Disqualifying Barry Bonds for obvious reasons, Willie Mays is the greatest player of the integration era, and probably the second-greatest of all time. Willie and Babe Ruth are about even for WAR among position players, but Ruth gets the overall advantage because he was also once the best left-handed pitcher in the AL. Even though Ruth pulls pretty far ahead of Mays when his pitching records are added in, there is still room for Willie in the GOAT debate because Ruth played in segregated baseball, and thus did not play against all of the best players of his era.
Willie is also the greatest right-handed hitter of all time, the greatest centerfielder …
Oh, why recite his accomplishments? I could be typing all day. Basically, he was the GOAT, or at least on the short list.
————-
And then there was “the catch” in the 1954 World Series, when Willie turned a sure triple or inside-the-park homer off the bat of Vic Wertz into what may be the longest fly-out of all time. (Debatable. The longest fly-out in the StatCast era is 427 feet. Wertz’s smash was in that same range.)
————-
This was one of my first baseball cards. At that time, I didn’t appreciate how great Willie was. I wanted a Mantle. (Who was just as good, but for not as long.)
One area Mays can’t compare with Ruth (other than the whole pitching thing) is performances in the postseason. Ruth was other worldly as a hitter and pitcher, whereas Mays was sorta…blah. Hard to say anyone is better than Ruth when he was so great when it counted most (Babe did have one awful WS, in 1922. However if you take out his hitting numbers while pitching, where he went 1-11, his numbers are almost impossibly great.).
Ruth also shined on opening day as a hitter and pitcher, in the all star game, and christened Yankee Stadium in ’23 with a homerun.
Mays defense in centerfield and, from what I’ve read, baserunning ability, certainly made him the best player of the integration era. Vin Scully, who saw games in person dating to the ’30s but never saw Ruth, would say without hesitation Mays was the best he ever saw, and he called games dating to 2016.
Extraordinary talents, and it’s amazing Mays was around as far into this life as he was. RIP to the Say Hey!
The best I’ve ever seen. And the last of the four Great Dodgers Oppressors, along with Aaron, Mathews, and F. Robinson from my very first rooting days. Got to see him several times at that shitheap called Candlestick when i was posted at the Presidio.
I remember when Mathews beat the ever-lovin’ daylights out of Don Drysdale in the summer of 1957. Drysdale thought he was a tough guy. He found out otherwise.
Probably the only reason anybody knows the player Vic Wertz is because of “The Catch”
He was a pretty fair ballplayer. Most people don’t realize that at that moment he was the hottest hitter in baseball. He was hitting the ball hard every time up. The Mays catch was the only out he made during that game, when he had four hits and was pretty much the entire Indians’ offense. But of course the only time anyone noticed him is the one time the Giants caught the ball, on a 430-foot smash that would have been at least a triple with anyone but Mays in center! His excellent stick work continued through the series, where he batted .500 with four extra-base hits, including a homer.
He was no Hall of Famer, but was really a top contributor for a lot of years: 266 homers, 1178 RBI. He finished in the top ten in the MVP balloting four times. He had two consecutive years when his RBI totals were 133, 123. His lifetime OPS+ was 122 – higher than Gil Hodges, an exact contemporary who was also primarily a first baseman, and who is in the Hall of Fame. (And Gil’s numbers were padded by Ebbets Field, where he had an .899 OPS, compared to .819 on the road.) The only reason Vic is forgotten is that he played in Detroit and Cleveland in his prime years. If he and Hodges had traded places, he would have been a fan darling in Brooklyn, one of the Boys of Summer, and we would remember him as a star.
He would not have made the Hall, but only because he was not as durable as Hodges. Wertz was just as good as Hodges per at bat, and their careers spanned the exact same years (1947-63), but Hodges was an iron man who got a thousand more plate appearances.
Looks like Mathews was getting more than a bit of help at this point. Not cricket. And Drysdale kept on doing his thing through 1969.
Funny thing is that, though being a Dodgers fan from the day they arrived in ’58, I always kind of liked the Braves. Probably the influence of my Boston area father. Respected Aaron and revered Spahn.
