Willie Mays didn’t creep up on the baseball world. He famously started his career 0-for-12 and 1-for-26, with a home run off Warren Spahn in between, and manager Leo Durocher had to console an overwhelmed, crying Mays. He had a rough start, and everyone knows that. What the familiar narrative omits, though, is that Mays was hitting third when he hit that homer off Spahn.
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You don’t put a 20-year-old rookie in the middle of the order unless you’re sure he’s something special. Mays was already a player who had all eyes on him. He was already expected to be The One and would eventually win the Rookie of the Year in 1951. When Bobby Thomson hit the home run that won the pennant, won the pennant, won the pennant, Thomson likely got something good to hit because Mays was on deck. Mays was already a hitter the other team had to worry about.
Still, Mays wasn’t an icon yet. He wasn’t the face of the sport yet. When did that happen? When was the transition from, “Gee, this ballplayer could be something” to “This is Willie Mays, and he might be the best baseball player to ever live”?
I’ll spoil the ending. Right away. It happened so, so fast.
When Mays left to serve during the Korean War in 1952, it was during the month of May and the Giants were in the middle of a seven-game winning streak. During that streak, Mays was on fire, with two doubles, two triples and a home run in 25 at-bats. Still, all that did was raise his season OPS to .736. It would be well over a year until he played in the majors again. That .736 OPS would be his lowest until 1973, when he was 42 years old. He was still young, sure, but he left to serve during the war with a career .266 batting average and an .808 OPS. From the future looking back, that doesn’t seem like a player who was already a star.
Except he was. Mays was already, unambiguously, a star. Before the news broke that Mays passed on Tuesday, I had spent the afternoon looking up old articles about him in preparation for a very different article than the one that published. I looked for the articles about him from before he was in the majors (Minneapolis loves the guy) and articles about him from after his retirement (Bowie Kuhn still gets the gas face).
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What stuck with me from those articles is how ready everyone was for the idea of Willie Mays, Superstar, even when he was in the Army and long before he was winning his first MVP.
When Mays left for the Army, here’s what sportswriting legend Grantland Rice wrote:
No young ballplayer has shown greater promise in recent years. Mays has youth, speed, power and a rare defensive skill. He was born the way he is — not taught.
Mays is still just 21 at this point. He was hitting .227 on the season. No matter. He was already a star.
It must be admitted that (Tris) Speaker and (Joe) DiMaggio made almost all plays seem easy. They needed little effort. On these plays, Willie might show considerable effort. But he reaches balls, now and then, that I doubt Speaker, DiMaggio or Terry Moore could get to. Willie Mays has a fierce yearning to exterminate all fly balls, no matter where they are.
Don’t know about you, but I’ll think about “Willie Mays has a fierce yearning to exterminate all fly balls” for a bit longer. It’s an incredible description. I’d love to repurpose it for a modern player, but, nope. That description stays right there, for that player.
While Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby blazed trails in their respective leagues, Mays was one of the first true rookies to make the jump from the Negro Leagues into professional baseball. That link goes to an article that describes Mays as being “unburdened by any deep social complexes,” which, no, that’s not how any of that worked, but it’s a reminder that there were different levels and layers to the full integration of MLB, and some of them would take decades to reveal themselves.
When Mays was with the Army, the Giants missed him. And they weren’t quiet about it. When Mays got to watch his team play the Dodgers on a furlough in 1953, Durocher said to a reporter, “See that young fellow sitting in the first-row box seats to the left of our dugout? If we had him on the club this year, we’d win the pennant in a breeze.”
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This wasn’t just a manager blowing smoke about a young player he’d taken a liking to. A column from Harry Grayson that went out on the wire in March 1953 had a headline of “Giants Figure Mays Is Difference For Pennant.” An Associated Press article read “Willie Mays Release is Giants’ ’53 Hope,” and it detailed Mays’ application for a dependency discharge — he argued that he was the sole provider for his mother, stepfather, three brothers and six sisters. The request was denied, with the Army saying, “Dependency did not exist to a degree to warrant a discharge.”
At Birmingham, Willie Mays’ mother died yesterday bearing her eleventh child. The New York Giant outfielder, now in the Army, is the oldest; he’ll be 22 on May 6. My guess is that Mays will be discharged within the next few weeks.
Mays was not discharged within the next few weeks. He wasn’t discharged when he hurt his foot sliding into third base during an Army game. He wouldn’t be discharged until the following March, and the headline on the front page of the March 2, 1954 New York Times sports section read, “Ted Williams breaks collarbone in first spring drill; Mays out of Army.”
Mays had played 155 games in the majors to this point, and that was spread out over two years. He hadn’t even had played a full season, from start to finish, yet he was getting equal billing with Ted Williams in the headlines.
Can you imagine just how amazing Mays’ overall game must have been? How much he already stood out from his peers, even if he wasn’t exactly putting up MVP offensive numbers yet? How exciting it was to watch him play, especially considering how exciting it was for him to play? The world was absolutely ready for him to break out.
If you don’t believe that, consider this passage from July 3, 1954.
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This season, Willie’s play has bordered on the miraculous so many times that only last week, when he belted his 24th homer out of the lot at the Polo Grounds, the blast was heard all the way over in Ebbets Field. Midway through the Cardinals game, Tex Rickard, the Dodgers’ public address announcer, startled the fans by exclaiming: “Dodgers fans — Dodgers fans — just thought you might like to know that Willie Mays has hit another home run.”
That announcement caused Jackie Robinson, another most valuable player candidate, to comment after the game. “What do we care what Willie Mays is doing?”
Everybody cared about what he was doing. In his first season back from the Army, Mays hit .345/.411/.667 with 41 homers, winning the 1954 National League MVP. He’d lead the Giants to a World Series win, upsetting a heavily favored Cleveland team that won 111 games (in a 154-game season). In that World Series, he made a catch that you might have heard about. He was a star before he left for the Army, but he immediately morphed into a generation-defining player.
Jimmy Cannon would eventually make the Boxing Hall of Fame for his writing on that sport, but he devoted a lot of time in 1954 to Mays. Here’s something he wrote before the regular season was even over, before the World Series or The Catch:
Open up to let him get through because he belongs with Babe Ruth, Rogers Hornsby, Stan Musial, Walter Johnson, Joe DiMaggio, Hans Wagner, Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, Hank Greenberg, Jackie Robinson. This is what Laurette Taylor had and Man O’ War and Jack Dempsey and Rodgers and Hart. It comes back, dropping through the generations, like Shirley Booth and Native Dancer and Joe Louis and now Hammerstein works with Rodgers. They make men talk about them as though they are friends and not precious toys of an age.
The entire article is an incredible read. It is dramatic. And you can’t do anything but nod your head in agreement. This is what they were writing before Mays had ever won a pennant or a World Series, before his second full season was over. In December of that same year, Cannon ended a column with this:
I don’t know what it is, but Willie Mays has it. It is enough to know it is there and to appreciate it. Not even Willie Mays can define it.
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If you’re wondering how long it took him to become a hero, a superstar, a revered American icon, it happened immediately. The world was waiting for him impatiently the whole time, and somehow he over-delivered relative to those expectations. I don’t know what it was, but Willie Mays had it. He had it right away, and everyone knew it.
(Top photo of Willie Mays signing autographs in 1952: File / Associated Press)