I've meant for awhile to follow up on this post, in which I mention my dad having seen Willie Mays play for the Minneapolis Millers in a May, 1951, game at Nicollet Park. Yesterday, Mays's 89th birthday, would have been a good day to catch up, but better even later than never.
I think it was on the day of that post, January 28, that I met some people I used to work with for lunch. Nicollet Park was on my mind and at lunch I said something about it, including that my dad had seen a game there in which Willie Mays had made the greatest catch he'd ever seen. Next day one of the baseball fans from the old office shot me an email in which he attached the box score and newspaper accounts (one by the legendary Halsey Hall) of the Miller game played at Nicollet Park on May 7, 1951—69 years ago today, the day after Mays turned 20—against the Louisville Colonels. He wanted to know whether the details matched up with my dad's account. Here's the lede to Halsey's May 8 gamer for the Minneapolis Tribune:
Minneapolis won one of the most thrill-splashed, impotently pitched games in the lurid history of Nicollet park Monday night, defeating the Louisville Colonels 10-9. The 1,351 fans went home drooling, for instance, about—
Willie Mays turned scoreboard boy. Off Taft Wright, in the third inning, the young genius looked like he was hanging up numbers as he leaped almost to the level of the big league board for a fly ball, banged into the wall and doubled a runner at second base. It will rank as one of the greatest catches you ever will see.
Yes, that has to be the game my dad saw! Good sleuthing, honed by the necessity of tracking down people for service in law suits. Here is the account from the May 8 Minneapolis Star:
The phenoms were on parade at Nicollet Park Monday night as Minneapolis nosed out Louisville 10-9 in a carnival of run, hit and walk that opened a four-game series.
Almost too many things happened to keep track of in the two hours and 49 minutes of action, but when all totalled up a couple of kid outfielders had stolen the show—Willie Mays of Minneapolis and Karl Olson of Louisville.
[Snip]
Mays in the third inning made the greatest catch anyone present could recall at Nicollet park. He literally climbed the right center field wall to pick off Taft Wright's jet drive.
It was so nearly an impossible catch that Jim Piersall, Colonel runner on second base, took off and raced for the plate. He headed for the dugout instead of trying to get back to second and the double play was easy.
What happened to Karl Olson? How long between occurrences of "lurid" and "impotently" in the lede to a Halsey Hall game account? How could a 9-inning, 10-9 game be played in under 2 hours, 50 minutes? Why did the style sheets of Minneapolis newspapers evidently require a lower-case p for "Nicollet park"? What else did my dad do in Minneapolis on a Monday night in May, 1951, when he was ostensibly a college student 40 miles away, in Northfield? I said in my post that Mays had a double and a homer, but actually he had a single and a triple: did I misremember my dad's account, or did he embellish? It seems he did not embellish the details of the catch.
There are a million delicious details. Or maybe they seem delicious because I miss baseball. Piersall, the runner Mays doubled off second, went on to a distinguished big league career that was however marred by mental illness, which is the subject of his autobiography Fear Strikes Out and the movie made from the book. I had thought he was little more than a journeyman but I see now that he was a good, or nearly great, player—two-time all star, two-time Gold Glove winner, and member of the Boston Red Sox Hall of Fame. In 1956, he led the American League with 40 doubles. Tidbit: as a high school basketball player, he led his Waterbury, Connecticut team to the 1947 New England championship, scoring 29 points in the final game. Another tidbit: one of the early signs of his illness, diagnosed as manic-depression, occurred about a year after Mays doubled him off second base, when he got in a fist fight with Yankee second baseman Billy Martin. (Could have happened to almost anyone, of course.)
The box score shows that Mays was not the only future Hall of Famer playing at Nicollet Park that night. Hoyt Wilhelm was one of three pitchers used by the Millers, and, despite walking four (to go along with five strike outs), got credit for the win. He helped his own cause, collecting a hit and a walk in two plate appearances and scoring a run. You can't tell from the box score, but I'm guessing Wilhelm entered the game in the sixth inning, when the Colonels scored five times to take an 8-6 lead, and got at least the last ten outs, allowing only a solo homer in the ninth inning. He pitched in the majors from 1952 to 1972 and was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1985.
Regarding Mays, the Star article notes that his two hits that night pushed his average to .405. By the time the New York Giants called him up two weeks later, he was batting .477. I wonder whether he had to break a lease at the boarding house where he lived at 3616 Fourth Avenue South, less than a mile from the Nicollet Park site. The house is still there, behind the Hosmer Library. In those days, the area around 38th Street and Fourth Avenue was a black residential and business center. Housing in south Minneapolis was segregated and enforced mainly by "racial restrictions" in real estate deeds. If the boarding house had been south of 42nd Street, the owner most likely would not have been able to rent to Mays, who was at the back end of his prime when I first became a baseball fan. When I think of him, I see him running between first and second base, cap off, looking over his right shoulder at the ball he just hit over the right fielder's head and deciding to try for a triple. Only bad thing about being a Twins fan was not seeing more of him, Hank Aaron, and Roberto Clemente.
The above picture was taken on May 24, 1951, in Omaha, where the Millers were playing when Mays got the call from the Giants. He's getting a plane ticket to Philadelphia, where the next day he made his major league debut against the Phillies. The stuff my colleague, Dave Gates, sent me is copied below.
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