This Day in Baseball History (Willie Mays Clubs 1st HR)

May 28, 1951—Decisively ending an 0-12 hitless streak that seemed to confirm his initial fears about joining the major leagues, 20-year-old New York Giants rookie Willie Mays hit the first of his 660 career home runs.

In his first at-bat at the team’s home, the Polo Grounds, their newly installed center fielder smacked an offering from star Boston Braves southpaw Warren Spahn over the left-field fence, for what was also his first career hit.

My blog post from 10 years ago briefly reviewed the amazing career of the man that many have proclaimed the best all-around ballplayer of all time. But I think it’s worth spending a little time here on his introduction to the big leagues, as well as how it compared and contrasted with that of rookie and legendary Hall of Famer, Mickey Mantle.

These two were not the only future Hall of Famers to experience difficulties when first exposed to the big leagues. Others, such as Willie Stargell, Brooks Robinson, Pie Traynor, and Roberto Clemente, had relatively subpar campaigns even over their first five seasons, as demonstrated in this 2012 Jim McLennan post on the “AZ Snake Pit” blog.

But the spotlight shone more intensely in New York, the media and sports capital of America—and Mays wasn’t yet over his yips at the plate. He then proceeded to go on another hitless streak: 0-13. At this turning point in his career, as he sat sobbing in front of his locker, he found reassurance from a manager not otherwise known for being soft-hearted: Leo Durocher.

Though he had clashed with Jackie Robinson while managing the Brooklyn Dodgers, Durocher took a gentler approach with this less mature but still immensely talented player now under his wing.

When Mays repeated what he had told him previously while in the Giants’ top minor-league club, the Minneapolis Millers—i.e., that he doubted his ability to hit major-league pitching—Durocher answered, “As long as I’m the manager of the Giants, you are my center fielder. … You are the best center fielder I’ve ever looked at.”

Breathing a sigh of relief, and justifying his manager’s confidence, Mays went on a 14-for-33 tear. He sparked the team’s thrilling pennant run that season, winning Rookie of the Year honors with 20 home runs, 68 RBIs, and a .274 batting average in 121 games—not to mention playing dazzling defense.

There couldn’t have been a more dramatic contrast to another much-heralded outfielder that year, Mantle. Though some veteran New York Yankees like Hank Bauer sought to make him comfortable, the “Commerce [Oklahoma] Comet” was well aware that he was regarded as an interloper and ultimate threat to job security by the Bombers’ proud but fading superstar fixture in center field, Joe DiMaggio.

In contrast to Durocher, Yankee manager Casey Stengel—after successfully overriding the advice of general manager George Weiss that their hot young prospect was not ready for the majors—felt the need to send Mantle back to the minors when his strikeouts began to mount.

It’s now part of Bomber legend how a tough-love visit from Mantle’s father Mutt led his son to surmount his funk and for Stengel to call him back up—as the team’s current rightfielder and centerfielder-in-waiting—in late August. Mantle ended the season hitting .267 with 13 home runs, 65 RBIs, and a .792 OPS.

While Stengel managed Mantle for the first 10 years of his career, Durocher only benefited from having Mays in his lineup for three. (The “Say Hey Kid” served in the Army from May 1952 through March 1954, causing him to miss most of one season and all of another, and his manager was fired after a third-place finish in 1954.)

Nevertheless, that short period of time was enough to make the crusty Durocher speak glowingly about him for the rest of his life, as seen in this passage from his autobiography, Nice Guys Finish Last:

“If somebody came up and hit .450, stole 100 bases, and performed a miracle in the field every day, I’d still look you right in the eye and tell you that Willie was better. He could do the five things you have to do to be a superstar: hit, hit with power, run, throw and field. And he had the other magic ingredient that turns a superstar into a super Superstar. Charisma. He lit up a room when he came in. He was a joy to be around.”

