgame.mlblogs.com/baseball-integration-timeline-b289bc04ca12.

4  Input from SABR members Charlie Bevis and Mark Davis provided insight on why the Giants sent Mays to Minneapolis rather than Ottawa. Email correspondence in July 2022.

5  “Willie Miranda, Nat Rookie, Sparkles in Cuban League,” The Sporting News, February 14, 1951: 25. The Almendares club in the Cuban League had sought to sign Mays after losing another outfielder, Dick Williams, to the military, but the New York Giants refused.

6  After establishing himself with the Giants, Mays played in the Puerto Rican League, forming an eminent outfield with Roberto Clemente and Bob Thurman on a Santurce Cangrejeros team that won the Caribbean Series in 1954-1955.

7  A Minnesota adage was to not take off snow tires until after the boys’ high-school basketball tournament, which seemed to be accompanied by heavy snow each year. In 1951 the storms hit before and after the tournament and even caused a sizable section of Williams Arena, site of the tournament, to collapse a few days before the tournament.

8  Halsey Hall, “19-Year-Old Miller in Fifth Year of Baseball,” Minneapolis Tribune, March 20, 1951: 15.

9  Halsey Hall, “It’s a Fact,” Minneapolis Tribune, May 1, 1951: 18.

10 Halsey Hall, “New Ball Park Deal Closed,” Minneapolis Tribune, December 13, 1948: 1.

11 The Minneapolis Park Board got permission to continue construction of football and baseball stadiums on the Parade Grounds on the edge of downtown Minneapolis despite the NPA moratorium, an indication that the Giants could have finished any baseball stadium it had started by that time. The Giants originally seemed intent on having a stadium finished by 1950 at the latest, and regular updates on the ballpark appeared in the St. Louis Park newspaper through 1949 before mysteriously disappearing in early 1950. The Giants, who had bought the land from a neighboring restaurant, held the property into the 1970s. The restaurant, which had reportedly sold the land at a discount, banking on a ballpark bringing in more customers, unsuccessfully sued the Giants based on an agreement the restaurant claimed it had with the Giants to be able to buy back the land if there was no ballpark on it within five years.

12 Rolf Felstad, “Such a One Is Willie,” Minneapolis Tribune, Sunday, May 27, 1951: 3F.

13 Andy Sturdevant, “Willie Mays’ South Minneapolis Neighborhood,” MinnPost, October 12, 2016, https://www.minnpost.com/stroll/2016/10/willie-mays-south-minneapolis-neighborhood-just-two-months-1951.

14 Halsey Hall, “Millers ‘Mudders’ Overwhelm Columbus 11-0,” Minneapolis Tribune, May 2, 1951: 19.

15 Halsey Hall, “Millers Beat Colonels 10-9,” Minneapolis Tribune, May 8, 1951: 21.

16 Rob Tanenbaum, “Minneapolis Ignored Mays,” Minneapolis Star, January 23, 1979: 3D.

17 Author interview with Willie Mays, July 9, 2002.

18 Ottawa fans were experiencing the same bruised feelings as those in Minneapolis. When the Giants called up Mays, they sent shortstop Artie Wilson, who had been a star with Birmingham in the Negro American League, to Ottawa. When the Millers had an injury to infielder Rudy Rufer, the Giants then transferred Wilson to the Millers to fill the gap. Joe Hendrickson, “Sports Views,” Minneapolis Tribune, June 6, 1951: 20.

19 Minneapolis Tribune, May 27, 1951: 4E.

20 “That Stoneham Letter,” Minneapolis Tribune, May 30, 1951: 6.

21 Halsey Hall, “It’s a Fact,” Minneapolis Tribune, August 31, 1951: 19.

22 Dick Cullum, “Cullum’s Column,” Minneapolis Tribune, August 30, 1951: 18.

23 For the Giants, Mays played in exhibition games in Minnesota against the Millers on August 11, 1954; June 23, 1955; June 7, 1956; June 17, 1957; and June 15, 1959. He played in an exhibition game against the Chicago White Sox on May 19, 1958, and against the Minnesota Twins on August 9, 1971. He also played for the National League in the All-Star Game in Minnesota on July 13, 1965. In eight games, he had a batting average of .455 with five home runs and seven runs batted in.

