Willie Mays: The Life The Legend – James S. Hirsch, 2010 ★★★

Celebrating a Quiet Giant

In baseball, statistics are the ultimate measure of achievement, yet they fail to do justice to one of the game’s greatest legends. Willie Mays holds no major career records which jump to mind. In areas like stolen bases or home runs, his totals, while impressive, did not dominate even in his own time, let alone looking back now.

Yet when considering the totality of the game, and all the players who ever played it, Mays stands apart like a colossus.

In Willie Mays: The Life The Legend, James S. Hirsch asks the question: “Was he better than the Babe?” Even if you sense he would like to say yes, he doesn’t. Babe Ruth changed the game with his home runs, and that after establishing himself as a champion left-handed pitcher. But Hirsch makes a strong case for Mays anyway.

Ruth, he says, was “baseball’s most dominant player,” but Mays “its greatest master.” Mays changed how the game was played, bringing together speed, power and an ability to be anywhere in the outfield.

Had he been born fifteen or even ten years earlier, he would have played most if not all of his career in the Negro Leagues, probably remembered, along with Josh Gibson, Oscar Charleston, and Cool Papa Bell, as a mythic but ill-defined figure who was victimized by America’s racial hypocrisy. Had he been born ten years later, he would never have been part of perhaps the most celebrated era in sports history – New York in the 1950s – when baseball dominated the sports culture, integrated teams stole the march on civil rights, ballpark sponsored miracles, and legends were born.

A young Willie Mays launches one, his left hand covering the bat handle while the right is completely released. Mays's unique grip, learned in the Negro Leagues, included keeping his right thumb loose under the handle. He swung a heavy bat and wore no batting glove.
Image from https://www.laprogressive.com/racism/willie-mays-giants

For Hirsch, race is at the heart of the Willie Mays story. He was not the first Black to integrate baseball, nor its first superstar, but his cultural significance was often defined by the quiet challenge he presented to bigotry and segregation. And “quiet” is the right word: Mays was not a militant activist, either when he played or after, something which made him different from Curt Flood and Jackie Robinson, to name two African-Americans who made waves while changing the game.

Mays just played baseball like it had never been played before.

Said his minor league manager Tommy Heath of the Minneapolis Millers: “What do you look for in a player? You look for a good eye, speed, a good arm, baseball sense. He has ‘em all.”

Power, too, but that came later, in 1954, three seasons after his debut and following a season and a half lost to military service. He wound up stroking 660 round-trippers in his career, accomplishment enough without considering the windy, cavernous parks he called home.

For teammates, Mays was a sizable morale boost. His gravity-defying catches and fearsome throws made him a legend across two decades; his ability to set the right mood with teammates was also unique. Charlie Grimm, manager of the Milwaukee Braves, called Mays “the only ballplayer who can help a team just by riding on the bus with them.”

The catch. The 1954 World Series wound up being remembered for this Game 1 play, as the Giants defeated the heavily-favored Cleveland Indians in four games. At this moment, the game was tied 2-2. Image from https://www.laprogressive.com/racism/willie-mays-giants

For people who follow baseball, one brief video clip tells the whole story: Mays chasing down a Vic Wertz liner soaring over his head in the 1954 World Series, snagging it over his shoulder in a basket catch, and then whirling around to zip the ball into the infield.

Hirsch writes: It’s appropriate that a film clip or an image, not a statistic, defines him. Unlike other great players, who are associated with numbers – 56, .406, 61, 714, 755 – Mays holds no record with historical resonance. His brilliance was in how he played the game, and the Catch evokes the awe and wonder of those skills.

Passages like that make Willie Mays: The Life The Legend worth reading. Hirsch not only knows how to celebrate Mays but finds ways to define the indefinable impact he had on the game.

He draws attention to The Catch not only because it was famous in itself but helped signal a new era. It is black-and-white footage; the following year, the World Series would be shot on color film. Mays played in 1954 on one of three teams based in New York City; four years later, there would be only one, with Mays and the Giants moving to San Francisco.

One thing the 1960s had in common with the 1950s was a lot of great seasons by Willie Mays.

Mays in the 1960s. While he won fame playing for the Giants in New York, it was for the San Francisco team he became a model of consistent greatness, leading the National League in Wins Above Replacement every season but three from 1954 to 1966.
Image from https://www.mccoveychronicles.com/2022/11/12/23454896/movie-review-say-hey-willie-mays-san-francisco-giants

Hirsch spends a lot of his book explaining just how this worked. The Giants won just the 1954 World Series and played in two others, 1951 and 1962, while Mays was on the team. But when it came to fielding, hitting safely, hitting for power, throwing runners out, or running for extra bases, Mays was at or near the best every season from 1954-1966.

