Big 50: San Francisco Giants: The Men and Moments that Made the San Francisco Giants
400
Big 50: San Francisco Giants: The Men and Moments that Made the San Francisco Giants
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781633195073 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Triumph Books |
| Publication date: | 05/15/2016 |
| Series: | Big 50 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 400 |
| File size: | 32 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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The Big 50, San Francisco Giants
The Men and Moments that Made the San Francisco Giants
By Daniel Brown
Triumph Books LLC
Copyright © 2016 Daniel BrownAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-63319-507-3
CHAPTER 1
Willie Mays
As a jittery and insecure rookie in 1951, Willie Mays went 0 for 12 before breaking through with a home run against Warren Spahn of the Boston Braves.
"I'll never forgive myself," Spahn later joked. "We might have gotten rid of Willie forever if I'd only struck him out."
Nice try. Mays stuck around to torment pitchers and delight Giants fans for nearly another quarter century.
In fact, he's still here, his potent swing forever captured in bronze outside AT&T Park.
The statue in Willie Mays Plaza remains the top meeting spot for fans. So the man himself will serve as our gathering place for this book: meet us at Willie Mays, the portal to all things Giants.
The Say Hey Kid, like the franchise itself, began in New York and moved to San Francisco in 1958. He won a World Series at the Polo Grounds in 1954 and helped them win another one 60 years later by giving hitting tips to outfielder Michael Morse.
"Willie Mays was actually writing something down on a piece of paper, and all I could think about was saving the piece of paper," Morse said a few days after his pinch-hit homer helped propel San Francisco into the 2014 Fall Classic. "He doesn't miss many games. He'll break down your swing. He'll break down the way you're playing defense.
"It's so amazing how the Giants greats are always around the clubhouse and they always interact with the team now. It's the kind of organization where it's just in the blood. It's in the core."
Here are the things to know about Mays' statistics: he hit 660 home runs, batted .302, stole 338 bases, won 12 Gold Gloves and two MVP awards, and made 24 All-Star teams.
Here is the thing to know about Mays' style:
"He always wore his cap size a little bit larger so it would fly off when he was running," the late Giants pitcher Stu Miller said. "But that's what his idea was — to please the crowd."
The most exhilarating show in baseball history ran from 1951 through 1973. The incandescent center fielder was known as a five-tool player because he could hit for average, hit for power, run, catch, and throw.
But the "five-tool" label actually sells him short. Willie Howard Mays could fill a hardware store.
Another tool: Mays played with boundless joy, as if he were merely playing stickball on the streets of Harlem (which he often did after games at the Polo Grounds). Rival executive Branch Rickey once described Mays' zest as "the frivolity in his bloodstream [that] doubles his strength with laughter."
"I'm not sure what the hell 'charisma' is," Cincinnati Reds first baseman Ted Kluszewski once said, "but I get the feeling it's Willie Mays."
Another tool: smarts.
"Willie Mays was not the fastest guy in baseball, but he was the quickest to react," the late broadcaster Lon Simmons once told me. "Go to a game now and watch how long it takes a runner to react on a wild pitch — there are times when it's practically to the backstop. Willie was gone before that ball passed home plate."
Carl Boles, a backup outfielder for the 1962 Giants, recalled a game at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh when Mays scored on a passed ball that had rolled only a few feet from catcher Don Leppert. No one else would have dared to break home on a ball like that, but Mays bolted as though he knew what was coming.
Boles later approached Mays like a young magician trying to figure out a master's trick.
"Willie, how did you do that?"
"Well, their catcher is a boxer: he doesn't catch anything low, he just knocks it down," Mays replied. "So if you watch the flight of the ball, and it's going to be low, you know he's going to box it." That's why, when Al McBean fired a low pitch into the dirt, Mays needed just a nanosecond to dash for home.
Another tool: trickery.
Tim McCarver, the longtime catcher, said Mays used to intentionally swing and miss at a pitch early in the game because he was already thinking several innings ahead. In his book Baseball for Brain Surgeons, McCarver wrote that Mays would make a point of flailing on a pitcher's curveball as a way of enticing the pitcher to throw him another one later in a key situation.