Willie Mays batted .298 in 399 career games at the Polo Grounds and hit 98 home runs. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)

Certain ballparks complement the strengths of specific players. Yankee Stadium, which opened in 1923, was termed The House That Ruth Built. One reason for such a slogan was the short distance to the right-field stands, which seemed to cater to the powerful left-handed stroke of Babe Ruth.1 While the benefits of Ruth playing in Yankee Stadium were immediate, it took many years for a player to take advantage of the vast center field at the Polo Grounds. That player was Willie Mays.

New York City was home to playing fields termed the Polo Grounds from 1876 through 1963. The first Polo Grounds, at 110th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, was used for polo. In 1880 the New York Metropolitans, owned by John B. Day, began playing baseball at the site. Day moved the Metropolitans to the American Association in 1883 while also taking control of a team from Troy, New York. That team was called the Gothams and played in the new National League. They became the Giants in 1885. Both teams played at the Polo Grounds after a second field was built on the site. The Metropolitans ceased operating after the 1887 season.

In 1889 New York City had plans for the 110th Street site and Day looked for a new home for the Giants. He settled on a field in Coogan’s Hollow at 155th Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan for the new Polo Grounds. The Giants quickly got a neighbor, the New York team in the newly formed Players’ League. They played their games at a field adjacent to the new Polo Grounds, Brotherhood Park. The Players’ League folded after one year. The Giants decided Brotherhood Park was a better venue and made it their home field. It was also called the Polo Grounds.2

A fire just after the 1911 season began caused widespread damage to the wooden ballpark. The new ballpark, built with steel, concrete, and marble, was ready three months later.3 This version of the Polo Grounds became the home of the Giants until they moved to San Francisco at the end of the 1957 season.

This last manifestation of the Polo Grounds was unique among ballparks. The right-field foul pole was just 258 feet from home plate while left field was 277 feet. However, both the right-field and left-field stands extended straight out, finally curving as they reached the center-field bleachers. The power alleys in both right and left were approximately 450 feet from home plate while center field was even more distant, 483 feet. A superb center fielder was required to cover this wide expanse of ground. Over the years, the Giants had good center fielders but it wasn’t until 1951 that the team found a perfect fit in Willie Mays.

His journey to the Polo Grounds began in Birmingham, Alabama, where he joined the Black Barons of the Negro American League in 1948.

On a barnstorming trip to Birmingham, Roy Campanella became excited at seeing Mays patrol center field and throwing out the speedy Larry Doby at home plate.4 He told the Brooklyn Dodgers they had to see this kid. They sent a scout, Wid Matthews, to look him over. Apparently, Mathews was not impressed, saying, “He could not hit a curve ball.”5 The Dodgers passed on Mays.

Another team that looked at Mays was the New York Giants. In a quirk of fortune, Giants scout Eddie Montague was looking at another Black Barons player when he spotted Mays. Montague said Mays was the greatest young player he had ever seen. The Giants quickly signed Mays in 1950 with a bonus of $4,000 and a salary of $250 per month.6 Fate had intervened as Mays was destined for the Polo Grounds, not Ebbets Field, which was the Dodgers’ home ballpark.

The Giants assigned Mays to the Trenton team in the Class-B Interstate League. After hitting .355 and playing a flawless center field at Trenton, he was invited to join the top farm team of the Giants, the Minneapolis Millers, for 1951 spring training. In a game with the parent club, Mays had a double and a home run and attracted the attention of Giants manager Leo Durocher. Durocher wanted Mays to play center field for the Giants in 1951. Horace Stoneham, the Giants owner, felt he needed more time in the minor leagues, given that he was only 19. Mays began the season with Minneapolis.

The Giants got off to a slow start while Mays was starring with the Millers. As the Giants struggled, Durocher kept lobbying Stoneham to bring Mays up to the majors. In late May Durocher finally got his wish and Mays became a Giant. He was no stranger to the Polo Grounds, having played several games there with the Black Barons.

