SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Willie Mays raced at top speed toward the center-field wall at the spacious Polo Grounds and somehow managed to track down and corral a fast-traveling ball with an over-the-shoulder catch that became the most iconic moment in the Hall of Famer’s decorated career that featured 660 home runs.
It simply became known as “ The Catch.”
But there was little simple about it. The Say Hey Kid’s superb grab of a drive hit by Cleveland’s Vic Wertz in Game 1 of the 1954 World Series against the favored Indians will always be one of his finest moments, also a key in the New York Giants’ 4-0 sweep to win the championship.
“It wasn’t no lucky catch,” Mays emphatically noted years later.
Not at all.
The play showed off the mesmerizing skill of one of the most talented players ever to step on a baseball field and was considered by many to be the Greatest Living Ballplayer before he died at age 93 on Tuesday.
In the top of the eighth inning with runners on first and second in a 2-2 game, Mays took off running straight back toward the wall, head looking at the outfield rather than tracking the ball, and snared it before instantly releasing a fabulous throw that gets far less attention than the catch itself.
“Yeah, that was the key right there, I thought,” Mays recalled in April 2014. “Because if I hadn’t caught that, you gotta get three runs some kind of way. Vic would have been on third some kind of way and the other two would have scored. So I think that was the key to the whole World Series.”
It was a play that is as famous as any in the grand history of baseball and was memorialized at the time by the Hall of Fame broadcaster Jack Brickhouse, who said: “Willie Mays just brought this crowd to its feet with a catch which must have been an optical illusion to a lot of people!”
To Mays, it was just another play that happened to come on the game’s biggest stage.
“I usually catch fly balls like that all the time,” he said. “But you’re talking about a World Series. You’re talking about something that doesn’t happen all the time. Even if you make a catch like that, which I did, in the regular season — but to catch it in a way that the world is looking at you — it’s remarkable, I think.”
Mays never wanted to say where that play stood on the list in his career of brilliant catches — and there were many for a player who won 12 Gold Gloves as one of the game’s greatest fielding outfielders.
