“The one constant through all the years has been baseball.”

—Terence Mann (James Earl Jones) in Field of Dreams

Willie Mays

Willie Mays died June 18th at 93. His old friend Monte Irvin preceded him in 2016 at 96. Among the dwindling band of one-time New York youngsters, a cache of fond memories died with them.

I grew up on Staten Island, home of Bobby Thomson, whose playoff-winning, walk-off home run was dubbed “The Shot Heard Round the World.” It came on 3 October 1951, after the New York Giants had come from 13 1/2 games behind in August to tie the mighty Brooklyn Dodgers for the National League pennant. Driving by “Bobby’s house,” at the junction of  Todt Hill and Richmond Roads, was required of every kid’s dad when we were in the cars.

New Yorkers mostly liked the Yankees and Dodgers, but if you lived on “The Island” in that brief shining moment, the “Jints” were number one. Root for them and you were soon reeling off the whole lineup.

Willie Howard Mays, Jr. had come up to the majors in May of that glorious year—only to be drafted into the Army just after the season ended. (To the chagrin of “The Island,” the Giants lost the ’51 World Series to the all-powerful Yankees in six games, despite winning the first two of three.) Willie rejoined the team in 1954—and one of his many dates with destiny.

“The Catch”

I’m not going to limn his career, which you can find on Wikipedia and many other sources. Just want to remember our Giants roaring back in the World Series of 1954. We beat the “indomitable” Cleveland Indians, who’d won 111 games that year. (Disgruntled Yankee fans said the other teams had thrown games to the Indians just to keep the Yanks back. “We could have beat them, too,” we chorused.)

It was Game 1, eighth inning, scored tied 2-2. Up stepped Cleveland slugger Vic Wertz, who had batted in the Indians’ two runs with a first inning triple. With two runners on, Wertz sent a drive to deep center. Willie took off—vainly, we all thought. It looked like another sure triple.

Running flat out, his back to the ball, Mays made this impossible, miraculous, over-the-shoulder basket catch. Cleveland’s rally fizzled and the Giants won with Dusty Rhodes‘s three-run homer in the tenth.

It broke the Indians’ hearts. They never came back. Despite an ace Cleveland pitching staff, the Giants won four games straight, and all us kids at Public School 19 were in ecstasy.

“Too good for this world…”

We stopped following the Giants when they left town for San Francisco in 1958. But Willie stayed with the team—and stood the booing SF fans gave him early on, though he soon became a favorite. He retired in 1973 after a two-year stint back in New York, this time with the Mets. By then he was a fixture, an American hero, honored everywhere from the White House to the Golden Gate.

How good was he? Just look at the stats: 660 home runs. 3293 hits. 1909 runs batted in, 339 stolen bases, lifetime batting average .301, twenty-four All-Star Games. And there was always “The Catch.”

Roberto Clemente said: “To me, Willie Mays is the greatest who ever played.” Willie Stargell, whom Mays once threw out from 400 feet, “couldn’t believe he could throw that far. I figured there had to be a relay. Then I found out there wasn’t. He’s too good for this world.” Ty Cobb said Mays was the only player he’d pay to see.

Leo “The Lip” Durocher, the scrappy Giants manager in those two World Series, did not issue praise lightly. “If somebody came up and hit .450, stole 100 bases and performed a miracle in the field every day, I’d still look you in the eye and say Willie was better.” Then there was the Dodgers’ Don Zimmer: “In the National League in the 1950s, there were two opposing players who stood out over all the others—Stan Musial and Willie Mays…. I’ve always said that Willie Mays was the best player I ever saw.

Monte Irvin

I can’t think of Willie in those long-vanished days without recalling my other Giants hero, Montford Merrill Irvin. He too made the Hall of Fame, but didn’t enjoy the longevity Willie did. Monte came up to the Giants in 1949, played through 1955, and then a year with the Chicago Cubs. Sadly, a back injury during spring training in 1957 ended his career.

Monte was overshadowed by the illustrious Willie, but the two were close friends. I cannot improve on the Wikipedia report about Mays’s 1951 arrival at the Polo Grounds, home of the Giants:

During that season, Leo Durocher asked Irvin to serve as a mentor for Mays, who had been called up to the team in May. Mays later said, “In my time, when I was coming up, you had to have some kind of guidance. And Monte was like my brother…. I couldn’t go anywhere without him, especially on the road….

It was just a treat to be around him. I didn’t understand life in New York until I met Monte. He knew everything about what was going on and he protected me dearly.” Irvin later replied, “I did that for two years and in the third year, he started showing me around!

Given such a short time, Monte’s stats were impressive: lifetime batting average .305, 160 home runs, 604 runs batted in. Both Mays and Irvin averaged 86 RBIs per year. Before the majors. Irvin spent nine previous years in the old Negro Leagues, where he batted .358. His career there was interrupted by the Second World War. He served three years with the Army Engineers, was deployed to England, France and Belgium, and fought in the Battle of the Bulge.