Mays made his debut on May 25 in Philadelphia’s Shibe Park. He went hitless and also struggled in the field. In the next two games in Philadelphia, he also went hitless. Returning to the Polo Grounds for a three-game series against the Boston Braves, Mays hit a home run over the left-field roof against future Hall of Famer Warren Spahn in the first inning. That was his only hit in the series. In the Giants’ next game, against the Pittsburgh Pirates, he went 0-for-5. He was 1-for-26 in his first seven games.

After the game with the Pirates, Mays was found crying in the clubhouse. Coaches Herman Franks and Freddie Fitzsimmons called for Durocher. Mays told Durocher he couldn’t hit big-league pitching and should be sent to the minors. Durocher responded, “As long as I’m the manager of the Giants, you are my center fielder. Tomorrow, next week, next month. You’re here to stay. With your talent, you’re going to get plenty of hits.”7

Durocher also had some advice for Mays about his difficulties at the plate. He had noticed that Mays was turning over his right hand too quickly when swinging, leading to groundballs to the left side. He wanted Mays to take the ball to right field. Finally, he told Mays to pull up his pants as a way to raise his strike zone.8

Durocher also had the following guidance for Mays as he patrolled center field: “You have to catch balls line to line. The ball goes to the left, you gotta be over there. The ball goes to the right, you gotta be over there. Wherever the ball goes in the outfield, you gotta catch it.”9 Buck O’Neil summarized how well Mays pursued fly balls by stating, “While there are players faster than Mays, no one was faster while a fly ball was in the air.”10

In the next game against the Pirates, on June 2, Mays was moved from third in the batting order to eighth. He responded by going 2-for-4 as the Giants won 14-3. Mays then went 13-for-33 in the final nine games of the homestand. There were no further concerns about him at the plate. In addition to his improved hitting, Mays was playing a flawless center field after some misfortune in that first game.

As the season progressed, the Dodgers surged and had a 13-game lead over the Giants on August 11. On the 14th the two teams began a three-game series at the Polo Grounds. The Giants won the first game, 4-2. The second game pitted Ralph Branca of the Dodgers against Jim Hearn of the Giants. With the two teams tied 1-1 after seven innings, Billy Cox led off the Dodgers’ eighth with a single. Jackie Robinson pinch-hit for Wayne Terwilliger and flied out. Hearn committed a balk, moving Cox to second. Branca followed with a single, moving Cox to third and bringing up the dangerous Carl Furillo.

With runners on first and third, Furillo hit a fly ball to right-center field. Joseph Sheehan of the New York Times had the following description of what happened next: “It looked plenty deep enough to bring in Cox, especially since Mays had to run a long way to get the ball. But Willie, making a complete whirling pivot on the dead run, cut loose with a tremendous peg that boomed into [Wes] Westrum’s mitt in perfect position for the catcher to tag the sliding Cox.”11 Eddie Brannick, the Giants road secretary since 1922, said, “I’ve seen [Tris] Speaker, [Joe] DiMaggio, [Terry] Moore, all of them, but I’ve never seen anything like that throw. This kid made the greatest throw I ever looked at.”12

Both the Dodgers and Giants players were in disbelief. All the players and fans were certain the Dodgers were going to take the lead but the game remained tied after the inning-ending double play. Mays was first up in the bottom of the eighth and received a standing ovation. He singled to center field and scored on a two-run home run by Westrum. The Giants won, 3-1.

Whether this play or game proved to be the catalyst, the Giants went on a prolonged winning streak and tied the Dodgers for the National League lead during the last week of the season. They remained tied at the end of the season and a three-game playoff was needed to decide the pennant winner. That playoff ended with the Bobby Thomson home run that gave the Giants the pennant. Mays was on deck when Thomson hit the home run.