Born on May 6, 1931, in Westfield, Alabama, Mays showed rare athletic gifts almost from the crib. His father, Willie Howard Mays Sr., worked as a railroad porter and also swept floors at the local steel mill, where he was a star on the company baseball team. Willie's mother, Annie Satterwhite, was a standout in both track and basketball.
By the time he was five, Mays would play catch with his father on the farmland near their home. Willie Sr. taught his son each position, starting with catcher, and told him that he could boost his value by honing every skill available to a ballplayer. (Mays' childhood is exquisitely detailed in Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend, the 2010 book by James S. Hirsch.)
Mays signed to play for the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro Leagues in 1948, when he was 17. By June of 1950, scouts were lining up, none more enthusiastic than Eddie Montague of the New York Giants.
"They got this kid playing center field that's practically barefooted that's the best ballplayer I ever looked at," Montague reported, according to Leo Durocher's book Nice Guys Finish Last. "You better send somebody down here with a barrelful of money and grab this kid."
It didn't take a barrelful. Mays got a $4,000 signing bonus and a salary of $250 a month.
The multidimensional outfielder made short work of the minor leagues, starting the 1951 season by batting .477 over 35 games for the Minneapolis Millers of the Triple-A American Association.
Mays was in a movie theater in Sioux City, Iowa, when he learned he was being called up to the big leagues. As Hirsch recounted in his book, between features the house lights went on and the manager shouted into the crowd.
"If Willie Mays is in the audience, would he immediately report to his manager at the hotel?"
Is there a more fitting way for the most theatrical player of all time to get the news?
Mays made his debut on May 25, 1951. He bumbled out of the gate, feeling nervous and overmatched, aside from his home run against Spahn. Herman Franks, one of the Giants coaches at the time, noticed the kid crying in front of his locker after a game and alerted Durocher.
Durocher plopped down next to Mays, who was still disconsolate, and wrapped an arm around his shoulder. "As long as I'm the manager of the Giants, you're my center fielder," Durocher assured him. "Tomorrow, next week, next month. You're here to stay. With your talent, you're going to get plenty of hits."
The next day, Mays drilled a single and blasted a 400-foot triple to right-center field. The prodigy had arrived.
Over the course of a 22-year major league career, Mays had 3,283 hits and batted above .300 in 10 seasons. He had 17 seasons with at least 20 home runs and twice topped the 50 mark.
Mays was the first National League player to reach the 30-30 club (homers and stolen bases), leading the league in stolen bases every season from 1956 to '59.
He won 12 consecutive Gold Gloves, tying Roberto Clemente for the most among outfielders; both might have won more had the award existed before 1957.
Mays remains the Giants' all-time leader in runs, hits, doubles, home runs, and total bases — marks threatened but not surpassed by his godson, Barry Bonds.
"I can't believe Babe Ruth was a better player than Willie Mays," Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax once said. "I can't believe he could run as well as Mays, and I can't believe he was a better outfielder."
"As a batter, his only weakness is a wild pitch," Bill Rigney, the first San Francisco manager said.
"You used to think if the score was 5 — 0, he'd hit a five-run homer," Reggie Jackson said.
Given Mays' love of showmanship, it should be no surprise that he was twice the All-Star Game MVP, in 1963 and '68. He owns or shares the Mid-Summer Classic records for at-bats (75), extra-base hits (eight), hits (23), runs (20), stolen bases (six), triples (three), and total bases (40).
"They invented the All-Star Game for Willie Mays," fellow Hall of Famer Ted Williams said.
Strange as it seems in retrospect, Bay Area fans were initially cool to the New York import when the team moved west. It didn't help that Mays arrived in San Francisco publicly reminiscing about his New York days. The Biographical History of Baseball notes in that initial season of 1958, Mays hit a career-high .347, with 29 homers and 96 RBI — and still heard boos at Seals Stadium.
At the end of that first season in San Francisco, fans voted Orlando Cepeda the team's most valuable player.
"San Francisco is the damnedest city I ever saw in my life. They cheer Khrushchev and boo Mays," writer Frank Conniff of the Hearst newspapers joked after the city once gave a warmer reception to a visit by Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev.