Service to his country left Monte Irvin ever conscious of the contributions of veterans. In the Baseball Hall of Fame he served on the Veteran’s Committee. For many years after he left baseball, he also participated in Veteran charities—notably the American Veterans Center and World War II Veterans Committee.

Meeting Monte twice

I enjoyed a closer relationship with Monte Irvin than Willie Mays because I met Monte twice—some forty years apart.

The first was at the Polo Grounds in 1952. Monte was playing his usual left field, and I was in the grandstands. (It bears mentioning that Irvin at that time was a proven star, while Mays was in the Army. The year before, Irvin had sparked the Giants’ pennant race comeback, batting .312 with twenty-four homers and a league-leading 121 RBIs.)

“Hey Monte!” I yelled from he stands. “Hit one out today?” He heard and gave a thumbs-up. And later he did.

Forty years passed. In the 1990s on behalf of the Churchill Centre I attended a World War II veterans conference in Washington. The Committee often hosted baseball celebrities who were also veterans, and Irvin was was a frequent presence. Also present were two great pitchers: Warren Spahn of the Braves and Bob Feller of the Indians. But my attention was riveted on Monte. I hadn’t seen him since the Polo Grounds.

I greeted him at the bar: “Hullo, Number Twenty!”

Monte said, “You remember?”

“I do. I yelled to you from the outfield stands forty years ago. You hit one out. I rooted for you even more than Twenty-four.” (That was Willie.) He laughed and said, “Yeah, but he lasted longer.”

“Maybe so, but the word was, you got more dates.” Laughs all around.

Field of Dreams

Odd how memories come flooding back. “Memories so thick,” says “Terence Mann” in Field of Dreams, that we “have to brush them away from our faces, as if we dipped ourselves in magic waters.”

Think mighty façades sprouting flags and pennants. Long dark corridors smelling of beer and tobacco and hot dogs. And then emerging onto the biggest expanse of manicured green you’ve ever seen. Of the national anthem, the roar of the crowd, the crack of the bat when your hero connected. I loved those guys.

“Game Called”

by Grantland Rice

More baseball

“The Dodgers’ Immortal Vin Scully,” 2013.

“Moe Berg: ‘Give My Regards to the Catcher’ —Franklin Roosevelt,” 2014

“God is a Nats Fan: A Kid from New York Remembers,” 2019.

“Ty Cobb: Inconvenient Truths,” 2016.

“Nats Win: It’s 1924 All Over Again,” 2019.

“Baseball 2018: But Some of Us Still Remember When,” 2018

It may seem odd, since baseball is not an English sport, and its closest counterpart over there is rounders. But—ever obedient to the whims of Churchillians—I offer what he had to say on the matter.

The interesting photo above accompanied a nice article, “Churchill on Baseball,” by Christopher Schwarz, which I published  a few years ago in Finest Hour 163. I supplied the following Churchill quotes as a sidebar to Mr. Schwarz’s article.

_____________

Baseball by Churchill

“Millions of men and women are in the market, all eager to supplement the rewards of energetic toil by ‘easy money.’ From every part of its enormous territories the American public follows the game. Horseracing, baseball, football, every form of sport or gambling cedes its place to a casino whose amplitude and splendours make Monte Carlo the meanest midget in Lilliput.”

—WSC, “What I Saw and Heard in America,” Part IV: “Fever of Speculation in America,” Daily Telegraph, 9 December 1929; reprinted in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, 4 vols. (London: Library of Imperial History, 1975), IV 42.

* * *

“Broadly speaking, human beings may be divided into three classes: those who are toiled to death, those who are worried to death, and those who are bored to death. It is no use offering the manual labourer, tired out with a hard week’s sweat and effort, the chance of playing a game of football or baseball on Saturday afternoon. It is no use inviting the politician or the professional or business man, who has been working or worrying about serious things for six days, to work or worry about trifling things at the week-end.”

—WSC, “Hobbies,” in Thoughts and Adventures, 1932. (The best current edition is by ISI, thoroughly edited and re-footnoted by James W. Muller and Paul Courtenay.)

* * *

“‘The written word remains.’ The spoken word dies upon the air. The news bulletin is coming through on the broadcast. The telephone bell rings – your wife asks you if you remembered to post that letter—and by the time you can again give your attention to the announcer, he has passed to another item. Without the newspaper you will never know the result of that baseball match, or the President’s latest message to Congress.”

—WSC, “You Get It in Black and White,” Colliers, 28 December 1935; reprinted in Collected Essays IV, 317. (Churchill should have said “game” not “match.” Baseball is not cricket!)

Prime Minister’s Questions, 21 July 1952:

Mr. Fenner Brockway (Lab.): “Is [the Prime Minister] aware that…the Iver Heath Conservative Party Association held a fete to raise money for party purposes to which it invited American Service baseball teams to participate for a ‘Winston Churchill’ trophy…and had a note from him saying he was honoured that his name was linked to the trophy?”

