San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
‘Remember ’91’: Playing against Mays a privilege
The sportswriting business offers up a special privilege every now and then. Sports Illustrated’s Scott Price played one-on-one basketball against Barack Obama. Tom Verducci spent five days in uniform with the Toronto Blue Jays during spring training. I’ll go with playing left field at Candlestick Park with Willie Mays at the plate.
The dusty old yard could be downright idyllic around 11 in the morning, and that’s about the time we took the field for a hardball doubleheader in the fall of 1991: a loosely defined “media” team, with yours truly at the helm, against a “Giants front office” squad organized by team attorney Jack Baer.
Over the several years in which these games took place (always with the real San Francisco team playing out of town), the Giants’ front-office players tended to be youngish men in their employ, from the ticketsales department to construction workers, and we rarely recognized any of them — until this one particular day.
“So it’s the first inning, and I’m playing first base,” said longtime baseball beat writer Bud Geracie, now the sports editor of the Bay Area News Group, “and this guy steps up to the plate trying to act like Willie Mays. The stance, the mannerisms, everything. Except, wait a minute — it was Mays.”
I felt the same rush of excitement out in left field, knowing two things could happen: He hits a routine flyball that I nervously secure, or he slams a dead-pull rocket that I completely botch.
“I know I was hoping he didn’t hit it to me,” Geracie said. “But he did, a popup around the bag, and I don’t even remember moving. It came right down to me.”
So began a memorable day, and as Corey Busch (then a Giants vice president) recalled, “I don’t know how or why Willie showed up. Most of us had no idea this would happen. It’s likely he was at the yard that day, someone mentioned the hardball game, and he just decided to join in. That would be completely in character for Willie.”
Magnificently, he dressed for the part in Giants pants, regulation cleats, a long-sleeved warm-up jersey and a special T-shirt worn on the outside, not tucked in. “Remember ’51,” it
proclaimed, and few recalled it with more clarity than Mays. That was his rookie year in New York, the season Bobby Thomson slugged that epic home run against the Dodgers at the Polo Grounds and broadcaster Russ Hodges shouted into his microphone, “The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!”
So here was the man, having just turned 60, with his usual sense of the moment. He moved well enough to jog — an endearing image reminiscent of his trips to the dugout after a titanic home run — and he left center field to the younger types, settling in at first base and deftly handling every baseball that came his way.
As we came to realize that “Remember ’91” would be our call of the future, we watched greatness in repose, an authentic legend who sought no attention and spoke only in quiet chats with our guys. “My son, Zack, was also in the game,” recalled Dennis Dalton, a friend since his days as a Cal shortstop in the ’60s. “At one point, the two of us went into the Giants’ dugout to get closer to Mays.
“For a little while, it was just the three of us, chatting. I can’t even remember what was said; it was just small talk. But there I am, playing baseball at Candlestick with my son and Willie Mays. I got a little emotional thinking of my father, who grew up a Dodger fan in New York but absolutely revered Mays. Knew he was a baseball deity. So I always had that on my mind.”
I was trying to capture some of the action on video while also playing in the game, and when Mays came up a second time, I had handed the video duties to Ross (“Judge”) Murphy, the lead singer for Zero and a soulful cat who, sadly, died a few years back. Judge spotted Mays in the on-deck circle, hit “Record” and let it roll, staying on Mays as he took a few practice swings, watched an out being made, then stepped up and drilled the first pitch for a clean single to center. You can hear a halfdozen guys yell “Yeah!” quite
clearly on impact.
“I mean, he lined that ball up the middle, just smoked it,” Geracie recalled. “At 60? He could have been 30 up there. It was so quick, just all wrists.” Steve Fainaru, who went on to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist with the Washington Post, said “It was like Ty Cobb coming up. I was in leftcenter and the ball came right to me. An impossible thing.”
“I’ll never forget that sound,” said Steve’s brother, Mark Fainaru-Wada, who made his name as an investigative journalist (“Game of Shadows”) during his Chronicle days. “So perfect. Just pure crack of the bat in an empty ballpark.”
And that “crack” is so crucial. You couldn’t play on my team without using a wooden bat — one of 30-odd Louisville Sluggers in my collection — and nobody complained. Come on, for heaven’s sake: aluminum in a big-league stadium? Some of the Giants’ players went straight to the fakery, but Mays wasn’t hearing of it. He was wielding a two-toned wooden bat he found in the clubhouse.
“He whistled that thing through the infield, like a vapor,” Dalton said. “He’s out there in a uniform for the first time in who knows how long, and he’s hitting shots.”
Mays got another at-bat in the opener, popping up behind third (nice catch, Bryan Clausen), then called it a day. And I started thinking about this sporting miracle after The Chronicle’s John Shea wrote “24,” the definitive book on Mays’ career. “Think you could ask Mays about that game the next time you guys talk?” I asked John.
“He couldn’t remember,” Shea told me.
For those who bore witness, it is well remembered. The day we shared a baseball field with the greatest ballplayer who ever lived.