The 1951 season had to be considered a success for Mays. Durocher’s contribution cannot be underestimated. Durocher was considered a tough taskmaster who demanded the utmost from his players. He also realized that not all players respond to such treatment. Durocher understood that Mays, a Black 20-year-old playing and living in a strange environment, had his confidence shaken in his first seven games in the major leagues. If Durocher employed those tough tactics with Mays, his performance may have suffered. Instead, Durocher softened his approach and reassured Mays that he belonged in the major leagues. Bill Rigney, who succeeded Durocher as Giants manager after the 1955 season, gave the former skipper a lot of credit for Mays’ development.13

Monte Irvin also played a big part in helping Mays make the transition by ensuring that he did not develop any bad habits in New York City, the city that never sleeps. Mays said: “Monte taught me how to treat others and how to be treated. He played the game right and treated people right. He was a thinker. He made sure I didn’t get into trouble.”14

Another individual who had a major influence on Mays in 1951 was Frank Forbes, a Harlem boxing promoter who was assigned by the Giants to be more or less Mays’ guardian. Forbes wanted a good home environment for Mays and found a place on the first floor of a home owned by David and Ann Goosby at the corner of 155th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, a short walk to the Polo Grounds. Mrs. Goosby prepared meals for Mays, washed his clothes, and provided sage advice. Mays also enjoyed playing stickball with the neighborhood kids. With Irvin, Forbes, and Mrs. Goosby, Mays would have a difficult time getting into trouble.

When Mays returned home to Alabama, he received his draft notice. The Korean War was still being fought and Congress had approved an expansion of the US military. Mays pursued a deferment given that his income was supporting his family. His deferment request was denied and he was told to report for duty on May 29, 1952. As a result, he went to spring training and began the 1952 season with the Giants before joining the Army.

At Fort Eustis, Virginia, Mays played a significant amount of baseball on the base team. While in the Army he perfected his trademark basket catch. He had seen Bill Rigney catch infield popups using that catch. Mays felt that making the catch close to his waist gave him a greater opportunity to retrieve the ball quickly and make any necessary throw. (Since Mays adopted such an approach, no other outfielder comes to mind who has made use of the basket catch.)

Alvin Dark, Monte Irvin, Wes Westrum, and Willie Mays, left to right, kept the Giants in the thick of many pennant races. (SABR-Rucker Archive)

After the 1953 season, the Giants made a significant trade with the Milwaukee Braves. The Giants received left-handed pitchers Johnny Antonelli and Don Liddle and others for Bobby Thomson and Sam Calderone. Antonelli would have a big impact on the 1954 season.

Mays had a banner year with the Giants in 1954 as they won the pennant. He showed no rust after serving in the Army. In fact, it was somewhat obvious that playing Army baseball had enhanced his strength, maturity, and hitting skills. In his first 80 games, he hit 30 home runs. Sportswriters and fans were wondering if he was a threat to Babe Ruth’s record of 60 home runs. However, Durocher had another idea. He suggested to Mays that rather than hit home runs, he should be hitting to all fields and pursuing the batting championship.

The strategy worked as Mays went into the final day of the season battling teammate Don Mueller and Dodgers star Duke Snider. Mays went 3-for-5 and won the title with an average of .345. He hit 41 home runs and had 110 RBIs. He was voted the league’s Most Valuable Player.

The Cleveland Indians won 111 games as they easily captured the American League pennant. The first game of the World Series was played on September 29 with pitcher Sal Maglie starting for the Giants and Bob Lemon for the Indians. The Indians scored two runs in the top of the first but the Giants tied it in the bottom of the third. The game stayed tied as the two teams entered the top of the eighth inning.

Leading off for the Indians, Larry Doby drew a walk. Al Rosen’s single put runners on first and second with no outs. Durocher replaced Maglie with Don Liddle. The first batter Liddle faced, Vic Wertz, already had three hits and two RBIs. With a 2-and-1 count, Liddle’s next pitch was over the middle of the plate and Wertz hit a long fly, possibly 450 feet, to center field.

As soon as the ball was hit, Mays turned, ran with his back to the plate, and pounded his glove. The New York Times’ John Drebinger described what followed: “Traveling on the wings of the wind, Willie caught the ball directly in front of the green boarding facing the right-center bleachers and with his back still to the diamond.”15

Once he caught the ball, Mays had the presence of mind to realize Doby would be tagging up at second base. If he didn’t get the ball back quickly, Doby might even score. So after making the catch, Mays pivoted and unleashed a throw to second baseman Davey Williams, holding Doby at third. Even with Doby at third and only one out, the Indians failed to score.

