Willie Mays and the power of love

Constant devotion and immeasurable talent created perhaps the best player ever.

For a guy who flew over the numbers, Willie Mays left a few that haven’t disappeared.  The 660 home runs, for example. The “24” on the back of his jersey, which Major League Baseball might think about retiring.

The number that my mind can’t release is .477. That was his batting average in the only 35 games he ever played in Triple-A. Mays had 71 hits in 35 games for the Minneapolis Millers. Against Louisville, Mays sprinted to catch a drive by Taft Wright, crashed into a wall, rose and threw to second to double up a runner. Wright then slid into second and dusted himself off, with the impression he had doubled. The manager, Pinky Higgins, had to come out and tell him Mays had denied him. It would not be the last time Mays walked the tightrope of improbability and made it to safety.

Local sportswriter Halsey Hall had chronicled Mays’ exploits during exhibition season and ended his story with, “We think you’ll like Willie.”

That was in 1951, and we did, all the way to the end.

Mays died Tuesday, at 93, two days before his Giants were to play St. Louis at Rickwood Field in Birmingham. Mays played there with the Birmingham Black Barons when he was in high school, home games only. He yearned to be there for this commemoration of the Negro Leagues, but on Monday he sent word that the doctors wouldn’t let him travel. You’re not supposed to be shocked when a life ends this late, but it was just as hard to imagine Mays’ birth. He just seemed to be here all along, perpetually at home within the white lines, messing with the geometry of a game that never had seen anyone like him, and may never again.

(Hall, by the way, became the Twins’ radio voice. One day someone saw Hall pack a whiskey bottle for a road trip and wondered why, since most cities sell liquor. “You never know when you’re going to run into a local election,” he explained.)

The Giants naturally felt Mays had aced his Triple-A exam and sent word that he would join the big club. The Millers were playing in Sioux City, and Mays was at a movie theater. Someone flashed a message on the screen: Willie Mays, Call Your Hotel.

Mays dragged his feet. He said he wasn’t ready yet. The Giants, particularly manager Leo Durocher, said he was. Mays seemed to prove his point by going 0-for-12. The next game was against the Braves’ Warren Spahn, who threw Mays a fastball. “For 60 feet I thought it was a pretty good pitch,” Spahn said. Mays hammered it out of the Polo Grounds, and Spahn later joked that the events of the next 20 or so years were all his fault.

Okay, more numbers. They don’t explain Mays, but they illustrate him:

— Five times Mays had an OPS of 1.000 or more. That’s the sum of slugging percentage and on-base percentage. In 1954, after he returned from a military obligation that took away almost two full seasons, Mays had a slugging percentage of .667 and won the batting title at .345.

— Until he was 40, Mays never struck out 100 times in a season. Even in that season he led the N.L. in on-base percentage, at .425.

— Twice he hit over 50 homers in a season. Four times he led the league in homers. Four consecutive times, he led the league in steals..

— In 12 consecutive years he scored more than 100 runs. In eight consecutive years, he drove in more than 100 runs. In seven consecutive years, he did both.

— From 1954 through 1961 he missed a total of 13 games, although he sometimes played himself into exhaustion. The 162-game schedule came along in 1962, and Mays played all 162.

— He hit 22 of his home runs in extra innings.That included a 16th-inning blast that ended the Giants’ 1-0 win over the Braves in 1963, with Juan Marichal and Spahn throwing complete games. Mays’ home run was off Spahn’s 201st pitch of the night.

Spahn would later play for the Giants and marveled at Mays’ ninth-inning at-bat against Houston’s Claude Raymond. There were two out and the Giants trailed by two, and Mays fouled off four 3-and-2 pitches. “He went for the home run each time,” Spahn said. On the fifth pitch, Mays got it, and tied a game the Giants eventually won. Spahn said that if every at-bat was somehow so crucial, Mays “might hit .400.”

“When they pitch it I hit it and when they hit it I catch it,” Mays said more than once. That was a deke. Mays was one of the most analytical players of his day. Managers entrusted him to call pitches from centerfield. When he was sprinting toward the wall to run down Vic Wertz’s blast in the 1954 World Series, he was thinking that Cleveland had two men on, and if he could only get the ball back to the infield in time, he could stop them from tagging up. He was known for swinging wildly at a pitch that he had no chance to hit, which then convinced the pitcher to try the same thing, which Mays would sometimes turn into one of the 660.

