Say Hey Kid

I've seen that video clip about a million times, and I never get tired of it.

There's Willie Mays, running for all he's worth, as he tries to track down a long fly ball hit by Cleveland slugger Vic Wertz in the first game of the 1954 World Series. The only reason Mays, a young center fielder for the New York Giants, even has a chance for the catch is that the game is being played in the spacious but oddly shaped Polo Grounds, so Mays seemingly can run all day if he needs to. It was at least 450 feet to the wall well behind Mays – he was playing Wertz shallow – and an ungodly 483 feet to the unusual cutout wall in dead center just to the left of him.

For context, the deepest center field in the majors today is 415 feet at Coors Field in Colorado.

And he does run. He runs with his back to home plate and with the ball on a trajectory to sail over his head toward a wall with no warning track or padding. He looks more like a football wide receiver on a post pattern than an outfielder.

There's no way in hell he's going to catch that ball.

Except that he does (see here).

The catch (if you type in "The Catch" in Google, and nothing else, a number of videos of Mays' miraculous catch come up) is often described as "over the shoulder," but I swear, it should be described as "over the head." Mays extends his gloved hand while still running in a hard sprint (go ahead and try that hand-eye exercise some time) and somehow, the ball dies in the pocket of his well-worn leather MacGregor.

I don't know how he does it. I'm assuming he had eyes on the ball the whole way, but you'd never know it watching the clip. Maybe he did have eyes in the back of his head, because that's what it looks like it takes to make the catch. But it just happens anyway, as if it was preordained.

And maybe it was. I think some athletes are just hot-wired for greatness in that way.

The Catch might be major league baseball's best defensive play of all time, given that it was in the World Series and all the weight that implies. And if it isn't, well, it's certainly leading the argument.

And while you always know it's Willie Mays making the catch, there's more than that singular moment to define who he was. In an era that featured the likes of Jackie Robinson, Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron, Stan Musial, Ted Williams, Roberto Clemente, and a host of other Hall of Famers, Mays might arguably be the best all-around player of all time given his combined skills.

He was a career .301 hitter with 660 home runs, 1,909 RBIs and 3,292 hits. He also won 12 Gold Glove Awards for his defense, playing six seasons before the Gold Glove Award was even conceived. He was the complete package.

Mays died Tuesday, taking with him yet another vestige of my youth. He was 93. He passed just six days after another sports icon, Jerry West of the Los Angeles Lakers, died at the age of 86. This is simply happening way too fast for us Baby Boomers.

I'm a child of the '50's, and not surprisingly Willie Mays was one of my baseball heroes. One way that I honored him was that his baseball card never made its way to the spokes of my bicycle wheels to make my Schwinn sound kind of like a faux motorcycle engine. He had a permanent place of honor in the baseball card collection of my shoe box. 

I also liked the easy-to-identify simplicity of his name. Willie Mays. Talk about preordained  – that was a name made for baseball. Then there were all those homers and clutch hits. I was a kid, so I didn't appreciate until way later in my life what he meant to the civil rights movement or the struggles that he negotiated in the ever-changing landscape of American culture.

There was just his confident smile and the ever-present threat that he was going to do in my Phillies once again.

 The Polo Grounds in Upper Manhattan. Willie Mays made The Catch just to the right of the center field cutout about 450 feet away from home plate. That's just ridiculous.