The Giants ultimately won the game, 5-2, as Dusty Rhodes pinch-hit a three-run home run in the bottom of the 10th. While Rhodes became a hero, the game was really won in the top of the eighth with the catch and throw that Willie made. Whenever World Series highlights are shown, this play tends to be front and center. It has become known as “The Catch” and it only could have happened at the spacious Polo Grounds.

The Giants went on to win the next three games and sweep the Series. At the age of 23, Willie Mays had been in two World Series, won a batting title and an MVP, and made “The Catch.”

Mays followed his 1954 performance with another excellent year in 1955. He hit 51 home runs as Durocher decided the Giants needed more power and asked Mays to hit for the fences. However, the year was bittersweet. During the last game of the season, Durocher pulled Mays aside and told him he would not be back in 1956. Tearfully, Mays responded, “But Mr. Leo, it’s going to be different with you gone. You won’t be here to help me.”16 Then Durocher told him, “Willie Mays doesn’t need help from anyone.”17

Rigney was named the next Giants manager. The former Millers skipper decided to establish a new culture and treat all the players equally. Rigney realized that there were some players who weren’t happy with Durocher’s treatment of Mays. Rigney publicly criticized Mays and even fined him for not running out a pop fly to the catcher. In addition to the tension between Rigney and Mays, the Giants were struggling to win games. As a result, Dark and Whitey Lockman were traded but the Giants still stumbled and finished sixth. Mays failed to bat .300, finishing at .296. He did become the first National League 30-30 player with 36 home runs and 40 stolen bases.

While the relationship between Rigney and Mays improved in 1957, the Giants still struggled. In addition, there was considerable speculation that the Giants would be moving after the season, The 1956 attendance showed a steep decline and 1957 was even worse. In addition, the ballpark was deteriorating. In an 8-to-1 vote, the Giants’ board of directors made it official. They would be playing in San Francisco in 1958.

In the final game of the season at the Polo Grounds, Mays came up in the seventh inning with the Giants losing 7-1. He hit a groundball to third base but beat it out running full speed in a rather meaningless game, exciting the crowd. Mays came to bat once again in the bottom of the ninth. The small crowd of 11,606 greeted him with great applause. They recognized the excitement he had provided to all baseball fans and to New York City since 1951.

While it appeared that the Giants and Mays were never to play again in the Polo Grounds, they did return. The New York Mets began play as an expansion franchise in 1962. The Polo Grounds became their first home ballpark. On June 1the Giants and Mets began a four-game series there. Mays was greeted by the fans with “Say Hey Willie” signs and loud cheers. In the New York Times Arthur Daley wrote, “The center field turf at the Polo Grounds looks normal this weekend for the first time in five years. Willie has come home.”18 Mays did not disappoint as he hit three home runs in the four-game sweep.

While Willie Mays did return to New York to play for the Mets in 1972 and 1973, he was not the same player who roamed center field at the Polo Grounds in the 1950s. During those years, all baseball fans and especially Giants fans were thrilled by his performance. His fielding and “The Catch” facilitated by the spacious Polo Grounds outfield will be long remembered. As Donald Honig wrote, “Putting Mays in a small ballpark would have been like trimming a masterpiece to fit a frame.”19

DR. JOHN J. BURBRIDGE JR. is currently Professor Emeritus at Elon University, where he was both a dean and professor. While at Elon he introduced and taught Baseball and Statistics. He has authored several SABR publications and presented at SABR conventions, NINE, and the Seymour meetings. He is a lifelong New York Giants baseball fan. The greatest Giants-Dodgers game he attended was a 1-0 Giants’ victory in Jersey City in 1956. The sole run was a Willie Mays home run off Don Newcombe. Yes, the Dodgers did play in Jersey City in 1956 and 1957. John can be reached at burbridg@elon.edu.

