It’s a blessing and something of a curse that in the nearly 150 years of Major League Baseball, there are endless methods to disseminate, dissect and analyze this absurd game.
Ultramodern Statcast metrics and expected statistics? The meat-and-potatoes of batting average, home runs, RBIs? Colorized restorations of forgotten eras, crisply produced by Ken Burns? Hey, knock yourself out.
Yet it is Willie Mays’ ultimate gift to us that you really only need two timeless swatches of history to put his greatness into context.
One grainy black-and-white highlight.
The back of his baseball card.
Combine the two and strangely, that’s almost all that’s required to credibly pronounce Mays the greatest player of all time.
Oh, we’re not here for another odious GOAT debate, as that acronym, mercifully, didn’t even exist for most of Mays’ life. Nor are we here to steal anyone’s joy.
You can have your Babe Ruth, dominating the pre-integration diamond on both sides of the ball, or your Barry Bonds, great enough on his own, greater still with a little help. Henry Aaron, Shohei Ohtani, Mickey Mantle, Ken Griffey Jr., Ted Williams, Frank Robinson – they all mean different things to different people and if one of them strikes you as the very best, there’s no need to argue.
But it says here that Willie Mays was the greatest of them all.
Catch of a lifetime
Mays died Tuesday at 93, a day baseball fans long dreaded even before its timing was downright heartbreaking. Major League Baseball is honoring Mays all week at Birmingham’s Rickwood Field in Alabama, where Mays made his professional debut as a teenager in 1948 with the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro Leagues.
One year later, he was a New York Giant. Six years later, a sprint into the Polo Grounds’ nether reaches made him an athletic immortal.
You’ve seen it enough. Yet it’s still not enough.
They just don’t build ballparks like the Polo Grounds anymore, where dead center field is 483 feet away and the alleys around 450 feet, the better to accommodate the New York Football Giants and competitively balance the absurdly short dimensions down the lines.
It is an almost impossible expanse for a center fielder to cover.
When Cleveland’s Vic Wertz came to bat in the eighth inning of Game 1 of the 1954 World Series, two runners were on base, one man was out and the game was tied 2-2. Under these circumstances, a slightly above-average play might be cause for partial veneration.
By the time Wertz’s bat smashed the ball just to the right of dead center field, and Mays sprinted on a dead run and hauled in the ball over his shoulder, he was an estimated 460 feet from home plate.
Consider that on Tuesday night, a few hours after Mays died, the powerful Ohtani crushed a ball 476 feet into the trees beyond Coors Field’s center field wall and was rightfully celebrated on social media. After all, it was the longest home run hit in the big leagues this year.
Now watch the ball disappear into the trees and imagine Mays, minus the wall and the faux forest, running it down. Hey, that’s just five yards deeper than his Polo Grounds catch.
Had that merely been a one-off event, it would have ensured Mays a spot in baseball lore. We of a certain generation still remember plenty of mortals, from Jim Edmonds to Gary Matthews Jr. to Mike Trout making catches that defy belief.
Now consider that this one saved a World Series game the Giants would eventually win in 10 innings, on their way to a sweep. Cleveland is still awaiting its next World Series trophy.
Numbers game
It is when we marry the physically preposterous nature of that catch with Mays’ career numbers that we are again taken beyond belief.
Let’s not overthink this: That the man who made that catch was physically capable of hitting 660 home runs in the major leagues is preposterous.
That the man who made that catch at various points in time led the major leagues in batting average. And on-base percentage. And slugging percentage. And stolen bases. And won a dozen Gold Glove awards and didn’t win 15 or 16 only because they didn’t start passing them out until 1957.
Mays’ 660 home runs ranked third all-time when he retired. And not unlike Williams missing three entire seasons to fight in World War II, Mays ran into plenty of drags on his production.
Like awaiting baseball’s slow integration, as he spent 1948 with the Black Barons one year after Jackie Robinson broke the major league’s color barrier. Or missing nearly two full seasons to military service as the Korean War unfolded.
On the field, hitting in wind-swept Candlestick Park during what was still the prime of his career was a bummer for a power hitter. Still, the greatness endured: In 1965, as a 34-year-old, Mays hit 52 home runs, posted major league-leading OBP (.398) and OPS (1.043) totals, and had a career-best 185 adjusted OPS. (Hitting 52 bombs in Candlestick will do that for a guy).
It’s an exercise in frustration to figure out how many home runs Mays might have hit if not for those factors. And every player has their pitfalls, be it injury, an unfriendly home ballpark, or a terrible team around them.
Yet you wonder, if Mays somehow ran into 40 more home runs over his 23-year career, how he might be perceived in an even grander light. Odd that 660 home runs would be received with less fanfare than 700, but think about that for a minute.
Seven hundred home runs, that catch, those Gold Gloves, a career that stretched from the Negro Leagues to divisional play, from the Polo Grounds to the multipurpose stadia of the ‘70s?
Mays will get plenty of props this week, and forever. But reaching one more round number, a summit only Aaron and Ruth and Bonds reached, might have ended any debate, for all time.
We’ll never know Mays’ sprint speed or exit velocity or route efficiency, numbers that when applied to the merely ordinary read like so much minutiae.
But with Mays, we never really had to know. A snippet from a black-and-white NBC broadcast and an enduring greatness that spanned four decades is more than enough.