If Durocher served as a kind of proud surrogate father to his young superstar, Stengel often acted as a demanding, frequently disappointed one to his. Early to see Mantle’s immense gifts, he also frequently grew frustrated with him for not paying attention to constructive construction and for not measuring up to a standard for what he could be.

The dissing of his best player may have reached a nadir in 1959, when Stengel listed Hank Bauer, Yogi Berra and Phil Rizzuto as his best players, according to Jane Leavy’s The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood. Pressed by Bauer about this noticeable exclusion, Stengel answered, “You gave 110 percent every time you were in the lineup.”

I couldn’t finish this post without looking at one particular aspect of this landmark game in the career of Mays.

The at-bat against Spahn was not only an indicator of his future greater greatness, but also a sign of his comfort at the plate against the Hall of Fame hurler. In 253 plate appearances against him, Mays hit 18 homers (the most he accumulated against any pitcher), while batting .305. with a .955 OPS.

Since the run he gave up to Mays was his only one in his 4-1 victory, Spahn took the first round-tripper by Mays in stride, joking later, “For the first 60 feet, that was a hell of a pitch."

I suspect that it was harder for him to accept another he yielded in July 1963, when, on the mound for the Milwaukee Braves, he lost his chance at outdueling the (now San Francisco) Giants’ Juan Marichal in the 16^th inning when, after 16 innings and 201 pitches, he watched his chance at a complete-game shutout disappear through  Mays’ solo HR.

This Day in Baseball History (Willie Mays, Bicoastal Giant Legend, Born)

May 6, 1931—Swift, smooth-fielding slugger Willie Mays was born in Alabama, in America’s most viciously segregated era—a long way from the East and West Coast cities where he broke through as perhaps the greatest in the first generation of African-American players.

Gotham fans of a certain age—or even those just fascinated by sports history—would tell you that the golden age of New York baseball lasted for a decade, from 1947 to 1957, and especially the last six years of that period. The city was big enough to hold three franchises: the Yankees in the American League, and, over in the National League, the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers. One, sometimes two, of these teams made it to the World Series in each of these 10 years. Not so coincidentally, all three teams had sluggers in center field, each with their own rabid fans: the oldest, Duke Snider, for the Dodgers; Mays, for the Giants; and a player who, like Mays, entered the major leagues with rookie travails in 1951, Mickey Mantle.

All these years later, I am not going to choose a “best” among these three magnificent center fielders who inspired countless arguments among midcentury New York fans about who was the greatest. I simply want to celebrate the achievement of one, Mays, who made a difference in the life of baseball and in two great American cities.

(One of those cities, let it be noted, was NOT Boston. While still holding out against integrating their team—a stance they would maintain until a dozen years after Jackie Robinson came to Brooklyn--the Red Sox sent a scout to assess Mays, then playing not far from where he grew up, with the Birmingham Black Barons. Mays, the scout reported, was not the Sox kind of player.  Undoubtedly, at least part of the reason why the Curse of the Bambino extended longer than it had to was because of the Curse of the Color Line in Beantown).

In one of his great columns in which he summed up a sports figure by addressing him in the second person, sportswriter Jimmy Cannon conveyed the magic that this gifted ballplayer held for countless city youths:

“You're Willie Mays of Fairfield, Ala., who is part of the small talk of New York. This shall be your city as long as your talent lasts….Kids forget the squalor of their childhood as they emulate the shambling urgency of your gait. They speak as though you lived on the same block with them.”

When you think about it, the time that Mays had to make his mark as a member of the New York Giants was relatively short compared with his entire career. He missed the 1952 and 1953 seasons entirely because of military service, and after 1958 he followed when the Giants left the Polo Grounds for San Francisco’s damp, foggy, windblown, altogether miserable Candlestick Park. He was not part of a New York team again until 1972 and 1973, when he played for the New York Mets, at a point when his considerable awareness of the subtleties of the game could not compensate for his declining physical skills and injuries.

