‘Say Hey’ Tells It the Way He Played Game

The man sitting across the table from me was the greatest ballplayer many of us will ever see. There were guys who got more hits, guys who hit more homers, guys who stole more bases, batted in more runs.

But nobody ever put it all together the way Willie Mays did.

Nobody who ever put on a glove did the things with it he did. He made center field the Bermuda Triangle of baseball. He caught and hit more home runs than any other man who ever played the game.

You look at Willie Mays and you know he couldn’t be anything else but a ballplayer. God anticipated him. The body is hard and muscled and compact, a man’s body. But the face is a little boy’s. You want to buy him a balloon.

Ty Cobb played out of hate. Jackie Robinson wanted to get even. Willie Mays played out of love.

He could light up a ballpark.

Not many people know it, but Willie was almost a loner off the field. He led the league in dining alone--in his room. But Willie came alive when the stands were full, the game was on and he stood in center field, about to give some of the greatest solo performances any show business has ever seen.

What center stage was to Caruso, center field was to Willie Mays. It wasn’t a game, it was a symphony.

If it stayed in the air, Willie caught it or hit it. Energy just rippled off him.

Don Drysdale used to say of Henry Aaron that trying to smuggle a fastball past him was like trying to smuggle sunrise past a rooster. Well, smuggling a curveball by Willie was like trying to sneak a steak past a lion.

He once hit four home runs in one game and narrowly missed a fifth. He stole five bases in one game and once threw a runner out at every base, including first and home, in one game. He didn’t play baseball, he re-defined it.

“There are three leagues,” Herman Franks used to say, “the American, the National, and Willie Mays.”

I never saw Willie Mays make the third out in the last inning of an important game.

In the 1962 playoffs, Willie came to bat against the Dodgers, who were leading 4-2, with two out in the ninth. Willie smashed the key single that kept the rally going and, eventually, the Giants won the pennant.

In the World Series that year, Willie came up in the bottom of the ninth in Game 7 with two out and Matty Alou on base and smashed a double to right that I--and Willie--always thought should have tied the score. But Alou wouldn’t chance it, with Willie McCovey and Orlando Cepeda due up, and stopped on third.

Willie’s numbers were Ruthian--660 homers, 3,283 hits, 1,903 runs batted in, 2,062 runs scored, 523 doubles, 140 triples. The most Mays ever got for those kinds of aggregates was $180,000 a year. Willie never held out. He was afraid they wouldn’t let him play.

Willie didn’t play with the loping grace of DiMaggio or the effortless glide of Henry Aaron. Willie went after the ball like a kitten after yarn. Willie gave them a show for their money.

“I like to feel I played for the fans,” he says. “I loved the fans.”

He purposely let his cap fly off, he circled under a ball to get leverage for a throw, he was like a juggler who pretends to drop plates to get your attention. His basket catch was just part of the repertoire. Willie could have caught the ball with his feet if they wanted him to.

Willie has a new book out, “Say Hey, the Autobiography of Willie Mays,” written with Lou Sahadi. It’s as much fun as watching Willie pull down Vic Wertz’s line drive with his back to home plate 450 feet away, or seeing Willie pulling Sandy Koufax’s fastball up in the Candlestick wind.

There is a tendency in sports literature--if that’s not an oxymoron to end all!--today to do what White House memoirists are prone to do--scarify the great industry they’re leaving.

Willie Mays will have none of that. It’s not that he won’t chronicle the disagreements he had with fellow players, managers like Clyde King, or even owners. It’s just that Willie loves baseball and feels he owes it something besides the back of his hand.

Willie’s book is about the joy of baseball, not the warts. It’s like being 20 years younger and you’re facing Sal Maglie again and the ball is coming right at your head and you scramble and fall down to escape it and the umpire, Tom Gorman, goes out to have a talk with Sal the Barber.

When he comes back, you say to the ump, “What did he say?” and Gorman replies, “He says to tell you he’s sorry.”

On the next pitch, Mays hits a home run and, as he runs past Maglie on his way around the bases, he looks over. “I’m sorry, too,” he says.

The game belongs on the financial pages now. But nobody talked of money when Willie played. He played it for the same reason kids used to hunt frogs or shoot marbles. They invented baseball for people like Willie Mays.

We were lucky to have him. He’s what the game is all about. He’s what we are all about. His book is as pure Mays as running down, and catching, a three-base hit in the gap--and doubling a runner off third.