In the end, the Say Hey Kid bore no resemblance to the extraordinary force that was central to the American imagination for much of the 20th century.
Young Willie Mays struggled at the plate, stumbling on the basepaths. A line drive arced toward him that Mays had caught with ease for most of his career. But he fell. Another outfield error tied the game in the ninth inning.
On that October afternoon in 1973, as Mays and his New York Mets faced the Athletics in Oakland for Game 2 of the World Series, he was 42 years old and suffering from aching knees. Time was closing in on baseball's star on its grandest stage.
It's easy to forget that he would bounce back at the plate three innings later. The unthinkable happened: Mays not only fumbled, he looked lost, awkward and out of sorts.
The impact of his appearance will remain as a warning long after his playing days are over. Don't be like Willie Mays, who stayed around long enough to stumble in center field and become a shadow of his former self. It has become a mantra echoed by everyone from politicians to business leaders to pundits commenting on great athletes who want to play into their later years.
Stop before it's too late.
Mays, who died Tuesday at age 93, did his best since retiring to ignore what would likely have been his final game, but there's another way to capture the reaction.
The emotional depth of Mays' struggle is a testament to his greatness and to the fact that this man from the Jim Crow South – only the sixth black player in major league baseball after Jackie Robinson – once captivated Americans of every color and creed.
He was perfect for so long that the shock the baseball world felt when it saw Willie Howard Mays triumph was the same as the shock it felt when it saw God become man.
How great was he?
660. That's how many home runs Mays hit during his playing career. When the “Say Hey Kid” retired, only Babe Ruth had hit more.
Mays played 22 seasons in the major leagues, collecting 3,283 hits and a career batting average of .302, impressive numbers for a player with that kind of power. He was named to the All-Star team 24 times, won the Gold Glove Award 12 times, and had 100 or more RBIs 10 times.
He was named the National League Most Valuable Player twice, and some experts say he might have been named MVP seven more times if the award didn't have to be shared among players.
The numbers and accolades are only part of his story. how Mays' play distinguished him as one of the game's most deeply beloved stars, the way he used his intelligence, speed, style and power to bend baseball's boundaries to his will.
“I don't think Willie Mays was ever booed, even in an opposing team's stadium,” said Bob Kendrick, president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. “That's how beloved he was. He was a very likeable and approachable person to people of all backgrounds, all races.”
“Every time he stepped on the field, I knew I was going to see something special that I probably hadn't seen before.”
His arrival, four seasons after Robinson broke major league segregation in 1947, was perfect timing.
In 1951, only 10 percent of American homes had a television, so during Robinson's heyday, only a small percentage of people were able to watch him play in the stands or on television.
But technology improved and television became more affordable: by 1954, the year Mays won his first National League MVP award, roughly half of American homes owned a television and baseball was broadcast nationally for the first time.
That fall, Mays' Giants stunned Cleveland and won the World Series, Game 1 becoming baseball legend thanks to a play known simply as “The Catch.”
The catch began with a sprint through center field, as Mays' brown and dark orange No. 24 jersey faced home plate and chased down Vic Wirtz's hard-hit ball deep into center field.
How was Mays able to clearly track the ball and watch it arc over his shoulder and land perfectly in his mitt?
How did he have the clarity to remember that stopping the runner was paramount, or the ability to spin and unleash a thunderous hit to second base?
“This was a giant pitch,” sportswriter Arnold Hano wrote in his game report, “like a human version of a howitzer pitch.”
Mays and the Giants moved west to San Francisco for the start of the 1958 season. By that time, nationally broadcast baseball was commonplace and nearly every home in America had a television. Mays seemed to be everywhere.
Unlike Robinson and other outspoken, sometimes polarizing black stars of the time, Mays stayed out of politics and civil rights issues. Staying out of the fray had an advantage: White fans, never offended, worshipped Mays with a fervor never felt by a black athlete.
For eight years in the 1960s, his Giants drew the highest attendance of any visiting team in the National League, and Mays began appearing on nationally syndicated television talk shows and comedy shows and on the covers of some of the most popular national magazines, including Time, Life, Look, Collier's and, of course, Sports Illustrated.
Hollywood stars were in awe of Mays and offered unreserved praise: “If I played baseball like you, I'd be the happiest man in the world,” Frank Sinatra gushed.
During Mays' playing career, he was one of the great trio of center fielders, the others being Duke Snider of the Dodgers and Mickey Mantle of the Yankees.
Snyder and Mantle were part of the veteran players, the group of white players who once dominated major league baseball.
Mays was completely different.
“He was doing things that were unheard of in the major leagues at that time,” said Harry Edwards, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. “If Jackie had done those things, they would have been called showboating.”
“But by the time Willie came along, Jackie had cleared that space, Larry Doby in Cleveland had cleared that space. There was room for an evolution of the black player's game that matched the style and culture that was emerging.”
Mays developed his style as a teenager playing for the Birmingham Black Barons in the Negro Leagues, where showmanship was a must.
During his rookie season in the major leagues, he “would blurt out, 'Tell me who I am,' 'Tell me what,' 'Tell me where I am,' and 'Say hey,'” said New York Journal-American sportswriter Bernie Klemenko. “At my newspaper, we dubbed him the 'Say hey boy,' and it stuck.”
“Say hi” was part of his style. So were his pitches from all angles. The basket catches. The daring on the basepaths. And his hat, a little small, flew off every time he sprinted, emphasizing his speed.
Mays always wanted to look good, she polished her nails, and she had a smooth, powerful, bold swing worthy of a Rembrandt.
A certain melancholy is common among modern athletes, but when Mays stepped onto the field, it looked like he didn't belong anywhere else, or didn't want to be anywhere else.
“I'd sit on the bench during batting practice and just watch him. Just watching him walk was something special,” said Cleon Jones, who grew up in Alabama and idolized Mays, and ended up sharing the outfield with him when the Giants traded him to the Mets in 1972.
“To be honest with you, his uniform seemed to fit him better than anybody else's,” Jones said. “The players looked up to him with an almost spiritual reverence.”
No one wanted to see a god perish at dusk.
By then the end was near.
“He was hurting badly,” Jones recalled, sitting next to Mays' locker. “His knee was like a watermelon. I said, 'Rest a day,' and he wouldn't. He didn't want to let the team down. He was dysfunctional, but he never said no.”
“I knew he shouldn't have been in that lineup, he shouldn't have played, but Willie went out there. He owed the fans so much.”
In that fateful Game 2 of the 1973 World Series, when the Mets faced the Athletics in Oakland, Willie Mays came off the bench to pinch-run for Rusty Staub.
First, he collapsed while rounding second base.
Then came another outfield blunder, another collapse running to catch a fastball, and another clumsy defensive error.
“This is something I don't think any sports fan anywhere wants to see,” exclaimed Tony Kubek, commentating on the game on national television. “One of the greats, playing in the latter years of his career, having these issues, rising and falling.”
It was a shock to all of us.
But what gets forgotten, and what we should remember, is that Mays stood up once again in this World Series game.
In the top of the 12th inning, with the sun setting and the score at 6-6, with a runner on second and two outs, Athletics pitcher Rollie Fingers took control on the mound. Mays held his own at the plate.
The pitcher hunched over, kicked his left leg up high and delivered a straight fastball, hard and down the middle.
Mays swung and hit the ball hard, sending it bouncing over the mound, past second base and into the outfield.
It was the final hit of each player's career and gave the Mets the lead for good, though they ultimately lost the series in seven games.
Red Smith, sitting in the press box in Oakland, penned a powerful column for The Times.
“There is no one like him,” Smith wrote. “Not in this world.”
And that will never happen.