But The Catch, as it became known after the Giants swept Cleveland in that ‘54  Series, was not the one he prized most. In Pittsburgh he pursued a drive and couldn’t get his glove on it, so he just caught it with his bare hand. Against the Dodgers he snagged Bobby Morgan’s drive and knocked himself out against the wall. When he awakened he saw Durocher and Jackie Robinson, of the opposition. “Leo wanted to know if I was OK,” Mays said. “Jackie wanted to know if I really caught the ball.”

“His glove,” said Dodgers’ general manager Fresco Thompson, “is where triples go to die,” and San Francisco sportswriter Bob Stevens saw Mays whack a triple in an All-Star Game and became the first of many to write, “The only guy who could have caught it, hit it.”

As a 20-year-old rookie, Mays was the man on deck when Bobby Thomson strode to the plate to face Ralph Branca. Thomson, of course, produced the most famous home run in MLB history. But amid the tumult around him and the teammates celebrating beside him, Mays was slow to react. He had thought the Dodgers would walk Thomson to pitch to him — imagine that — and he was still mapping his plan against Branca. “What’s going on?” he remembered thinking. “I’ve got to get up there!”

But a lot of players did extraordinary things. They just didn’t do them as often or as originally as Mays did. People were drawn to him, and that included the kids in Harlem, where Mays lived. They’d come to his window at 9 a.m., knowing he was usually game for stickball, in the street. Mays would be out at 9:30 and would play for a couple of hours. He later said stickball helped him to hit the curveball. Often he would unleash a swing that would create a “five sewers” shot, a tape-measure blast. Yeah, Willie Mays did that. Try that with Shohei Ohtani sometime.

Teammates, especially in the early days, nurtured him. When Mays wasn’t permitted to stay with the team in all-white hotels, some Giants would come to his hotel and sleep on his floor. They knew what he could mean to them, but they also couldn’t resist his devotion to the game, the purity of his love. “With this guy, we’re going to be having strawberries in the wintertime,” said Gerry Schumacher, the Giants’ publicist.

“I don’t know what the hell charisma is,” said the Reds’ Ted Kluszewski, “but he’s got it.”

Mays tinkered with his cap so it would come off his head easily, strictly for entertainment purposes, and his basket catch, which he learned in the service, was an affectation that only he could pull off safely.

His death puts the 60s a little farther back in the rear-view. In the National League Mays was accompanied, and rivaled, by Hank Aaron, Frank Robinson, Ernie Banks, Roberto Clemente, Maury Wills, Curt Flood, Lou Brock, Bob Gibson and teammates Willie McCovey and Orlando Cepeda. Who’s left? Maybe Sandy Koufax and Pete Rose.

Mays caught his share of racial grief but usually internalized it. He was too busy tunneling. In Hagerstown, Md. he got booed and harangued one night, and he would respond by launching a ball off a faraway wall, to the point that the PA announcer told the fans to knock it off. “He’s killing us,” the man said.

But there could have been no better time to be Mays, or to have him around. A couple of decades earlier and he would have been a Negro League legend, inaccessible to the mainstream fan. A couple of decades later, Mays might well have been the quarterback at Alabama. Those who saw him grow up in Westfield, near Birmingham, said he could have passed his way to a scholarship, and he could have passed and shot his way to a basketball career, too.

The Willie Mayses of today are actively discouraged from baseball, thanks to college scholarship limits and the expense of the “travel ball” circuit that brings the MLB scouts. That’s the paradox of the Negro Leagues. They were created by the infamy of America’s apartheid, yet they might have been the most reliable player development system we’ve ever seen. Mays, who played in the Negro League World Series in 1948, and Satchel Paige were Black Barons, as was a guy who put down his bat for a guitar and introduced himself as Charley Pride. And when the preachers in Birmingham wrapped up their Sunday messages, they’d often say, “I’ll see you at the ballpark,” for the Sunday matinee at Rickwood Field.

Thursday will be the first time Willie Mays couldn’t get to his ballpark of choice. But the guy in Minneapolis tried to tell us, and he was right. We liked him.