NOTES

1  Chris Landers, “Yankee Stadium’s Short Porch in Right Field Is Responsible for Some of Baseball’s Biggest Moments,” MLB.com, January 29, 2019, https://www.mlb.com/cut4/why-does-yankee-stadium-have-a-short-porch-in-right-field-c303279930.

2  Stew Thornley, “Polo Grounds (New York),” SABR BioProject, https://sabr.org/bioproj/park/polo-grounds-new-york/, accessed online on December 1, 2022.

3  Thornley.

4  John Saccoman, “Willie Mays,” SABR BioProject, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/willie-mays, accessed online on December 1, 2022.

5  Saccoman.

6  Saccoman.

7  James S. Hirsch, Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend (New York: Scribner, 2010), 103.

8  Hirsch, 104.

9  Willie Mays and John Shea, 24: Life Stories and Lessons from the Say Hey Kid (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2020), 65.

10 Hirsch, 102.

11 Joseph M. Sheehan, “Mays Helps Hearn Topple Brooks, 3-1,” New York Times, August 16, 1951: 38.

12 Jason Aronoff, Going, Going … Caught! Baseball’s Great Outfield Catches as Described by Those Who Saw Them, 1887-1964 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2009), 155.

13 Mays and Shea, 61.

14 Mays and Shea, 63.

15 John Drebinger, “Giants Win in 10th From Indians, 5-2, on Rhodes’ Homer,” New York Times, September 30, 1954: 1.

16 Hirsch, 244.

17 Hirsch, 245.

18 Hirsch, 352.

19 Hirsch, 104.

“They invented the All-Star Game for Willie Mays.” – Ted Williams1

Willie Mays played in a record 24 All-Star games. Here, he talks with, left to right, Charlie Neal, Henry Aaron, Ted Williams, and Stan Musial before the second game of 1959. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)

There were the All-Star Games, of course, and the two faced each other once in each of the years from 1954 through 1960. Ted Williams was at the end of his career and Willie Mays starting his. The first game in which Mays played was 1954. Williams, back from missing most of two years in Korea, resumed his own All-Star Game career that same year. Over the nine games, Williams was 3-for-19 with four runs scored and two RBIs (both in 1956), while Mays was 9-for-23, with nine runs scored and four RBIs.

All told, in 19 All-Star Games, Williams hit .304, with 10 runs scored, four homers, and 12 RBIs (four in 1941 and five in 1946). Mays played in 24 All-Star Games, with a .307 batting average, 20 runs scored, with three homers and nine RBIs.

Williams holds the record for most RBIs in All-Star Game history, with 12. (He also holds the records for bases on balls, with 11.) Mays holds the record for the most base hits in All-Star Game history, with 23. He also holds record for the most extra-base hits (8), most triples (3), most total bases (40), most stolen bases (6), and most runs scored (20).1

There were two games in which they each played with their own teams – the Red Sox for Williams and the Giants for Mays – in head-to-head competition. They were exhibition games in June 1951. The first was on June 11 at the Polo Grounds in New York, a benefit game for the National Amputation Foundation. Roger Bowman pitched for the Giants, giving up a run in the second on hits by Williams and Bobby Doerr. Mays homered off Red Sox starter Paul Hinrichs in the bottom of the second, helping the Giants build a 3-1 lead. Boston took a 4-3 lead in the eighth, Buddy Rosar’s two-run pinch-hit single giving them the lead. They added a fifth run in the ninth when Johnny Pesky singled, Clyde Vollmer walked, and Williams singled off the right-field wall. The final was 5-3, Red Sox.

The second matchup was two weeks later on June 25 at Boston’s Fenway Park, and the Giants turned the tide, beating the home team Red Sox, 5-4, in a benefit for the New England Hospitalized Veterans Fund. Monte Irvin homered after Mays had singled, for two runs in the second. Bobb Thompson twice singled in a run. Williams had won a home-run-hitting contest before the game, beating out teammates Doerr, Vollmer, and Vern Stephens, and Giants Irvin, Mays, and Henry Thompson. (Doerr had won the contest in the Polo Grounds.) Williams batted just once in the game, 1-for-1 with a single. Mays was 2-for-2 with the single and a later double.

