Willie Mays Was Great In Many Ways as per George Will's Story

It was an ordinary day.  I found out today that The Washington Post's extraordinary columnist, George Will, can write about everything and anybody!  Today he wrote about a fellow by the name of Willie Mays...and he did a fantastic job.  Probably better than any other sport's columnist ever wrote about my all time favorite...The "Say Hey Kid"....Willie Mays. I know I wrote about Willie a few days ago, but I just had to share with you parts of the article that George wrote in the Washington Post.  He began his article with...  In the 1962 Yankees-Giants World Series, the Yankees' Clete Boyer hit a line drive to right-center.  "As the ball left the bat, I said to myself two things.  The first thing I said was 'Hello double!'  The second thing I said was, 'Oh, (bleep), he's out there!"  Willie Howard Mays Jr., who died Tuesday at age 93, was the archetypal "five-tool player" who could run, catch, throw, hit and hit for power.  And, I must add, did all those things better than most anyone else who ever played the game.  Now, that last line was from me, even though I'm sure George would agree with me!  George went on to say...Said his first major league manager, Leo Durocher, "If he could cook, I'd marry him."  Actress Tallulah Bankhead said, "There have only been two authentic geniuses in the world, William Shakespeare and Willie Mays."  Mays didn't seem to have the confidence at the start when he said, "I can't hit the pitching up there."  That was in 1951, while speaking by phone to Mr. Leo Durocher, who would soon be his manager.  Leo assured Willie that any player who was hitting .477 in the minors at Minneapolis could surely hit major league pitching.  He could!  But, a few weeks later, the Giants sent Mays -- who was 0-12 in major-league at-bats -- to the plate to face, 60 feet 6 inches away, Warren Spahn, who was enroute to becoming the winningest left-hander in baseball history.  Mays hit the first of his 660 home runs.  After the game, Spahn said, "For the first 60 feet it was a helluva pitch."  It was years later that Warren said, "We might have gotten rid of Willie forever if I'd only struck him out."  In 1963, in a game of a sort that will ever again be played, Spahn, then 42, and another future Hall of Famer, Juan Marichal, 25, both pitched shutouts into the 16th inning.  Marichal threw 227 pitches, Spahn 201.  The Giants won 1-0 when Spahn gave up a walk-off home run.  Guess who hit it?  Willie played professionally for the Birmingham Black Barons and listened to radio broadcasts of the Birmingham Barons, a white team whose play-by-play announser became, in the 1960s, infamous: Theophilus Eugene "Bull" Conner's use of fire hoses and police dogs on student protestors in 1963 helped propel a horrified nation to embrace the 1964 Civil Rights Act.  "Pretty good announcer," Mays remembered.  In a sense Mays was too good for his own good.  His athleticism and ebullience - e.g. playing stickball with children in Harlem streets - encouraged the perception of him as man-child effortlessly matched against grown men.  

Willie Mays - The "Say Hey Kid"

He was called a "natural."  Oh?  Extraordinary hand-eye coordination is a gift. There is, however, nothing natural about consistently making solid contact with a round bat on a round ball that is moving vertically, and horizontally, a 95mph.  Because Mays made the extraordinary seem routine his craftsmanship and intelligence were underrated.  Even as a rookie, he would reach 2nd base, decode the opposing catcher' pitch signs, and tell the Giants' dugout that, say. the third in each sequence was the actual sign.  His base-running "instincts" actually were a meticulously honed craft.  Although he played centerfield, he would take pregame infield practice, reminding himself where infielders should position themselves to cut off throws from outfielders.  Then, when he got a hit, he would take an extra base if the infielders were out of position. Sometimes, early in a game. Mays would intentionally swing at and miss a pitch he could easily have hit, thereby encouraging  the pitcher to throw the pitch during a crucial late-inning at bat.  Mays and another early 1950s center fielder, who played less than a mile away from the Giants' Polo Grounds, the Yankees' Mickey Mantle (like Mays, born in 1931), electrified baseball in the 1950s, when. it was indisputably the national pastime. (The NFL and NBA ranked behind boxing in the decade in which Americans first sat down to watch TV.  At least a quarter of American men regularly watched "Friday Night Fights" and other matches).  In the 1954 World Series. the Indians' Vic Wertz crushed Don Liddle's pitch into baseball's deepest center field - 483 feet to the wall in the Polo Grounds - where Mays made "The Catch."  Liddle, who was put in the game to pitch only to Wertz, reportedly said laconically, "I got my man."  Yes, by getting him to hit a Ruthian blast to the only player who could have caught it.  Baseball fans are an  argumentative tribe, but none question that Mays was among baseball's half-dozen best position players ever.  Still, after that first home run off Spahn, Mays went 0-for-13, making him 1-for-25.  Even baseball's gods need time to figure things out.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.  Amen!