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 425 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?
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