"Say, Hey, Say Willie..."

Swingin' at the Plate...that Giants kid was great..."

          I had a very unpleasant day last Tuesday for reasons I would not write about – family stuff – and the day was made worse by a heat alert. When I returned home, I put the Yankee game on the radio while I checked my e-mail, and found out that Yankee slugger and captain Aaron Judge had to come out of the game against the Baltimore Orioles, when the O’s pitcher hit him on the wrist.

          Now everyone was worried that the team’s symbol, top player, and MVP candidate would miss extended time, as he did last year. “Everyone” included me. I keep track of Judge’s progress up the Yankee All-Time Home Run pole. Right now, with 283 lifetime dingers, Judge is in eighth place on that list, behind Bernie Williams at 287. Then there’s a long trough to sixth place: Alex Rodriguez at 351. Then there’s a quick jump: Yogi Berra at 358 for fifth, and Joe DiMaggio at 361 for fourth place.

          For those who care, Lou Gehrig is third with 493, Mickey Mantle second with 536, and Babe Ruth first with 659.

          Anyway, this piece of bad news was followed by a message on my e-mail: emergency Zoom meeting of the New York Giants Historical Preservation Society, a group of fans of the old baseball team that fled to San Francisco after the 1957 season. The subject: Willie Mays had just died at age 93.

          This announcement was expected, but upsetting all the same. The oldest living Hall of Famer, Mays was also if not the greatest living baseball player, the greatest of all time. He was the ultimate five-tool player: he could hit, hit with power, run, catch, and throw. His offensive and defensive skills made him a walking highlight reel. He was also a great ambassador for the game from beginning to end, interacting with kids and supporting youth baseball through his Say Hey Foundation.

          His baseball career was a mass of honors and superlatives. Lifetime batting average: .301. Hits: 3,293. Home Runs: 660. RBIs: 1,909. Stolen Bases: 339. All-Star Games: 24. World Series Champion, 1954. National League Most Valuable Player: 1954 and 1965. National League Rookie of the Year: 1951. Gold Gloves: 12. National League Home Run Leader: four times. National League Stolen Base Leader: four times. Hit four home runs in the game on April 30, 1961. Named to the All-Century and All-Time teams. Inducted into the Hall of Fame first time out, in 1979, by 94.7 percent of the vote.

          Those are just the numbers. As the Giants fans convened via Zoom, the members unpacked their memories. They talked about a legendary moment in the history of baseball, “The Catch,” on September 29, 1954, in the first game of the World Series, in the cavernous – the only way to describe it – Polo Grounds at 8^th Avenue and West 155^th Street in Manhattan, against the Cleveland Indians.

In the top of the eighth inning, the score tied, 2-2, with the Indians’ Larry Doby on second, Al Rosen on first, and none out, Vic Wertz strode to the plate. Giants manager Leo Durocher replaced starter Sal “The Barber” Maglie, who had served up three hits to Wertz so far. In came Don Liddle to face Wertz.

Wertz hit Liddle’s first pitch for a line drive to deep center field, and Mays ran back, back, back, back, and made an incredible over-the-shoulder catch to haul in the drive for one out. Mays spun around, his cap coming off, and he fired the ball to second. Doby was only able to advance to third and Rosen was stuck at first.

With that, Durocher, having brought Liddle on strictly to face Wertz, strode to the mound to summon future Hall-of-Famer Hoyt Wilhelm to take over. When Durocher reached the mound, Liddle handed his skipper the ball, and said, “Well, I got my man.”

Wilhelm induced the next two batters to hit harmless fly balls, ending the threat. The Giants won the game on a three-run home run by Dusty Rhodes in the bottom of the 10^th inning, and Mays scored the winning run.

Mays’ catch, preserved by grainy black-and-white video and announcer Jack Brickhouse’s call, made it legendary, took the wind out of the 111-win Indians’ sails, and the underdog Giants took the World Series in a four-game sweep. Ironically, Mays said it was not his best catch – he pointed at one he made in his rookie year of 1951 against the Dodgers, which resulted in his rifle arm throwing out the Dodgers’ Billy Cox at the plate to save a game in that critical pennant race.