That left 1951, when he earned National League Rookie of the Year honors despite not being called up till late May (and not getting a hit in his first 12 a-bats); 1954, when he became Most Valuable Player; and only three more full seasons in which he played the game with a flair never seen before and seldom if ever glimpsed since. 

Here was a player who could not only slug the ball out of the park but also run so fast that he’d lose his cap, who could catch flies with his unorthodox but devastatingly effective “basket catch,” and—in the 1954 World Series—sprint into the canyon of center field in the Polo Grounds to catch a line drive by Vic Wertz, haul it in with his back to the infield, then whirl around to fire perfectly to the cutoff man. (It’s a sign of Mays’ consistent brilliance that he doesn’t even regard this play—one so iconic that it’s known simply as “The Catch”—as his best.)

The fans could see what he was like on the field, where his skill was evident. What they could not see was his leadership in the clubhouse, where his ebullience, pragmatism, even temperament and intelligence at least kept teams from self-destruction, and occasionally (as in the ’62 and ’73 pennant races) helped his squads reach the World Series. A few examples will suffice:

* He helped the San Francisco Giants come from behind in the pennant race, then defeat the Los Angeles Dodgers in a best-two-of-three playoff series, in 1962, despite having to be hospitalized down the stretch from exhaustion;

*He staved off a rebellion two years later by African-American and Hispanic players angered by racially insensitive remarks by manager Alvin Dark, successfully arguing that, no matter how angry they might feel, forcing a mid-season managerial replacement could only lead to catastrophe;

*He was virtually the only player on the field to keep his head a year later when a benches-clearing brawl broke out between teammate Juan Marichal and Mays’ friend on the Dodgers, Johnny Roseboro—eventually managing to separate the two before a riot could have broken out; 

*He made a key speech to the executive board of the baseball players union in 1972, urging them to stick together on the eve of their strike; and 

*He joined teammate Tom Seaver and manager Yogi Berra, among others, in persuading Mets fans to allow the game to proceed after a nasty slide by Pete Rose into Bud Harrelson led to a bottle being thrown at Rose from left field and to the umpires threatening the Amazin’s with a forfeit in this bitterly contested 1973 playoff game.

There was another quality, over and above all of his leadership qualities, even, which Mays summed up this way during his induction speech into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1979:

“This country is made up of a great many things. You can grow up to be what you want. I chose baseball, and I loved every minute of it. I give you one word –love. It means dedication. You have to sacrifice many things to play baseball. I sacrificed a bad marriage and I sacrificed a good marriage. But I’m here today because baseball is my number one love.”

Quote of the Day (Roger Angell, on the Polo Grounds in the ‘20s and ‘30s)

“I liked it best when we came into the place from up top, rather than through the gates down at the foot of the lower-right-field stand. You reached the upper-deck turnstiles by walking down a steep, short ramp from the Speedway, the broad avenue that swept down from Coogan’s Bluff and along the Harlem River, and once you got inside, the long field within the horseshoe of decked stands seemed to stretch away forever below you, toward the bleachers and the clubhouse pavilion in center….Everything about the Polo Grounds was special, right down to the looped iron chains that separated each sector of box seats from its neighbor and could burn your bare arm on a summer afternoon if you weren’t careful. Far along each outfield wall, a sloping mini-roof projected outward, imparting a thin wedge of shadow for the bullpen crews sitting there: they looked like cows sheltering beside a pasture shed in August.”—Roger Angell, Let Me Finish (2007)

(Photo shows the Polo Grounds on opening day, 1923, with newly built Yankee Stadium in the background; image from Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

This Day in Baseball History (Catcher Shin Guards Worn for 1st Time)

April 11, 1907—They all laughed at Columbus, the Gershwin brothers told us. Likewise, when Roger Bresnahan squatted behind home plate, the crowd on opening day for the New York Giants couldn’t stop laughing at the bulky new get-up of the team’s catcher.