When the Giants traded Mays to the Mets in May 1972, the outfielder was disappointed at leaving the team but happy to see New York again: "When you come back to New York, you come back to paradise," he wrote in his 1988 autography Say Hey, with writer Lou Sahadi.
But as it turns out, his true Eden was by the Bay all along. Mays returned to San Francisco and signed a lifetime contract with the team in 1993. He remains a lively presence at the ballpark, still boyish into his eighties — the Say Hey Octogenarian.
Today he is as interwoven into the Giants fabric as the orange and black.
On November 24, 2015, Mays was honored at the White House with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It is the nation's highest civilian award.
"The line I always used to describe him is: 'Willie Mays was the happiest guy in the world to be Willie Mays,'" Simmons once said. "That's what he wanted to be: He wanted to be Willie Mays."
THE CATCH
In 1954, Willie Mays emerged as baseball's supernova. He won the MVP award for hitting a league-leading .345 with 41 home runs and 110 RBI. That served as prelude for Mays' defining moment, his defensive gem in Game 1 of the '54 World Series against heavily favored Cleveland.
With two runners on and the score tied 2–2 in the top of the eighth, Vic Wertz blasted a ball an estimated 460 feet to center field at the Polo Grounds. Turning his back to home plate, Mays ran toward the wall in a dead sprint, caught the ball over his shoulder, and whirled to deliver a powerful throw back to the infield.
It remains known as The Catch.
"I was very cocky. When I say that, I mean that everything that went in the air, I thought I could catch. I was very aware of what was going on," Mays said during a visit to AT&T Park in 2003. "When the ball was hit off Don Liddle, the pitcher, I'm saying to myself, 'Two men are on.' I'm talking to myself as I'm running — I know it's hard to believe that I could do all this in one sequence.
"As the ball is coming, I'm saying to myself, 'I have to get this ball back into the infield.' In my mind, I never thought I would miss the ball. I didn't think that at all.
"When you watch the play, look at the way I catch the ball. It's like a wide receiver catching a pass going down the sideline, which is over the left shoulder, on the right side. I had learned about that while playing in high school."
CHAPTER 2The 2010 Champions
To explain the sheer absurdity of it, the absolute zany madness of it, it's best to start at the end: at the victory parade for the 2010 World Series champions. There Aubrey Huff stood at a podium in downtown San Francisco, surrounded by an estimated million people, stuck his hand down his pants, and fished around for a while.
As bemused fans looked on, including mayor Gavin Newsom and a live television audience, Huff searched the inside of his jeans for an awkward eternity before holding aloft a skimpy red undergarment.
"I got a little present for you guys in San Francisco," Huff told the crowd gathered at the city's Civic Center that day. "I'm sure all of you have heard about the Rally Thong."
Like a boxer hoisting a heavyweight championship belt, he lifted the skivvies above his head.
"This thing nailed it!" Huff yelled.
The crowd roared with approval.
Want to know what the Giants' 2010 season was like? It was kind of like that.
"This doesn't make sense," right-hander Matt Cain acknowledged on the night they finished off the Texas Rangers with a 3–1 victory in Game 5 for the Giants' first title since 1954. "You don't realize it. It's something that's surreal. But that's what we are: World Series champs."
To long-suffering fans, winning the 2010 title was as fun as it was cathartic. They had never seen a World Series championship at all, let alone one as surreal as this one.
The Giants didn't win it when they had Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Juan Marichal, Orlando Cepeda, and Gaylord Perry. They didn't win it when they had Will Clark, Kevin Mitchell, Matt Williams, and Robby Thompson. They didn't win it when they had Barry Bonds for 15 record-breaking seasons.
Yet they won it this time with ... well, what exactly?
Huff, who led the Giants in wins above replacement and almost every other batting category that season, was a 33-year-old journeyman who'd spent much of his career on last-place teams. Cody Ross had been claimed off waivers from the Florida Marlins on August 22, a back-page transaction for the future National League Championship Series MVP.
When the Giants signed Edgar Renteria, the eventual World Series MVP, before the 2009 season, it looked like desperation. An anonymous NL executive told Henry Schulman of the San Francisco Chronicle that Renteria "looked 100 years old."
