Squib 307: Notes on Willie Mays at the End, Followed by a Hypothetical [by Alan Ziegler]

    I’ve never liked when sportswriters disdain great athletes playing past their prime, arrogantly asserting they should have quit before the sad decline.

    Willie Mays was well past his prime at 40 when my father and I took my seven-year-old brother Philip to Shea Stadium on August 25 1971, so he could see one of the greatest players of all time. The Mets drew 16,000 fans over the season’s average for the game with the San Francisco Giants. Willie struck out three times in a row, but my brother got to see that swing, even if it wasn’t so sweet anymore. (He also saw Mays’s teammate Dave Kingman hit the side of the Giants' team bus, beyond the left-field bullpen.)

    The following year, while batting .184, Willie was cast off to the Mets, returning to the city of his early grandeur, 21 years after turning his back on Vic Wertz and breaking Cleveland’s heart from 350 feet away.

    In his final year, 1973, Willie Mays batted .211, which was 91 points lower than his career average. Sportswriter Bill Madden was among those to place Mays with “the many Hall of Famers who could never quite concede when it was time to quit,” lamenting “the everlasting image of a 42-year-old shell of former greatness, stumbling and falling down in the outfield in the 1973 World Series.”

    I treasure Mays memories from the ’73 World Series: He got the first hit of the series, and, in his last at-bat ever, drove in the go-ahead run off Rollie Fingers in Game Two (and yes, he stumbled getting out of the box).

    But the indelible moment gracing my memory for 46 years came when the umpire called out Bud Harrelson at the plate after a phantom tag. Willie was on-deck, and he anguished over a play that didn’t involve him for a team he barely knew.

    Not for nothing, but Willie wasn’t the only player who had trouble with fly balls in the blinding sun. Here’s 30-year-old left-fielder Cleon Jones.

    And by the way, Willie also stumbled in the outfield during the ’54 World Series—after making that magic catch and throw.

    All this is in preface for a hypothetical question I’ve been trying to formulate for many years. This is the closest I’ve gotten:

    If you could relive just one season of one major leaguer’s career, would you prefer to be Willie Mays in 1973, a shell of your former self (six home runs) but with a career’s worth of brilliant memories? Or would you choose, say, 23-year-old John Milner’s 1973 (23 homers), without a whole lot to remember, but a future to dream?

Comments

[The Best American Poetry]

You gots to choose Mays over Milner, whatever the year, but I am glad you mentioned Milner whom I had forgotten but now recall. In 1972 at Shea Stadium I saw Mays homer for the Mets. That summer and early fall I got a job that was clerical-minus but did get me free entrance into the Shea and Yankee Stadium press boxes for baseball and football. I remember the September night the Pirates clinched the division at Shea.

Splendid piece and photos. -- DL

[Alan Ziegler]

Alan Ziegler said...
Yes, Mays all days
Better than Duke or Mickey
Say Hey I says

Ah, you got to see Clemente a few months before that tragic flight. --AZ

[The Best American Poetry]

I used to think it was Mays all the way. But can see the case for the Mick.

[Alan Ziegler]

The Duke comes in third.

[The Best American Poetry]

Afraid so. But I rooted fot him -- and saw him get his 1500th hit.