A good thing they were in the stands, well out of Bresnahan’s reach. The catcher was a mirror of John McGraw—a competitive, fiery Irish-American who cared for nothing but winning, and who was ready to take on anybody who dared cross him. And this day, at the Polo Grounds, there were many people willing to do so, and they erupted in uproarious laughter when a foul tip rocketed off his new leg accouterments in the fifth inning of the game against the Phillies.

Well, you can’t blame either party entirely in this instance. That day, by the standards of the American diamond, Bresnahan’s attire was strange. The word in the last sentence that makes all the difference, of course, is American. British sports fans would have seen something like this, all right, on their cricket goaltenders. For U.S. fans who hadn’t beheld that particular sight previously, Bresnahan would likely have looked like a bumbling medieval knight.

They were profoundly mistaken. Bresnahan had been inspired to take the next evolutionary steps in shielding himself and others at his position from their usual wear and tear. God only knows how many catchers following Bresnahan would have succumbed to injury even sooner had he not tried out shin guards. 

Bresnahan was a player willing to try anything—even all nine positions on field. (I heard of the Minnesota Twins’ Cesar Tovar doing this in a single game—still, whether in such a concentrated instance or over a career, it’s quite a feat.) If Bresnahan was willing to try a new position, why not a new idea?

This one he discovered quite by accident, in a homeplate collision with the Phillies’ backstop Red Dooin. When he looked up, Bresnahan  couldn’t believe what he saw: papier mache shin guards worn under the stockings to protect Dooin’s heavily scarred legs. A problem loomed in Bresnahan’s case: he was considerably bulkier than the lithe Phillies catcher. The white cricket shinguards that put Giant fans (and the team’s rivals) in such convulsions was one remedy.

Shin guards represented the next evolutionary step—really, the last one—in the catcher apparatus that a later practitioner, Harold “Muddy” Ruel, would term “the tools of ignorance.” (Ruel, when he wasn’t calling signals for Walter Johnson in the 1920s, had learned to use language in creative ways as an attorney.) The rubber-mouth protector, the catcher’s mitt, the chest protector and the face mask had already been invented. 

But finding shin guards had become an increasing necessity, as baseball rules adopted in the 1880s had stipulated that the final strike, including foul tips, had to be caught on the fly. Staying close had the additional advantage of helping in “framing” pitches and fielding bunts. But proximity to the batter also made catchers far more prone to, at least, all kinds of little nicks, and sometimes far worse.

Bresnahan  was always on the alert for something to protect him. Part of it had to with being hospitalized after being beaned. A batting helmet he devised afterward—kind of like half of a leather football helmet, worn on the side of the head where the player batted from—never really caught on. But after some adjustments to cut down on bulkiness, Bresnahan’s shin guards did, as did his use of  leather-bound  rolls of padding in his wire catcher's mask.

Versatility, a willingness to experiment, and shrewdness (he caught Christy Mathewson’s three shutouts in the 1905 World Series) led to Bresnahan’s posthumous election to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1945. This year, he’s been nominated to the Irish-American Baseball Hall ofFame. The “Duke of Tralee” (an incorrect moniker bestowed by a sportswriter) is hardly among the more conspicuous nominees on the ballot, but maybe his election—and pieces such as the one you’re now reading—will spread his fame.

Song Lyric of the Day (Dave Frishberg, Immortalizing an Unusual Baseball Name)

“Whitey Kurowski, Max Lanier
Eddie Waitkus, Johnny Vander Meer
Bob Estalella
Van Lingle Mungo.”— “Van Lingle Mungo,” words and music by Dave Frishberg (1969), from The Dave Frishberg Songbook

The man who gave his name to the only song I know that’s composed entirely of the names of baseball players was born on this date 100 years ago.