Ladies and gentlemen, the most important team in San Francisco history!
Of course, they also had a shaggy-haired ace (Tim "The Freak" Lincecum), a closer with a beard like Abraham Lincoln (Brian Wilson), and a baby-faced rookie catcher (Buster Posey).
"This buried a lot of bones — '62, '89, 2002," Giants general manager Brian Sabean said, referring to the team's previous World Series heartbreaks. "This group deserved it, faithful from the beginning. We're proud and humbled by the achievement."
The theme of the remarkable 2010 Giants began with an early season loss: On April 19, David Eckstein hit a walk-off homer against reliever Jeremy Affeldt, giving the San Diego Padres a 3 — 2 victory in 10 innings.
It was the only home run the 5'7", 170-pound Eckstein hit all season. Broadcaster Duane Kuiper, in summing up the proceedings for the audience said, "Giants baseball. ... Torture."
That planted the seed. A few weeks later, on May 15, the Giants carried a 2 — 1 lead into the ninth inning at AT&T Park. The Houston Astros loaded the bases before it took Brian Wilson a total of 15 agonizing pitches to finish off Kaz Matsui for the final out.
Kuiper said it again.
"Giants baseball." Pause. "Torture."
This time, it stuck. Fans embraced the phrase as the unofficial brand of Giants baseball. It applied to the season. It applied to a half-a-century wait for a World Series victory in San Francisco. Torture signs and torture T-shirts popped up at AT&T Park, as a salute to the team's maddening methods. Of the Giants' 162 regular-season games that season, 115 — the most by any team in five years — were decided by three runs or fewer.
"At times it felt like this season lasted five years with all the close games," Affeldt told the New York Times that October.
The Giants won the NL West by going 92–70, but they never led by more than 3.0 games, and they trailed by as many as 7.5 (on July 4, no less).
But they rallied back, with a little help from the Rally Thong. Such was the power of Huff's fashion statement, a bright red thong with a black waistband and rhinestone-like studs that spelled out "PAPI" across the front. Writer Andrew Baggarly recounted its emergence as if describing King Arthur pulling the Excalibur from the stone. In his book A Band of Misfits, Baggarly wrote that Huff needed inspiration, "and he found it — in his underwear drawer."
"Guys, we've got 30 games left," he announced. "Here's 20 wins right here."
Huff was adamant: this was no personal slumpbuster.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Big 50, San Francisco Giants by Daniel Brown. Copyright © 2016 Daniel Brown. Excerpted by permission of Triumph Books LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword by Orlando Cepeda,Acknowledgments,
1. Willie Mays,
2. The 2010 Champions,
3. Barry Bonds,
4. Willie McCovey,
5. Juan Marichal,
6. Buster Posey,
7. Orlando Cepeda,
8. The Freak,
9. Bruce Bochy,
10. Will the Thrill,
11. The 2014 Champions,
12. Brian Sabean,
13. The Ghosts of Gotham,
14. Madison Bumgarner,
15. Gaylord Perry,
16. The 2012 Champions,
17. Dusty Baker,
18. Rod Beck,
19. Matt Cain,
20. Jeff Kent,
21. Travis the Hero,
22. Kruk & Kuip,
23. Pablo Sandoval,
24. Kevin Mitchell,
25. Matt Williams,
26. Hunter Pence,
27. One Flap Down,
28. 2002 World Series Heartbreak,
29. Robby Thompson,
30. Dravecky's Comeback,
31. Roger Craig,
32. Hodges & Simmons,
33. Brian Wilson,
34. Cain's Perfect Game,
35. Earthquake World Series,
36. Jack Clark,
37. Joe Morgan's Home Run,
38. Robb Nen,
39. The Brian Johnson Game,
40. John Montefusco,
41. The 1962 World Series,
42. J.T. Snow,
43. Saved by Ownership,
44. The Alous,
45. The 1993 Season,
46. Rich Aurilia,
47. Bobby Bonds,
48. Stu Miller,
49. Jim Davenport,
50. Brandon Crawford,
Bibliography,