Say hey, Willie Mays! A true Giant

Aurora's Sport Model Series captured great moments in history for my room

·        Willie Mays was in my bedroom.

He sat right on top of my bookcase, still robbing Cleveland’s Vic Wertz in the 1954 World Series every single day and night. He listened to me playing Rod Stewart, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, The Beach Boys, Motown.

He stood watch over my Strat-O-Matic baseball games, even the self-constructed baseball game I made out of a rectangular slap of plywood with a wire screen modeled on Fenway’s Left Field screen. I had a small ramp and a big ball bearing and a stick of wood about the width of a chopstick nailed to the board. I had bits of cardboard, secured by nails for the fielders and if you timed it right, you could hit the ball bearing off the ramp and up into the screen. Willie would have done that a lot.

Willie Mays, still robbing Vic Wertz…

The Aurora Model Company, back in 1965, came out with a Great Moments In Sports Line. There were plastic models you’d assemble for Babe Ruth, Jimmy Brown, Johnny Unitas, Jerry West, Jack Dempsey (except they should have had Luis Firpo knocking Dempsey out of the ring which is what happened).

My favorite, of course, was Willie Mays, making the basket catch that he was so famous for that he got sick of talking about it. Though I wasn’t exactly Mr. Model when it came to following the directions, using that model airplane glue, not getting all over the pieces and all that. But I was able to get Willie in precisely the right position to keep robbing poor Vic Wertz for the rest of both of their lives.

Growing up in New Hampshire as a sports nut - I also got the Dempsey-Firpo Aurora Sports Model - I only got to see Mays on TV on The Game Of The Week. Kids these days can’t believe that there was no ESPN and no Internet and no other way to see these guys. But whenever the Giants were on, I’d watch and Mays always seemed to making a great play in the field and hitting a home run. There just wasn’t any other player that seemed to be as explosive or as exciting.

My first glove was a Willie Mays’ glove and I wore the darn thing out. Of course, I knew Mays was black, I was a white kid who hadn’t ever even talked to a black person and it never occurred to me that he probably had to deal with all sorts of things related to his color. Was that a bad thing?

To me, his on-the-field excellence and exuberance separated him from all the other players I saw, except, of course, my hometown favorite Carl Yastrzemski. Baseball was hard work for Yaz, you could see that. For Willie, it was a showcase, he looked like he was having a ball and would do it for free. I think he even said that once,

I never got to meet him, which is just as well. I was in the ballpark in Atlanta when he was introduced as part of the All-Century team so I did see him in the flesh. I also saw him riding on top of an automobile in the 2007 All-Star Game in San Francisco (Thanks, Ron Sachs) with my son, John, then 13 years away from his own MLB debut.

It wasn’t until years later, writing and researching about baseball that you could see just how unique a player Mays really was. He had phenomenal power and speed - if you saw him without a shirt, he looked like a fighter - and never lifted a weight. And his physicality was extraordinary. When Ted Williams included a brief clip of Mays in the batter’s box in an instructional hitting video, his stride was from one end of the batter’s box to the other. You’d never teach a kid to do that.

Willie Mays’ extraordinary batter’s box stride showed his unique physicality

His first major-league hit, after an 0-12 start, was a game-winning HR off Hall of Fame lefty Warren Spahn. He ended up hitting 17 more off him, second all-time off one pitcher to Duke Snider’s 19 HR’s off of Robin Roberts.

Playing in the glorified wind tunnel called Candlestick Park, he wound up his career with 660 home runs, 54 behind that Ruth fella. And of course, Hank Aaron and his godson Barry Bonds would later pass him.

But when it came to extra-inning home runs, Willie was the all-time king with 21 extra-inning home runs, five more than his closest competitor, Frank Robinson. And of course, the single-most memorable HR Mays hit might have been on July 2, 1963 when his solo home run off Spahn put an end to one of the most memorable pitching performances of all time, Spahn and the Giants’ ace Juan Marichal throwing up zeroes for 15 consecutive innings.

Hearing all the talking heads today and last night talking about Mays being an inspiration to black people and a silent spokesman for African Americans and all that other historic stuff, I suppose it’s true. And if you were looking for that sort of thing, yeah, Willie Mays was something to see.

But at the same time, writing this on Juneteenth of all days, I sort of miss the idea that a New Hampshire kid who’d never met a black person at that point in his life could simply love a guy for the way he played, no matter what color he was or what color you were.

You certainly don’t want to offend anyone by saying that and from what I’ve read, Willie was excited about MLB honoring the Negro Leagues by playing at Willie’s old haunt Rickwood Field and including Negro League statistics into the all-time MLB record book. They gave him 10 more hits which still kept his career average at .301.

I only know that I’ve been watching this sport for 60 years and if I could pick any player to start a team, I’d start with Willie Mays.