Van Lingle Mungo (in the image accompanying this post) was a righthanded flamethrower who, in 14 seasons, compiled a 120-115 record and 3.47 ERA. Much of that time was spent toiling for the Brooklyn Dodgers, whose second-division play often made him lose control of his temper and of games. An injury led the Dodgers to release him in the 1941 season (naturally, the year they made it to the World Series), whereupon he reinvented himself as a junkball specialist.

That record and temperament made Mungo the subject of one of the typically priceless one-liners from Casey Stengel, his manager with the Dodgers: “Mungo and I got along just fine," said Stengel. "I won't stand for no nonsense, and then I duck."

That same fiery temperament might have made me, for one, reluctant to turn him into the subject of a song, but jazz pianist and composer Dave Frishberg probably did not know this when he did so: It was simply an unusual name that summoned an entire lost world of his youth.

But when Mungo heard that he was the subject of a song, the former player--now in his late fifties--wanted to know why he wasn’t getting royalties. (In those pre-free-agent days, players and ex-players had to hustle for every dollar they could get.) Frishberg patiently explained that hardly anybody associated with the song was likely to see any money from the tune, especially the songwriter himself, and that Mungo’s best recourse was to write a song about him. At that, Mungo grinned and said that maybe he would. (He didn’t.)

In a way, I liken what is now one of Frishberg’s signature tunes to Stephen Sondheim’s “I’m Still Here.” Each, containing references to an era unfamiliar to someone growing up today, becomes, in effect, a mini-history (in the case of the latter, “I got through Abie’s Irish Rose, five Dionne babies, Major Bowes”).

As a baseball fan, I find “Van Lingle Mungo” a deeply humbling experience. You see, I could only identify 12 of the 38 names in the song. That kind of average might be okay on the baseball diamond, but hardly elsewhere.

This Day in Baseball History (Mel Ott Sets Runs-Scored Record)

August 4, 1934—Slugger Mel Ott scored six runs in a game, a record he would tie 10 years later, and help the New York Giants overwhelm the Philadelphia Phillies, 21-4.

Recently a friend piqued my interest in the squad that has recently taken a back seat to the other three major-league teams in the Big Apple over the years (the Yankees, the Dodgers, and the Mets). 

He informed me of a project sponsored by the Yankees, Mets, Jets, San Francisco (baseball) Giants and New York (football) Giants--all former tenants of the fabled Polo Grounds--to restore the last remnant of the baseball Giants' glory days: the John Brush Stairs, which lead from a park to the former stadium site.

Ott is not only emblematic of the early greatness and later eclipse of this team, but also a fascinating case study, in and of himself, of the nature of enduring fame in the national pastime.

Before writing this post, the following facts, for no apparent reason, stuck in my mind about Ott:

* He accumulated 511 homers over the course of his career;

* He had an unusual swing, with his right leg kicking upward before he made contact. Nevertheless, the results of the odd motion were impressive enough that his first manager, John J. McGraw (a skipper otherwise distinctly unenamored by the lure of the long ball), warned associates in the organization (including Casey Stengel) not to mess with it.

* He died in an auto accident in 1958 (a terrible year for baseball legends in that regard—the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Roy Campanella was involved in a devastating car crash that confined him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life);

* More than 35 years after his untimely demise, he was still receiving letters, postmarked New York, with no return address but sealed with a lipstick print on the back of the envelope, from a woman known only as “Mary”, dividing bemused observers into two camps over her identity: either a lady who never really knew the slugger, or one who knew him extremely intimately.

* He was the last refuge of lazy crossword puzzle-makers who needed two three-letter words to fill out their work.

I wondered why I hadn’t read or heard more about Ott. Before the steroid era, after all, 500 HRs were nothing to sneeze at. So, I began reviewing the possibilities for why his prominence has dimmed somewhat over the years.

Maybe he didn’t have the chance to star in the offseason, I thought at first, or play a crucial role in a pennant race, as Carl Yastrzemski did in 1967, when every one of his Triple Crown statistics were needed to push the Boston Red Sox to the World Series.

