The Other Thousand

Everybody knows the 1954 catch. Mays got so tired of being asked about it that he once said he had a hard time even remembering it.

The one that people who watched him every day will bring up happened at Candlestick on April 11, 1970, twenty-five days before his thirty-ninth birthday. Bobby Tolan drove a ball toward the wire fence in right-center, into that dead space where nobody waves anybody off because nobody thinks there's a play to be made. Mays and Bobby Bonds arrived at the same instant, both gloves above the fence, and collided in midair. They came down in a heap on the warning track. For a moment nobody watching, including the umpire, knew where the ball was or whether it had been caught at all. Bonds got to his feet, reached into the glove of an unconscious Willie Mays, and held the baseball up.

He was thirty-eight. The legs were going. The power numbers had already started down. And he still went and got a ball that two outfielders had no business reaching.

That's the thing about Mays in the field. The 1954 catch is the one on the poster. The other thousand are why the people who actually saw him play refuse to put anybody above him.