Say Hey! Remembering Willie Mays and listening to Reggie Jackson
Scribbled Notes on a Cocktail Napkin: My impassioned case for playing even more regular season MLB games in unique locations
Scribbling from Oklahoma City
Baseball’s biggest three stories of the week are all interconnected, and they are all more related more to life and society than actual baseball games, which make them ideal topics for my Newsletter.
Willie Mays, the greatest ballplayer of all time, died at the age of 93.
Baseball staged a tribute to the Negro Leagues, playing a regular season game at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, a historic ballpark where Mays once played.
Reggie Jackson went on national television during the pregame ceremony for this joyful occasion on Fox TV and reminded America the extreme racism he faced when playing in Birmingham in 1967.
I’ve got my own memories and context to add to these intertwined stories.
"Scribbled notes on a cocktail napkin" is my weekly Sunday feature that's a tribute to the sports columnists I grew up reading who penned Herb Caen-inspired three dot columns. It's an excuse to shamelessly plug my other side projects, post my favorite Immaculate Grid from the week with a story about one of the players, link to stories I found interesting, and string together loose topics on my mind.
Spring training meant Willie Mays
“Hey writa’!” the high-pitched voice echoed from down the hallway.
It was Willie Mays. He wasn’t referring to me, or any sports writer in particular. But he had a question that he wanted answered.
“We gotta any pitchin’ this year, writa’?”
This was my introduction to Willie Mays. It’s 2000, my first year on the San Francisco Giants beat, in the Scottsdale Stadium clubhouse, and this is my, “holy shit, that’s Willie Mays, and I’m really covering Major League Baseball” moment.
Willie Mays meant spring training. His annual arrival is when spring training truly began. It’s certainly when spring training became lively, fun, unpredictable. You never knew what the Say Hey Kid would say. But you did know, he’d have a smile on his face, rookies would be in awe, veterans would turn to mush, laughter would ensue, and he’d want to know if the Giants had any pitching this year.
One of the smartest things Giants former managing partner Peter Magowan ever did was sign Mays to a lifetime contract. I saw Willie Mays plenty of times in the Giants clubhouse during regular season games. He was a fixture in clubhouse manager Mike Murphy’s office, a magnet for players on both teams to visit.
But what I most remember about Mays is spring training. It’s when baseball nostalgia helps us escape winter’s bitter cold with all the nostalgic warmth.
In 1987, my grandparents telling me about sitting in those old rusted green bleachers and watching Mays play spring training games.
In 1989, I’m back in Arizona with my Dad, and I remember watching Mays in uniform working with Kevin Mitchell on his transition from third base to left field. That year, Mitchell won the Most Valuable Player award and made a famous bare-handed catch.
And every year from 2000-03, when I covered the Giants from The Oakland Tribune, the highlight was the annual visit from Mays. I remember being struck that people really did just “say hey” to Mays.
In my opinion, drop the “one of” qualifiers. Mays was the best baseball player. Period.
I interviewed him plenty, especially as his Godson Barry Bonds pursued and eventually surpassed most of his records. I wish I’d have interviewed him more.
Somebody who did interview him, a lot, was my friend John Shea of The San Francisco Chronicle. One of my favorite subheads in a newspaper was John’s “Shea Hey” items in his Sunday Baseball Column.
“Shea Hey” and “Say Hey” collaborated on a book a few years ago that became an instant New York Times bestseller. I can’t recommend it enough.
Keep expanding MLB specialty games
Baseball might have its share of problems. Putting on a spectacular show in unique locations is not one of them. It might be the best thing MLB is doing right now.
Whether it’s erecting a baseball field amidst a corn field in Iowa next to the famed location where Field of Dreams was filmed, or turning the site of the 2012 Summer Olympics into a baseball diamond in London, or playing a game adjacent to the home of the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pa. (where the major leaguers watch the Little Leaguers first), or restoring Rickwood Field in Alabama to pay respects to the Negro Leagues this past week.
The challenge for baseball is to continue these special games, and expand them, without expanding them so much they no longer become special. I say go full throttle.