The Giants issued a t-shirt that depicts “The Catch,” and I have it. I wear it to major Giants- and other baseball-related events.

We discussed that catch, and others. Some of our members had met with and interacted with the titan, even on a regular basis. We knew all of his stories. He would watch baseball games on his TV, and when an announcer would say, “Who holds the record” in some category, Willie would say, “ME!” and chuckle.

They had all grown up in New York in the 1950s, and seen him play center field in the Polo Grounds, a bathtub-shaped park squeezed between Coogan’s Bluff in the west and 8^th Avenue and the Anderson Avenue elevated shuttle in the east. They had seen him display all five tools, even when the Giants had nobody to back him and fewer people in the stands.

I never saw Willie play in a Giants uniform. I was too young. The Giants left town in 1957, the Polo Grounds was demolished in 1964, and by the time I saw him, he was an aging and brittle New York Met in 1972, platooning at first base with Ed Kranepool.

What I knew about Willie Mays was what my grandfather and father told me: he was the one of the greatest players they ever saw, if not the greatest, and that was going back to 1908, when Grandpa first became a Giants fan at a version of the Polo Grounds that burned down in 1911.

          Unfortunately, I only saw an aged, fraying, first baseman, clearly playing out of position, not hitting well. However, I was only 10 years old. As I grew up, I began to appreciate Mays’s talents and abilities better.

          He had a great moment as a Met…the night he retired. The Mets were struggling to win the National League Pennant behind Tug McGraw’s “You Gotta Believe!” slogan. At the ceremony that night, a tearful Willie faced the microphones and gave a speech, which ended with him looking at his teammates and saying, “When I see these kids today, the way they’re playing, the way they’re fighting for themselves, it says only one thing to me, ‘Willie, say goodbye to America.’” A packed house at Shea Stadium leaped to its feet, roaring with cheers, eyes drenched.

          After the ceremony, Willie sat down on the bench. Met manager Yogi Berra came up to him and said, “I may need you to play tomorrow.”

          “Fine with me,” answered Willie.

          I also knew about Willie from one of his sadder moments.

          In 1983, Bally’s Casino in Atlantic City hired him as a “greeter.” That didn’t mean Willie stood at the casino’s entrance and shook hands with little old ladies with blue hair who came in to smoke cigarettes and lose at the slots…he welcomed “whales” to exclusive luncheons and played golf with them.

          At one such golf tourney, a couple of white men saw him and made snickering remarks about how the casino was letting black men play golf. They didn’t say “black men.” They spouted a word that I refuse to use at any time. When they were told who the black man was, they ran up to him to cadge autographs. Charming.

          Willie was not the only baseball legend an Atlantic City casino hired: another one put Mickey Mantle on the payroll, for the same purpose. Mantle, of course, played an enormous amount of golf in his post-baseball life, often while drunk. The Burning Trail Golf Course in Texas had to warn him about entering the club’s restaurant while nude.

          Anyway, while the whales were happy to meet Willie and Mickey, Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, a direct descendant of the Jim Bowie who perished at the Alamo to protect the rights of Texans to own slaves, looked askance at these hirings.

          He promptly banned Willie and Mickey from baseball for life, which both found highly offensive. Neither were going to play center field for the Giants or Yankees, but both teams sought them to bless them with their presence at ceremonies, spring training, Opening Day, and Old Timer’s Games.

          At Yankee Stadium, Mickey was always the next-to-last man introduced, right before Joe DiMaggio. I first saw Mickey live at the 1977 Old-Timer’s Game, where he bowed in all directions. Then he didn’t play. Supposedly, he pulled muscles while bowing. Actually, he was completely drunk, and could barely stand up.