But that turned out not to be the case—Ott played in three World Series from 1933 through 1937, batting .295. In 1936, he practically carried the Giants to the postseason singlehandedly, driving in 18% of the team’s runs.

Maybe, I thought again, Ott’s talents were one-dimensional, largely offensive-oriented. But that turned out to be even more incorrect than my first assumption: he recorded 26 outfield assists in 1929, and thereafter opposing players learned never to take advantage of his arm again.

So why has Ott—so famous in 1944 that, in a nationwide vote by war bond holders, he outpolled Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jack Dempsey, and Joe Louis as the greatest sports athlete of all time—been treated as something of an afterthought by today’s sports aficionados, even those based in New York? Herewith, some hypotheses:

* Ott’s persona paled next to the far more distinctive ones created by his contemporaries: larger-than-life Ruth, tragic Gehrig, all-around talent DiMaggio, hitting-obsessed Ted Williams.
His playing field affected retrospective evaluations. Baseball historian Bill James noted that 60% of Ott’s homers occurred at the Polo Grounds. People talk about the “short rightfield porch” of Yankee Stadium, but the 296 feet from home plate to the right-field foul pole had nothing on the 258 feet along similar lines at Coogan’s Bluff.

* At the same time, much of his early career coincided with the “dead ball era” of baseball. In one way, this benefited the Giants, and particularly ace Carl Hubbell, but it restrained the offensive totals of Ott, who never surpassed the 42 homers he hit in 1929 at age 20.

* He was given an entirely inadequate nickname. Any player worth his salt, if he wants to be remembered, needs a terrific nickname: The Babe, The Yankee Clipper, The Iron Horse, The Say-Hey Kid, The Splendid Splinter. Even 1970s reliever Al Hrabosky, for heaven’s sake, got “The Mad Hungarian.” And Ott’s? “Master Melvin.” That moniker was meant to evoke his naivete and precocity (he played his first big-league game at age 17 and, like fellow Cooperstown legends Robin Yount and Dave Winfield, never played a day in the minors). Instead, it sounds awfully close to “Milquetoast Melvin.” If I’d been him, I would have gotten a halfway decent PR firm to plant at least a good nickname with the press, something to evoke either his value to the team (“Magnificent Melvin” or “Melvin the Magician”) or the size of his homers (“Monstrous Melvin”).

* He was a helluva nice guy—perhaps too much for his own good. The fans loved Ott. So did owner Horace Stoneham, who named him player-manager in 1942. But after several seasons in which his teams kept finishing out of the running, Stoneham fired Ott as skipper, replacing him with the recent manager of the odious Brooklyn Dodgers: Leo Durocher, a man who, watching Ott and his squad in 1946, came out with the following (or something close to it): "Nice guys finish last."

I can’t quite end with Leo the Lip getting the last word. So, you say, Durocher won three pennants, while Ott won none. Let’s look at Durocher’s record more closely: How many of those pennants were won honestly? Only two—that we know of, anyway.

The most famous of Durocher's pennants—1951, with the Giants—did not come as a result of his between-the-lines strategizing, we now realize.

For more than a century, baseball fans thrilled to the “Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff”—the Giants’ improbable comeback from 13 1/2 games back on August 11, 1951, that climaxed with Bobby Thomson’s walkoff homer against Dodger reliever Ralph Branca. 

Little did fans know (though many in the game’s cognoscenti—including the redoubtable Jackie Robinson—suspected) that the Giants benefited from an elaborate electronic apparatus that enabled them to steal signs and flash them to their players. (The story was confirmed definitively in 2001 by The Wall Street Journal's Joshua Harris Prager.)

Imagine if, only 32 years after the “Black Sox” scandal, baseball had gotten caught up in another scandal that damaged the reputation of the summer game.

I’ll take “Master Melvin” over “Leo the Lip” any day of the week.