BILL NOWLIN pretty much only saw American League games while growing up in the Boston area, so never saw Willie Mays play. He does wish the Red Sox had signed Mays when they had the opportunity, but there are a lot of things to regret from that era. He has worked as a political science professor, cofounded the Rounder Records label, and has written or edited a lot of books and articles about baseball.

SOURCES

Boston Herald, New York Times, Springfield Union, and baseball-almanac.com.

NOTES

1  Mays is tied with Stan Musial for the most extra-base hits and most total bases, and tied with Brooks Robinson for most triples.

For decades, baseball fans have debated who was the better center fielder, Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays. (SABR-Rucker Archive)

Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle were both born in 1931 and reached the majors almost simultaneously in 1951, competing against each other as rookies in the World Series. Together with Duke Snider, they appeared in 11 World Series between 1951 and 1956, and arguments about their relative ability raged throughout the city of New York and beyond. The older Snider faded from the National League’s leaderboards after that, but Mantle and Mays continued to dominate their leagues and start every All-Star Game in center field well into the 1960s. Until Henry Aaron’s successful pursuit of Babe Ruth’s all-time home-run record captured the nation’s imagination, they remained unquestionably the most famous and the highest-praised players of their generation.

Who was better – and in particular, who was the better player at his peak? In his first Historical Baseball Abstract in 1988, Bill James, the founder of modern sabermetrics, argued very strongly for Mantle. “Mickey Mantle was, at his peak in 1956-57 and again in 1961-62, clearly a greater player than Willie Mays – and it is not a close or difficult decision,” James wrote. Identifying Mantle’s three best seasons as 1957, 1958, and 1961, and Mays’ as 1954, 1955, and 1958, he used his runs created formula to measure offensive performance, and claimed that Mantle had created about 35 more runs per season in his best years than Mays had in his.

Turning to baserunning, which was not part of the runs created formula, James pointed out that Mickey’s stolen-base percentage (although not his stolen-base total) was higher than Willie’s, and that he grounded into far fewer double plays (obviously because he batted left-handed for the great majority of his at-bats). Then, without using any statistical method, James argued that while Mays was probably the greater center fielder, Mantle was “a very good center fielder,” and that the difference between them in the field could not possibly make up for Mantle’s superiority at the plate.1 By the time he brought out a revised edition of the Abstract in 2001, James had developed Win Shares, his single measurement of a player’s offensive and defensive value. Based on win shares, he now identified Mantle’s best seasons as 1957-58 and 1961 and Mays’ best as 1965. He did not assert Mantle’s superiority so dramatically, but he still claimed that those three seasons of Mantle’s were all better than Mays’ 1965 season.2 He also acknowledged that Mays had been by far the better player over the course of their entire careers.

Roger Maris, Willie Mays, and Mickey Mantle gave fits to big-league pitchers. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)

In 2011 Michael Humphreys published Wizardry, a new study of fielding statistics, which longtime sabermetrician Richard Cramer has described as “the greatest single intellectual accomplishment in the history of sabermetrics.”3 Humphreys used a new method, Defensive Regression Analysis or DRA, to measure the fielding ability of a player at any position against the league average at that position. By his measurements, Humphreys ranked Mays as the second-best defensive center fielder of all time (between Andruw Jones, first, and Tris Speaker, third), and wrote that Mantle’s defensive performance was only significantly above average in two of his 14 seasons in center field –1952 and 1959 – and was -41 runs worse than average over his whole career.4 Those numbers led me to reevaluate the question of whether Mantle’s best seasons really were significantly better than Mays’ based on the method I developed for my own book, Baseball Greatness.5

That method combines offensive data from the website baseball-reference.com with Humphreys’ fielding data to compute a single number for Wins Above Average. As I explained in this book, I used Wins Above Average (WAA) rather than Wins Above Replacement (WAR) because average performance can be computed much more accurately than replacement performance, and because WAA gives a much clearer indication of a player’s value to his team.6 I eventually defined a superstar season as 4 WAA or more and found 1,803 such player-seasons in the major leagues from 1901 through 2019. We shall see in a moment that Mays’ and Mantle’s best seasons were more than twice as good as that.