          However, both players, many reporters, and their former teams fumed over this treatment by Kuhn, who Oakland Athletics owner Charles Oscar Finley had once called the “village idiot.” Kuhn was being stupid again. Willie and Mickey weren’t just ballplayers. They WERE baseball. They defined the game for millions of fans. It was a ridiculous decision.

However, he made a great many ridiculous decisions. I’ll never forget him wearing only a topcoat in the 1976 World Series in Yankee Stadium, even while everyone around him was bundled up in heavy coats to face the Arctic cold. Reporters jibed that he probably had an electric blanket under the topcoat.

          Bowie’s reasoning – such as it was – was that ballplayers working for casinos connected them with organized gambling, and, potentially, game-fixing, and organized crime. The fact that casino employees are not allowed to place bets at casinos did not matter to Bowie. Nor did the fact that the casinos did not engage in sports betting at the time.

          Willie and Mickey were out of baseball for three years. Peter Ueberroth, the impresario of the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympic Games, replaced him. Ueberroth had turned the Olympics into a gigantic patriotic spectacle that actually made money, unlike other such Games. The Soviets and the Eastern bloc nations boycotted the 1984 Olympics in a fit of pique over the Americans boycotting the Moscow Games in 1980. The Americans did that because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

          So with no Soviets and East Germans around, the Americans racked up a record number of Gold Medals, downing such tough opponents as Denmark, the Solomon Islands, Bangladesh, Benin, Uruguay, and Tonga. It embarrassed me, as I was rooting for Britain, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia. All I saw was Mary Lou Retton’s blinding smile, while nursing my Coke in the Mets’ pressroom after the game. The reporters, slightly inebriated, argued over what would be the most enjoyable event for Mary Lou: winning the gold or winning the big endorsement deal.

          Anyway, Ueberroth impressed baseball’s magnates that he could run a massive show and make money, so they hired him as Commissioner. He promptly told the owners that they were stupid for spending vast amounts of money on ballplayers to win games, because while they’d go to the post-season, they’d lose money. Better they colluded to hold the line on salaries and have mediocre seasons.

          This was genius, as far as the owners were concerned, so they colluded to deny ballplayers top salaries. It was “re-sign with your old team for a cheap salary, take it or leave it.” That resulted in not one, not two, but THREE court cases, and the owners lost big-time.

          However, by then, Ueberroth was gone, replaced by the cerebral A. Bartlett Giamatti, who died in less than one year on the job. But that’s another story.

          The one positive out of Ueberroth’s reign was that among his first moves as Commissioner was to rip up the suspension of Willie and Mickey. The two erstwhile sluggers were back in the game, which mostly meant that Willie could play in the Cracker Jack All-Star Game and Equitable Old-Timer’s Circuit, and Mickey could get drunk at Yankee Stadium again.

          In 1993, the Giants signed Willie to a lifetime contract to be a special assistant to team ownership. It actually was a “lifetime-plus-one-year” contract, so the additional year would take care of his wife if he died first. Sadly, she pre-deceased him.

          Willie’s job was to simply be Willie…enhance public enthusiasm to build Oracle Park, the stadium that replaced Candlestick Park, the ghastly cave of the winds Horace Stoneham created in 1960. Once that was done, he founded the Say Hey Foundation to promote youth baseball. Lord knows we need it – city kids play basketball these days. Grandpa remembered baseball as the “New York City” game.

          When not doing all these things, Willie had time to meet famous people, even HM Queen Elizabeth II at a White House state dinner for the 1976 Bicentennial. I would love to have been present at that conversation.

          He had some interesting appearances in pop culture. Charles Schulz regarded Willie as the acme of perfection, and referred to him often in his comic strip “Peanuts.” Schulz, of course, lived near San Francisco, and was a Giants fan. An episode of “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” from 1997 has Captain Sisko’s son trying to obtain for his father as a gift a vintage 1951 Willie Mays rookie card. Glad it survived to the 23^rd century.

          He was, like some famous Americans, even a 1951 song, “Say Hey, Say Willie,” which used his voice. Giants fans sang, “Swinging at the plate…that Giants kid is great,” long after he was into his 40s and beyond.