When it came to fisticuffs, Mathews didn’t need much help. His teammates tried to keep him from going berserk. Eddie dropped him and just kept pounding on him with both fists, like a scene in a Western. Eddie was undoubtedly the toughest guy in the league, as Frank Robinson and Drysdale could attest. Mathews landed three ferocious punches on Robinson, then stopped when he saw Robinson was helpless. (Robinson exchanged words with him after a dirty slide into third.) Mathews, as fast as he was tough, had considered a career as a heavyweight boxer. He also was a drunk who had no control over his temper, and was known around Milwaukee to wander into bars and occasionally beat the crap out of wise-ass fans. Frankly, he was a major asshole.
Drysdale wasn’t right for a long time after that. He got completely hammered in his next four starts, winning none of them. He did shake it off and went 3-0 against the Braves the rest of the way.
When I was a kid, they ran a PSA in which Willie Mays warned children against picking up blasting caps. which always puzzled me. Where was this a big problem? Were blasting caps being strewn about like gum wrappers or cigarette butts?
I think several comedy shows noted the absurdity of that PSA. I did a parody of it on my own show, in which my own dumb-jock character, the last white boxer Sugar Ray Milland, advised kids not to stick sharp nails too far into their ears, and not to drain all of the blood from their bodies – and of course, not to play with blasting caps.
Can we all agree that Willie Mays had the greatest career of any NY Met? As the greatest of the three, Willie came first in Terry Cashman’s Talking Baseball. He became the second of the trio to play for the Mets. The only one that was never a Met was Mickey Mantle. I suppose that was fitting because the NY Mets were created to replace the Brooklyn Dodgers and the NY Giants, so it was fitting for 2 of those teams’ greatest players to play for the Mets. But I guess we’ll never know why neither player went into the Hall of Fame as a Met.
Isn’t that obvious? Willie must be #1 because he would be #1 on any team except the Yankees.
(OK. Possibly the Red Sox. Cy Young had a higher career WAR than Willie, and Ted Williams was actually better than Willie on a per game basis, so there’s at least some room for debate. Willie had 156 WAR in 3005 games, Williams accumulated 121 WAR in 2297 games. Per 162 games, that’s 8.5 for Williams, 8.4 for Mays.)
That noted, both Warren Spahn and Tom Seaver were Mets, and their careers at least give Willie a run for the money.
If you consider only careers in a Mets uniform, Tom Terrific is number one and nobody is number two. (David Wright is second, but he’s light years behind. Dwight Gooden is third, but is not even close to second, let alone first.)
In many ways, David Wright is the Mets version of Don Mattingly. Like Mattingly, David Wright would have probably made the Hall of Fame if not for his back problems. If not for his own back problems, Mattingly’s case for the Hall of Fame was much stronger than Wright’s, but I think they both would have made it.
I certainly don’t hesitate to name the Sehekked my favorite player. OTOH, among my other favorite players are Juan Marichal, Willie McCovey, Orlando Cepeda, Madison Bumgarner, & Buster Posey. My favorite single moment in baseball history was when the Mighty Casey, that year’s Triple Crown winner check-swung a Sergio Romo fastball called strike 3 ending the game & the world series in a 4-game sweep. All that said, my opinion in all the GOAT debates is, as Ruth’s pitching in comparing Ruth to Mays demonstrates, always, but always, apples to oranges. IOW, it’s nonsense. IMHO.
What a pitching staff they had that year! The Tigers never had a chance in the first three games.
I just looked it up. The Tigers batted .159 in that series. Fielder and Peralta went 2-for-29..
The legend of Sandy the Invulnerable, the Left Hand of God, is based on the years 1963-66, when he was 97-27 with a 1.86 era (1.31 at Dodger Stadium, where his record was 50-11. His ERA was 2.44 on the road.
People overlook the fact that Marichal almost matched Koufax pitch-for-pitch. He was 93-35 in that period. His ERA was 2.31, better than what Koufax could do outside of Dodger Stadium.
They faced each other only three times in this period, twice in 1963 and once in 1965. The Giants won 2 out of 3.
==========
==========
Marichal usually squared off against Drysdale in that era, and he totally owned him. From 1963 on, they faced each other 13 times. Marichal was 10-2 with a no-decision, that no-decision being a 12 inning game where he left after 10 innings.
In other words, Marichal was the Right Hand of God.
So, effectively, we’ve been texting one another. But public or private, you warmed my cockles.