I saw my first MLB game in 1961, at Cincinnati’s Crosley Field. The Giants beat the Reds 6-0. Willie Mays hit a home run high against the screen in left field. Mays died yesterday at 93. I’ve always thought he and Hank Aaron were the second and third greatest Alabamians, behind Helen Keller.
My phone alerted me that Mays had died, sending me to a Washington Post obituary by Paul Duggan. I learned more about “the catch,” Mays’ iconic catch of a 450-foot Vic Wertz fly ball in the 1954 World Series at the Polo Grounds, an image of which is now on the trophy presented to the Series MVP.
Two seasons in the military during the Korean War may have kept Mays from winning the race with Aaron to break Babe Ruth’s career home run record. Duggan’s obituary is rich, but my mind kept going back to “the catch,” which describes not only Mays’ amazing athletic skill, but also his mental acuity:
“Soon as it got hit, I knew I’d catch this ball,” he explained. “ … The problem was Larry Doby on second base. … Suppose I stop and turn and throw. I will get nothing on the ball. No momentum going into my throw,” and Doby might have scored, giving his team the lead. “To keep my momentum, to get it working for me, I have to turn very hard and short and throw the ball from exactly the point that I caught it.”
Sports scribes would write that Mr. Mays made the lightning throw instinctively, a term that irked him. “All the while I’m runnin’ back, I’m planning how to get off that throw,” he told Hirsch. “The momentum goes into my turn and up through my legs and into my throw.”
Doby stopped at third base and, three batters later, the top of the eighth inning ended with the game still knotted. In the 10th, Mr. Mays walked, stole second and scored on a home run, and the underdog Giants went on to sweep the Series.
From another appropriate Juneteenth read: “Willie Mays, Baseball’s Electrifying Player of Power and Grace, Is Dead at 93,” by Richard Goldstein, The New York Times, June 18, 2024. (It is fitting that Mays lived to see the year ’24.)
ted.today 