          Willie also gained 10 hits this year when Major League Baseball added the Negro Leagues’ records as major league scores. Doing so made Josh Gibson the top single season and lifetime hitter for batting average. It’s not often a ballplayer adds 10 lifetime hits at age 93.

          He was supposed to attend the ballgame between the Giants and St. Louis Cardinals last week at Rickwood Field, where he started off with the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro American League. Both teams wore uniforms of Negro League teams from San Francisco and St. Louis. Sadly, Willie announced he could not attend…and died the next day. The Giants lost, 6-5.

          When Willie died, he was the oldest living Hall of Famer. That title immediately passed to 90-year-old Luis Aparicio, the slick-fielding shortstop of the Chicago White Sox and Baltimore Orioles, inducted in 1984. He’s followed by former Commissioner Bud Selig, 89. Selig never swung a bat. Next is Sandy Koufax, at age 88; Bill Mazeroski, at age 87; Pat Gillick, 86; Juan Marichal, 86; Billy Williams, 86; Joe Torre, 83; and Carl Yastrzemski, 80.

          And then I met Willie.

          In 2012, the Giants won their second World Series in two years, and they brought the World Championship trophy to a hotel in Manhattan for a breakfast. I joined the other New York Giants Historical Preservation Society folks for the free bagels and orange juice, along with Bay Area expatriates, and gazed up at the Giants leadership and Willie himself in awe, wonder, and reverence.

          He took questions from the crowd, and one attendee remembered an occasion when Willie came to bat against the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Don Newcombe. Dodger catcher Roy Campanella tried to distract Willie by promising a barbecue steak dinner at his place after the game, and Willie accepted the invite. Then he smashed a home run off Newcombe, trotted around the bases, and said to Campy, “What time are the steaks, Roy?” Campanella had no response.

          Laughter all around, including from Willie, who said he remembered the incident, and added, “I never had too much trouble with Don Newcombe.”

          After the breakfast, everybody could get their photo taken with the trophy, which included me, and I did.

          “This is a once-in-a-lifetime moment,” I thought, on the way home. “Too bad I didn’t interact with Willie directly.”

          I was wrong. In 2014, the Giants won their third World Series in five years, and in January, they brought the latest World Championship Trophy to New York for another breakfast.

          “We seem to come here every two years,” said their master of ceremonies, a young guy from their marketing department, and everyone cheered.

          Willie was back, along with Yonkers native and second baseman Joe Panik, whose double play move in the seventh game saved the Series for the Giants.

          This time, I told the Giant bigshots that I had something to say. They okayed it.

          I rose and first told everyone that after the breakfast was over, the Casey Stengel Chapter (New York) of the Society for American Baseball Research was holding its annual meeting a few blocks away at the Mid-Manhattan Library, come one, come all for presentations and lectures on New York baseball, which included the Giants.

          Next, I faced Willie and said, “As a fellow veteran, I would like to thank you for something you did that was far more important than any of your achievements on the baseball diamond, and that was serving our country as a member of the armed forces during time of war.”

          Dead silence in the packed banquet room for 30 seconds. Then everyone realized – Willie had lost two of his prime years, 1952 and 1953 – when he was drafted into the Army during the Korean War. So was Dad. He was up the line with Item Company of the 31^st Infantry Regiment. Half of that company was slaughtered in a failed and futile attack on “Jane Russell Hill.” It took Dad only 40 years to talk about that day with me.

          Unlike Dad, Willie was never shipped to Korea. However, he could have been. Some ballplayers of that era were sent to the front. Yankee second baseman Jerry Coleman flew F4U Corsair fighter-bombers for the Marines. He was the only ballplayer to fight in two wars, having done time in the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific as a Marine dive-bomber pilot, battling the Japanese.