My calculations showed that Mantle’s best seasons (in order of highest WAA) were 1957, 1956, and 1961, while Mays had four seasons at a comparable level, 1954, 1958, 1964, and 1965. Rbat represents runs above average generated by hitting, Rbaser is baserunning runs, Rdp represents runs gained or lost via frequency of grounding into double plays, and Rfield is runs saved in the field according to DRA.

Before going any further, we must understand exactly how extraordinary these seasons were. Each man had one season with more than 9 WAA – and in the whole history of baseball there have been only 39 seasons that good. They also had five of the 59 seasons between 8.0 and 8.9 WAA. This table confirms that Mantle’s best offensive seasons were indeed superior to Mays’, mainly because Mantle walked so much more frequently. His batting runs above average (Rbat) substantially exceed Mays’ in every one of these years. In addition, Mantle was indeed very marginally superior as a baserunner because he grounded into fewer double plays, although Willie earned an extra run or two on the bases in other ways. Above all, however, Humphreys’ fielding data shows that Mantle, in two of these three seasons, was essentially average, while Mays ranged from significantly above average to the fielding stratosphere in 1954. And that is why, in place of the substantial overall superiority that James ascribed to Mantle, we find that he had only a marginal superiority comparing their best three seasons, and that only Mantle’s best season was superior to Mays’ best, which turns out to be 1954 because of his fielding. Mantle’s superiority in peak value earned the Yankees less than one extra win per season.

We must also look at one other adjustment. WAA measures an individual’s performance against league average performance, and by the mid-1960s the National League was significantly stronger than the American League because it was more integrated and included far more outstanding Black players. Comparing Willie’s and Mickey’s best seasons, we find that Black players earned only 60 WAA in the 1957 American League, while earning 143 WAA in the 1954 National League. Black players in the AL in 1956 and 1961 – Mickey’s two other best seasons – earned 99 and 138 WAA, whereas in the NL in 1958, 1964, and 1965 – Willie’s other greatest seasons – they earned 251, 560, and 645 WAA. Using a rough calculation, I attempted to estimate how much the additional Black players in the National League added to league average performance by “replacing” them, theoretically, with average players. The results of the adjustment are shown below.

Yankee fans, take heart. Mantle’s three best seasons are still superior to Willie’s – by the microscopic total of 0.1 WAA, equivalent to about one run created per season. While Mantle’s offensive contribution was bigger, Mays balanced that out with his almost unparalleled work in center field. Meanwhile, their joint dominance of their leagues for a 13-year period was extraordinary. Mantle led all American League hitters (and usually all AL players) in WAA six times: in 1955, 1956, 1957, 1959, 1961, and 1962. Mays led all NL hitters (and usually all NL players) 10 times, in 1954-58, 1960 (when he tied with Henry Aaron), 1962, and 1964-66. While Mantle won three MVP Awards and Mays two, both of them arguably deserved a lot more. And at their peaks they performed at an extraordinarily similar level.

DAVID KAISER first experienced Willie Mays on television during the 1954 World Series, at the age of 7, when he saw Willie’s famous catch in the first game. A historian, he taught for 37 years at Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, the Naval War College, and Williams College. He is the author of two baseball books, Epic Season, the 1948 American League Pennant Race, and Baseball Greatness: The Best Players and Teams According to Wins Above Average. He has given numerous presentations at local SABR chapters and at a number of national conventions. He lives with his wife, Patti Cassidy, in Watertown, Massachusetts.

NOTES

1  Bill James, The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (New York: Villard Books, 1988), 403-406.

2  Bill James, The New Bill James Historical Abstract (New York: The Free Press, 2001), 728. James has never explained exactly how he incorporated fielding measurements into Win Shares.

3  Richard D. Cramer, When Big Data Was Small (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019), 54.

4  Michael Humphreys, Wizardry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 286, 308-13.

5  David Kaiser, Baseball Greatness: The Best Players and Teams According to Wins Above Average (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2017).

6  I also dropped baseball-reference.com’s practice of adding points for players at more demanding defensive positions and taking points away from those at easier positions, for reasons that I explained therein.