WSC: “I read in the Daily Worker some account of this. I had not, I agree, fully realized the political implications that might attach to the matter, and in so far as I have erred I express my regret.” [Laughter.]

Mr. John H. Hynd (Lab.): “While Hon. Gentlemen opposite may try to laugh this one off, may I ask whether the Prime Minister would contemplate the attitude of his Hon. Friends if this incident had happened in connection with a Labour Party fete?”

WSC: “I hope we should all show an equal spirit of tolerance and good humour”

Mr. Brockway (Lab.): “Can the Prime Minister estimate what would be the reaction of Mr. Eisenhower if British Forces participated in a Democratic Party celebration?”

WSC: “I certainly should not attempt to add to the many difficult questions which are pending at the present time by bending my mind to the solution of that question.”

As a sequel to 1960, let’s take 2019. See “Nats Win!”

Until 2019 I was a frustrated fan of the Washington Nationals, as I was the old Washington Senators. As a New York schoolboy in the Fifties, I’d go up to Yankee Stadium to root for the Senators when they were in town. Always wore my navy blue cap with the white block “W.” Big, scary Bronx voices would shout: “Hey, kid—the Washington section’s in the bleachers.”

The Senators were perennial heartbreakers, although in mid-1952 they were only five games out of first place and considered to be pennant contenders. Known for light hitting and good pitching, they played hard and were usually fun to watch.

By 2012 the Nationals, who returned baseball to Washington in 2005, have been playing great baseball, and there’s reason to hope for “Joy in Mudville” soon. But the first six years were pretty rough. In 2009, another Nats loss again to the Phillies, I did a weird thing. I watched the video on Direct TV while listening to a CD of the New York Yankees game at Griffith Stadium on 5 July 1960, last year of the original Washington Senators. (Found it on eBay.)

Back to 1960

Transported back in time, I heard Phil Rizzuto and Mel Allen (one at a time, no tag-team) call a pitcher’s duel between the Yankees’ Ralph Terry and my hero Pedro Ramos, which the Senators won 5-3 in extra innings. (As Casey Stengel said, “you can look it up.”)

How broadcasts have changed: Allen and Rizzuto called plays and made prescient observations—nothing else. There were no reminiscences of their playing days, no ballgirl interviews with celebrities in the bleachers while the game was going on, no goofy mascots, no songfests, no fireworks, no instant-replay, no strike-zone reviews (the zone was uniform, the umps impartial). Just baseball—pure and elegant, as God and Abner Doubleday intended.

How the game has changed. Terry and Ramos (chewing a big wad of ‘baccy) each went eight innings. Relief pitchers came in and stuck—were not pulled after one batter because the next guy was batting from the other side of the plate. The phrase “pitch count” didn’t exist. (I realize that since 1980, there is reliable evidence that you can blow a young pitcher’s arm by leaving him in too long.) There were no “Designated Hitters.” From sluggers to pitchers, everybody knew how to bunt and run bases. No balls went through legs or over heads.

“Rhubarbs” (Red Barber’s term) were similar: José Valdivielso charged the mound when Terry brushed him back (Phil mentioned his “Latin temper,” which he wouldn’t do nowadays.) The next inning Pedro hit Mantle while “Meekie” took his base with a big grin, and the umpire fined Pedro $50 and warned him not to do it again.

Pedro and The Mick

Senators pitchers loved to razz Mantle. In 1956, Mick had hit a Ramos pitch almost out of Yankee Stadium. And it was Chuck Stobbs, the winning pitcher in this game, who had served the ball Mantle hit 565 feet out of Griffith Stadium in 1953, the second-longest home run on record. (The longest was by Babe Ruth, who hit one 575 feet against the Tigers in 1926.)

I was struck by the clean baseball both teams played. Aside from a hit batter and a wild pitch, there were no gaffes. The typical inning ended “nothing across” (a medieval term meaning no Yankee runs or hits and no Senator errors, or vice versa). Hits were scattered, even from the vaunted Yankee lineup. Decisions on relievers, pinch hitters and runners by managers Casey Stengel and Cookie Lavagetto were foxy and smart; nobody could argue with them. The Washington crowd booed José when he charged the mound, knowing Terry wasn’t purposely trying to hit him.

Even the advertising was fun. The sponsors were the Atlantic Refining Company (“Atlantic Imperial, the gasoline that cleans your carburetor as you drive”—remember carburetors?) and Ballantine Beer (“the Crisp Refresher”). There were no ads for patent medicines designed to ward off RLS, DES, PID, HIV or the dreaded ED. Mel and Phil would have been embarrassed to talk about such stuff.

Ah, the summer of 1960. The Yankees went on to win the pennant. The Senators played close to .500 and finished 5th out of eight before packing up for Minnesota. What a wonderful, entertaining game that was—managed, pitched and announced—over a half century ago.