          The best-known ballplayer to go to Korea was Maj. Ted Williams of the Marines, who flew jets, with Maj. John Glenn as his wingman. Williams suffered illnesses and crash-landed his fighter when it was damaged by North Korean flak. After he landed and walked away, the plane exploded. Combined with World War II, his service left him with serious hearing loss and cost him vast lifetime numbers.

          Willie didn’t get to Korea. However, he did his time, square-bashing (as the British Army calls close order drill) in New Jersey. He could have been sent to Korea. He could easily have been killed or seriously wounded, ending his career.

          Now everyone realized what I was saying, and gave Willie an ovation.

          That done, I finally asked Willie my question. “Aside from yourself, who was the best defensive center fielder you ever saw?”

          Willie seemed reluctant to answer. He had a reputation for being diplomatic in his responses to harder questions on civil rights, Giants Manager Alvin Dark’s racist comments, and comparisons between himself and Mickey Mantle.

          Occasionally he had good answers. When Barack Obama became president, Mays messaged him, “Move on in.” Willie’s reward was to fly with Obama to the 2009 All-Star Game in St. Louis and receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Asked if baseball would ever have an openly gay player, Willie responded, “Can he hit?”

          Now Willie maneuvered around, saying he had seen a great many skilled outfielders, and then offered, “That kid on Seattle is pretty good.” He didn’t need to go further. Everyone in the room knew he meant Ken Griffey, Jr.

          After the event, I cornered Joe Panik to have him sign my books on the 2014 World Series, which he did happily. I gave him a piece of advice. “Listen, you are going to meet a lot of people who are going to capitalize on that play and your World Series money with get-rich-quick schemes, trying to get you to invest in everything from aardvarks to zebras,” deliberately going for the alphabetical gag. “I can tell you a lot of stories about ballplayers over the past century who have lost all their money to sharp guys like that. Make sure you run any offer past your agent and accountant first.”

          He agreed.

          After the 2012 event, I wrote a thank-you letter to Larry Baer, telling him about my family history with the Giants. I told him how my great-uncle the crook had worked as a youth in the poolhall Giants Manager John McGraw co-owned with the “Big Bankroll,” Arnold Rothstein. I got a note back that included an admission card to their elite Gotham Club at their ballpark. I keep it in my wallet, even though I haven’t used it yet.

Now, at the 2014 event, one of the Giants bigshots told me that Baer cornered a subordinate and told him to put two pool tables in the Gotham Club after reading my letter. I was amused that a robber, bagman, and mob enforcer was being honored in that way. “Better they honor my grandfather, who was an honest pharmacist,” I said.

After these events, I told people how I had gone to them been able to “have breakfast with none other than Willie Mays.” When people heard that, it was one of the rare times I was the object of awe and respect.

A few years ago, the New York Giants Historical Preservation Society took a 50-cent tour of the Polo Grounds area with an expert on New York history. Equipped with photographs, the gent gathered us on Edgecombe Avenue. There he showed us the Francis X. Bushman Steps atop Coogan’s Bluff. Nobody knows who Francis X. Bushman is…I think he was a local political leader in the 1920s or 1930s. Great name, though.

Next, he showed us an apartment house, where, in 1950, some kids playing on the roof found a loaded pistol, pointed it at the Polo Grounds, fired a shot, and killed a man sitting in the stands, before a Giants game. Whoops.

From there, we walked down Edgecombe Avenue, past Coogan’s Bluff (named for its owner), and reached the John T. Brush Memorial Staircase. That was installed in 1912 as a gift from the Giants players to the team owner, who died that year of tuberculosis. He was a decent chap by the standards of the day, and it is not often that players honor owners then or now.

The staircase was abandoned when the Polo Grounds came down, and was restored a few years ago with funding from the five teams that played at the stadium: the Yankees, the Mets, the Giants, the football Giants, and the Titans, which became the Jets. It is the only remaining piece of the stadium in place. Fans trotted down the stairs from the 155^th Street station on the 8^th Avenue Independent Subway at St. Nicholas Avenue to get to the Polo Grounds.

