In the early Fall season of 1954 I was in the second grade and one day I came through the front door of my house after school to learn that a big deal had happened in New York City, one of the places where really big deals occur. The Cleveland Indians had won 111 games and only lost 43 that season to comfortably win the American League pennant over the Yankees, the team that had won the previous five years. I had not known that at the time but I looked it up later in my brother Paul’s 1954 Baseball Almanac, which I read through hungrily one day when I should have been in school but wasn’t. Because this Autumn day was the day that I became fascinated with baseball, in particular the big leagues. The big deal in New York was that the New York Giants beat those unbeatable Indians ,5-2 ,in the first game of the World Series. The game was played at the Polo Grounds, an oddly shaped stadium that the Giants would abandon after three more seasons. The dimensions of the Polo Grounds played a very big part in the outcome of that first game and, ultimately the Series. Cleveland took a 2-0 lead in the first inning off Giants starting pitcher Sal Maglie. Vic Wertz hit a triple to score Al Smith and Bobby Avila. Don Mueller and Hank Thompson drove in runs off Cleveland pitcher Bob Lemon in the third inning. The 2-2 tie score was still holding in the eighth inning. Maglie walked Larry Doby to start the inning. Al Rosen hit an infield single and New York manager Leo Durocher replaced Maglie with Don Liddle. Up to the plate stepped Wertz, who had already added a pair of singles to his first inning triple. Wertz hit another tremendous drive, this one over the head of young New York center fielder Willie Mays. The ball traveled 445 feet but Mays caught up to it, swiveled around and made a throw for the ages back to the infield. Doby took third base but Rosen had to hold at first. Even people who never cared about baseball have seen the film of this play, which ever since has been known as The Catch. Yes, the center field wall was 480 feet from home plate. Pull hitters enjoyed the Polo Grounds, however. Both the left and right field walls were a little more than 250 feet away. That helped make Dusty Rhodes a New York hero when he delivered a pinch hit three run homer to win the game in the tenth inning. Lemon was still pitching then; in fact, he was such a good hitter that he batted in the top of the 10th and made the third out. Wertz had led off that inning with his fourth hit of the game, a double, before being lifted for pinch runner Rudy Regalado.

Cleveland never recovered from that and lost all four World Series games to a New York team that actually, despite winning a mere 97 games to beat Brooklyn by three games, was probably a little better overall team. Why? Mainly because they had Willie Mays who could, as scouts would often say, beat you every which way.

So Mays helped get this author interested in the game. I was a western Pennsylvania kid who rooted for the Pirates and Cleveland. I was a Dodgers fan from 1955 on and after I moved to L.A. in 1964 but like all folks who got to watch him or play with him or against him, I was a Willie Mays fan. His story is one of the ones that brighten our lives. Like so many of our athletic heroes, his story began in relative poverty. We think of professional athletes now as coddled millionaires but it has not always been such. I remember Chuck Tanner coming to our school when I was in fifth grade to take our class photographs. I remember Bill Skowron signing his photo for me at a super market opening in the off season. Many ball players had off season jobs in days of old. Many minor leaguers still do.

Willie Mays died after 93 say hey years and right before the game June 20th between the Giants and Cardinals at Rickwood Field in Birmingham Alabama. It was a great and overdue event to recognize and honor the old Negro Leagues but of course MLB and FOX TV choreographed a rather untidy whitewashing, shall we say, of the actual history. The only reason the Negro leagues existed was that the major league owners would not allow descendants of slaves to play for their teams no matter how well they could play. It was all mostly happy happy joy joy until Alex Rodriguez asked Reggie Jackson how it was playing for Birmingham in 1967.Jackson replied that he would not wish that experience on anyone and that he was lucky to have a manager and some team mates that helped him control his anger at being treated as a sub human or else he may have very well been lynched. Heartfelt honesty on FOX startled us all but I will forever be grateful for that moment.

Mays began his professional career playing for the Birmingham Black Barons at age 17. By 1951 he was National League Rookie of the Year and center fielder for the World Champion New York Giants. In 1973 I moved to San Francisco and the Giants had a great trio of outfielders but Willie Mays was not one of them. That season ended with Mays back in New York playing in a World Series for the Mets. Hard economic times was the given reason that Giants owner Horace Stoneham traded Willie away in ’72. He was 41 and a shadow of his former self but that was a very sad day. Like all of us he wanted to play forever but cold reality overtakes even the best of us.

It put me in mind of an old John Prine song a week before Willie’s passing when another hero of my youth died. That was Jerry West. And Daddy won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County Down by the Green River where paradise lay I’m sorry my son but you’re too late in askin’ Mr. Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away

Death still shocks and alarms me. Death near like our dogs and friends and family, death far like two of the athletes that I no longer want to admit to idolizing, Willie Mays and Jerry West. It’s all subjective of course. When Roberto Clemente died I was 26 and I told myself that it would be good not to have to watch him age. Me first of course. But it would have been good to see him maintain his dignity like those two did and Henry Aaron as well. Perspective changes.

I think I tried not to have heroes because I wanted the hero to be me. Growing up in western Pennsylvania Jerry West could not be denied as a hero. Zeke from Cabin Creek was just admirable. He went from West Virginia to Los Angeles, which is where I wanted to go as soon as I could. I wore number 44 in my CYO league. I wasn’t good enough to even try out for the high school team but I loved basketball. By 1964 I lived near L.A., watching him as a Laker just will his team to victory. I saw West, Elgin Baylor, and Wilt Chamberlain in a pre-season game in Santa Barbara and by college days I shouldn’t have been in awe but damn. Mister Clutch. The unbeaten streak. Heartache after heartache versus the Celtics while epitomizing what hard work, humility, and determination could accomplish–or not. Just an unforgettable human being. My wife at the time worked at a department store in Huntington Beach in 1968 and he was there signing photos. She got one for me and I still have it. But I try not to have heroes.