Mays, Hirsch writes, “was always better than the box score:”

By the time he retired, he had hit a homer in every inning from one to sixteen. It’s such a freakish mark – how many players even have a hit in every inning from one to sixteen? How many players even have an at bat? – that not much is made of it, but it’s an achievement that defines Mays’s essential qualities: his durability, his power, and his clutch hitting.

One notable defect of the book is hard to blame on Hirsch, but a defect still: the elusive character of his subject. This is an authorized biography, written with Mays’s cooperation and with extensive interviews. Yet the man himself remains largely in the shadows, guarded if not alone.

Hirsch concludes this reticence is part of what makes being a legend easier to live with. “Willie Mays never looked back, on anything, and what he brought with him he rarely shared with others but carried silently in his heart,” Hirsch writes.

A famous catch by Mays while colliding with teammate Bobby Bonds in April 1970 showed fans Mays still had it in the field at age 38. At the plate, he hit .291 with 28 home runs.
Image from https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1395973817271258&id=607345726134075&set=a.607350146133633

Hirsch runs against this wall several times in the book, most notably when discussing race. Mays was the pre-eminent Black ballplayer most of the years he played, but speaking out was not his style. Even when confronted with explicitly racist situations, like resistance to his moving into a house on a posh San Francisco street, he worked to defuse tensions. He eventually got the house, but never complained publicly.

This attitude, which extended to his relationships with white managers and club owners, offended many in the press as well as Black leaders like Jackie Robinson, the integrating champion who, after retiring from the game, became one of Mays’s loudest critics.

Hirsch pushes back at some of Robinson’s harsher statements, but echoes this line of criticism on the whole:

His reluctance to talk about race – or, more specifically, to discuss his experiences with racism – bleached out his Black identity. He was always the nonthreatening superstar who was embraced by all and who seemed insulated from racial hostilities. He simply floated above the fray without complaint or concern.

Of course, no one had the right to tell Mays how to be Black. As an athlete, he fought his own battles and scored his own victories in ways that resounded in the larger culture, whatever he chose to say afterwards. And that usually was about baseball.

My earliest baseball memory was watching Willie Mays hit a home run in his May 1972 debut with the New York Mets. He played for them two seasons, 1972-1973, and while he was often a shadow of his younger self, he did conclude his career with another World Series appearance.
Image from https://www.facebook.com/baseballinpics/posts/jerry-grote-with-willie-mays-after-mays-first-game-with-the-mets-may-14-1972-the/974899128088501/

Another problem with Willie Mays: The Life The Legend is its length. It weighs in at 566 pages. With a subject who was cooperative but not fulsome about the subject of himself, Hirsch is forced to rely on extensive research and many interviews to fill out his word portrait. This gets both repetitive and trivial in its focus.

But this is outweighed by the benefits of the book, which is a full-on appreciation of Mays the player. Hirsch explains in-depth his critical relationship as a rookie with his uncouth manager, Leo Durocher: “[E]ach needed the other, Durocher boosting his yearling’s fragile self-esteem, Mays coming through with clutch hits and acrobatic catches.”

Hirsch suggests Mays’s time in Manhattan playing in the Polo Grounds may have been a high-water mark for his career, culturally if nothing else. He played two of his four World Series for the New York Giants, formed one of baseball’s enduring troikas along with fellow Gotham centerfielders Mickey Mantle and Duke Snider, and earned the nickname “The Say Hey Kid.”

By the way, Hirsch explains that nickname sprang from Mays’s habit of greeting people with just that monosyllable. Over time, he became even less communicative. Always polite and relatively genial, he turned more inward as the years drew on and he became more prone to thinking people were out to take advantage of him. Hirsch observes:

What’s most striking about Mays is the contrast between his dealings with children and those with adults. One group he trusts; the other he doesn’t.

Mays in his later years. He died in 2024, at age 93. Hirsch's book captures Mays giving speeches to young people while dedicating baseball fields for them to play on. He enjoyed his solitude in retirement, but yearned always to be back on the field with fans.
Photograph by Daniel Shirey from https://www.nbcnews.com/news/sports/willie-mays-dies-93-rcna42452

The fact this is an authorized book becomes clear when Hirsch awkwardly sidesteps his subject’s fractured relationships with family members who include an adopted son. Yet for a book Mays had to sign off on, there is a lot more candor than one might expect. Hirsch explains in his Author’s Note that Mays only asked for one change after reading the book, regarding an ex-friend he wanted it clear he had been reconciled. The fact that this represents the late legend’s own story as he saw fit to share it makes this a book worth having, and reading.

It is also a fast-moving, graceful read, not unlike its subject. For all its excess verbiage it paints a portrait of a man and his time that helps you see what made Mays a legend, if not what drove him to stay one so long.