Then they crossed the Harlem River Driveway (what a name!) and down a ramp into the stadium. The Polo Grounds was unique – it was the only ballpark in baseball that one could enter by going downhill.

We walked down the restored stairs, over the plaque honoring John T. Brush, and to the bottom, where the city thoughtfully placed benches and chessboards for local residents. Immigrant taxi drivers from as far away as Malaysia and Guyana take breaks there for lunch. From there, our guide took us along the Driveway back to 155^th Street and onto St. Nicholas Place, which glories in the secondary title of “Willie Mays Place.”

When Willie came up in 1951, the Giants lodged him with David and Ann Goosby, who lived in a first-floor apartment on the east side of St. Nicholas, just south of 155^th.

Ann Goosby cooked healthy meals for Willie while he read comic books or played stickball in St. Nicholas Place with local kids. After the game, he’d take them out for ice cream. And he signed autographs.

Local women also approached him with autographs and gave him notes that gave their phone numbers and names. Willie threw the notes away when he returned home.

The tour stopped in front of the building, and a resident, seeing a group of older men in New York Giants gear, recognized us, and let us in. We took and posed for photographs in front of Mrs. Goosby’s apartment. That included me.

Then we walked down another flight of concrete stairs that connected 155^th Street with…155^th Street. For those of you puzzled by this, the answer is simple: 155^th Street goes over the Macombs Dam Bridge, straight to Yankee Stadium. However, another 155^th Street, below the bridge, goes from 7^th Avenue to 8^th Avenue and dead-ends against Coogan’s Bluff, next to an auto-body shop.

We walked through the parking lot for the Polo Grounds Housing Project, which replaced the stadium in the early 1960s. Demolition began on April 10, 1964. Grandpa saw the wrecking ball – the same one used on Ebbets Field – start hammering the abandoned stadium, from Harlem River Driveway. He watched for a while, and then gloomily went home.

The stadium site is now occupied by four mammoth housing towers. Residents have a dislike of police agencies that come to make official visits, and let them know by dropping jars of Hellmann’s Mayonnaise on their cars from 17 stories up.

One building has a pillar that bears a plaque telling visitors that it is the “approximate site” of home plate at the Polo Grounds, and lists all the years the Giants won World Championships there. The years are wrong. The Giants claimed the World Championship in 1904, but no World Series was played that year.

Unlike 90 years later, in 1994, it was not because of a labor action. Giants owner John T. Brush refused to play the American League Champion Boston Red Sox. They considered the American League a junior organization, not worthy of competition with the older National League. However, Brush and Giants Manager John J. McGraw modestly claimed the World Championship anyway.

There’s also a battered metal sign on another building that honors Willie, noting that he played there.

The final stop on the tour was the complex’s administration offices. The women behind the grilled-window desk looked at us warily, wondering if we were US Marshals, DEA agents, FBI men, or representatives of any variety of police, collection, or bounty-hunting organizations determined to locate and punish a resident.

When they found out we were just Giants fans, their mood lightened, and they pointed us at photographs of a 1968 ceremony to dedicate the plaque and “Willie Mays Field,” a playground area in the project. There were also photos of Brooklyn Dodger catcher Roy Campanella, whose liquor store stood across the street from the Polo Grounds. He was driving home after working there when he suffered the accident that left him paralyzed for life.

There are other little pieces of the Polo Grounds left, of course: some relics at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown…the lights went to a ballpark in Arizona…and for years, schoolchildren attending films on fire safety at the New York Fire Department Museum on Spring Street sat in rows of Polo Grounds seats. When the museum moved, I don’t know what they did with the seats.

Right after I wrote this, another Giants titan and retired number died – Orlando Cepeda. It was like taking a punch to a place that had already been hit.

Cepeda was signed by the New York Giants, debuted with the San Francisco Giants, and won the Rookie of the Year Award. He was a great hitter, and he and Willie McCovey battled for playing time at their best position, first base. Ultimately, the Giants traded Cepeda to the St. Louis Cardinals, where he won the 1967 Most Valuable Player Award as the team won the World Series, defeating the Boston Red Sox. “Cha-Cha” finished up as the Sox’ first designated hitter in 1973.