I hope MLB returns to Dyersville, Iowa.
I hope MLB continues to play in Birmingham and Williamsport, London and Mexico City, Seoul and Tokyo.
My biggest complaint is these should be entire series. Just one game at the Field of Dream site? Just one game where Willie Mays started his career? Just two games in London? Make it an entire weekend, three or four games.
If it is only one game, don’t play any other games at the time. None in the majors. None in the minors. Make that the only baseball game taking place that night. All eyes on that game, no other distractions.
The notion of playing even more specialty games should be explored. All 30 MLB teams should play a series at a unique location, say, once every three years.
Baseball plays so many games – 162 total, 81 home and away – so you have plenty of inventory. Teams can afford to “lose” a few home games every few years in the spirit of bringing this beautiful game to locations that don’t normally get to see the sport’s biggest stars.
I know, easy for me to say, but I’d love to see the Toronto Blue Jays not just play exhibition games in Montreal, but an entire series. I’d like to see them play a series in Vancouver and truly just take over Canada.
MLB teams play exhibition games in a few minor league ballparks each year. I know I’m biased, but I’d love to see a few major league games played there too.
I know, you can’t play in every minor league ballpark. They just don’t have the quantity of seats, the clubhouses for players, the light standards, the facilities for broadcasters. But some of the Triple-A ballparks do … yes, including Albuquerque.
What if the minor league baseball team that averages the highest number of fans in a season is rewarded with a regular season game the next year?
What if the MVP got to pick a place special to him for a specialty game?
Reggie speaks out on racism
It’s 1987, I’m 14 years old, my first year obsessively getting autographs at the Oakland Coliseum. A new issue of Sports Illustrated has arrived in the mail, and Reggie Jackson is on the cover. Of course I want to try getting it autographed.
But, my friends and fellow autograph hounds wonder, will Reggie sign this issue?
I remember reading the story. It was eye-opening for a white kid from the suburbs.
Reggie did sign the cover for me one day in the parking lot. I wish I could remember the exact conversation that took place, but I recall there was some undercurrent of Reggie saying something like, “I hope you all read the story in there.”
On Thursday, Reggie appeared on the national Fox pregame show to discuss his time playing in Birmingham. He was asked a question by Alex Rodriguez, no doubt intended to be a softball question, about returning to Birmingham. Reggie swung with all his gusto, like it was the 1977 World Series again.
Here are a few key passages.
“I walked into restaurants and they would point at me and say, ‘The n—– can’t eat here.’ I would go to a hotel and they’d say, ‘the n—– can’t stay here.’ We went to Charlie Finley’s country club for a welcome home dinner and they pointed me out with the N-word, ‘he can’t come in here.’ Finley marched the whole team out. … Finally, they let me in there and he said, ‘We’re going to go eat hamburgers. We’ll go where we’re wanted.’”
“Coming back here is not easy,” Jackson said. “The racism when I played here, the difficulty of going through different places where we traveled — fortunately, I had a manager and I had players on the team that helped me through it — but I wouldn’t wish it on anybody.”
“Fortunately, I had a manager in Johnny McNamara that if I couldn’t eat in a place, nobody would eat. We’d get food to travel. If I couldn’t stay in a hotel, they’d drive to a hotel to find a place where I could stay. If it had not been for Rollie Fingers, John McNamara, Dave Duncan, Joe and Sharon Rudi — I slept on their couch three, four nights a week for a month-and-a-half. Finally, they were threatened that they’d burn our apartment complex down unless I got out. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”
When I heard Reggie Jackson speak the cold hard truth this past week on Fox’s pregame show, I immediately remembered that issue of SI. I went back and re-read it. Here’s a link. It’s a time capsule of baseball and racism, a few months after Al Campanis’ ill-fated words that ignited a firestorm.
It’s a first-person story, written along with Peter Gammons, and the following passages stand out to me 27 years later.