After he retired, Cepeda had a rough time. A serial adulterer, he wrecked two marriages with affairs the led to children. He was caught in Puerto Rico trying to carry 160 pounds of marijuana on his plane. He spent five years in prison. The ordeal helped him, though: he converted to Buddhism, kicked the drug addiction, married a third and final wife, and the Giants signed him to a lifetime contract to be, well…Orlando Cepeda. He showed up at spring training, did a little scouting, and a lot of community work. The Giants pushed hard to get him in the Hall of Fame.

I met him in 1993 at one such event, the Cable Car bell-ringing contest in Union Square, where he tried out his Latin beat bell-ringing skills for a cheering crowd.

The efforts paid off. The Veterans’ Committee put Orlando in Cooperstown in 1999. The Giants retired his number. He got to smell the roses. He died at age 86, one of the Hall’s oldest living members.

As the years and decades went by, Willie became the last man standing from the 1951 “Miracle” Giants. He was on deck when Bobby Thomson clouted that legendary home run.

In 1975, a Notre Dame Philosophy Ph.D. and longtime Giants fan named Thomas Kiernan interviewed Mays for a wonderful book, “The Miracle at Coogan’s Bluff.” The cover shows a great cartoon of the ball going into the stands and Dodger left fielder Andy Pafko helplessly trying to reel it in. An average player, Pafko became a pretty good minor league manager.

In the book’s first chapter, Kiernan describes his failed attempt to join the Giants as a center fielder. His father intervened with the team to prevent that from happening, but it was immaterial: he did the tryout in early 1951, and later that year, Kiernan went to the Polo Grounds, and saw Willie in action.

“Although he was just beginning to show his fabled power at the plate, center field was already his playground,” Kiernan wrote. “He glided smoothly across acres of emerald grass to make impossible catches with the graceful economy of a panther. The Giants would not be needing another centerfielder for years to come.”

In 1974, Kiernan interviewed Willie and other surviving Giants about the “Miracle Game” for his book. Willie expressed how while he was on deck, he was grateful to Bobby Thomson for hitting the famed home run. “I was shaking in my shoes,” Willie said. “No way I want to go up there. Bobby – he save my life.”

Willie did offer some wisdom on that home run, expressing his relief at not being the man at bat. “I was sure glad it was Thomson done it, not me. I’d only be remembered for hitting the so-called miracle home run. It’s like nobody remembers Branca but for that one pitch. Thomson was a pretty good ballplayer, so was Branca.”

Branca, of course, was Ralph Branca, the pitcher who served up that home run. When he returned to his fiancée in the family car after the game, in tears, he asked, over and over, “Why me? Why me?”

Sitting in front was Branca’s future wife’s uncle, Father Patrick Rowley, a Fordham dean. He turned to Branca and said, “God chose you to bear this Cross because He knew you had the faith to carry it.” Branca later said that helped him a great deal. An injury early in the 1952 season did not, and his career never recovered. It’s too bad – Branca was twice a 20-game winner on two pennant-winning Dodger teams, an All-Star, and welcomed Jackie Robinson to the 1947 squad. Nobody remembers that.

Nor is Thomson remembered as a solid RBI man and decent center fielder and third baseman for the Giants.

Grandpa and Dad did remember him for both, Dad additionally for Branca being a New York University pitching star when both were attending it. At that time, tuition was $9 a credit.

Kiernan ended his chapter on Willie Mays, discussing his role as a “special instructor” for the Mets after his retirement. Here it is, and it speaks as an ending to the chapter and Willie’s life:

“For probably the last time in my life I had seen Willie Mays track a ball hit far beyond an ordinary outfielder’s range, float after it with just the required speed, and smoothly, casually, flick it into his glove as he ran from underneath his cap. He may have lost a step or two at the age of 43. But he had lost none of his amazing grace.”