The problem isn't limited to baseball, of course. As a nation, we have our problem, a sociological problem. Jackie Robinson, Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson were great men for spearheading and forcing the issue of equality, but except for a few people like the Reverend Jesse Jackson, the rest of us have sat back and done nothing. Black players are no different. The '70s came along, and most of us got our money, and we pulled off to the side and said, "I'm O.K., I've got mine."
Here we are at the end of the '80s, and we have a serious problem that isn't going away. If nothing happens in baseball and the situation stays the same, fingers will be pointed, and the game could get nasty. And if America itself doesn't change, we won't be the greatest nation in the world anymore. You'll see a "——you" approach in baseball. Clubs will be racked by selfishness and strong undercurrents of bitterness. Unless something is done, there will be even more reminders of inequality than there are today, and the bad feeling will only get worse.
I don't like words like racist, bigotry and prejudice because they evoke hatred. They are negative words, and the more we can stay away from them, the better. We have to temper our conversations so we don't offend one another. Blacks need the white world. I don't believe blacks should be given anything. I'm saying there are blacks who are qualified to work as managers, general managers, coaches, accountants and p.r. people, and all I ask is that qualified blacks be hired to fill some of those jobs.
The problem exists because of the invisible wall between whites and blacks. Whites are afraid of blacks, and I think that's because the two races don't interact enough. I've never been a guy who liked forced busing. I always felt that if I had children here in Oakland, I wouldn't want them bused to San Jose. But now I'm starting to see things a little differently. Maybe it would be worthwhile if they were bused to a predominantly white school, so white kids could find out that black children can be wonderful people.
Blacks have a responsibility to prove to people in power that they're qualified and that they want the good jobs. I want people to know I didn't hunt and fish all winter, that I was involved in the stock market and in real estate. I have an analytical head on my shoulders that can decipher P & L sheets and take me successfully into the business world when I retire. The biggest stumbling block blacks and whites have is their fear of approaching one another. Suspicions exist on both sides.
What Reggie Jackson said this week isn’t that different than what he’s been saying all his life.
I hope Reggie Jackson keeps speaking.
I hope we all keep listening.
More Willie Mays stories
I’ve read and re-read stories about Willie Mays constantly over the last week, hoping to gain an even better appreciation for his life.
After the Giants decided to callup Mays, they couldn’t initially find him. He wasn’t home and answering machines didn’t exist. Knowing that Mays favorite hobby was watching movies, they called to a local movie theatre. A message was put on the screens of every movie screen: “Willie Mays, Go To Lobby.”
Mays was at the movie theatre, saw the message, went to the lobby, and that’s how he found out he was going to the majors.
This is a photo of Willie Mays at the Omaha airport after playing his final minor league game. That a photographer was dispatched to the airport is an illustration of how big a story he already was, at age 20, in 1951.
The New York Giants bought an advertisement in The Minneapolis Morning Tribune, sorta apologizing for taking Willie Mays from their minor league team.
This week’s not-so-random Immaculate Grid story: Chili Davis
Chili Davis was never totally anointed “the next Willie Mays” because everyone knew that was unfair and that went poorly when the label was attached to Bobby Bonds in the late 1960s.
He was born Charles Theodore Davis in Kingston, Jamaica. He never knew Willie Mays until his family moved to the United States at age nine. He immediately fell in love with the game, playing during a golden era of youth baseball in Los Angeles, alongside Eric Davis and Darryl Strawberry.
The nickname Chili started as “Chili Bowl” because a friend said after a haircut gone wrong that it looked like somebody put a chili bowl around his head and cut his hair. The “bowl” was shortened, but the name stuck, to the point that his official Baseball Reference page lists him as Chili Davis.
Chili was drafted in the 11th round of the 1977 draft by the Giants. As a teenager in Instructional League, Willie Mays gave him lessons on how to play center field.
I fondly remember Chili’s debut in 1982. He hit 19 homers, stole 24 bases and played a solid center field. Say Hey! That’s not too shabby. Chili finished 4th in Rookie of the Year, behind Steve Sax, Johnny Ray and Willie McGee. Chili played in the 1984 All-Star Game, hosted by the Giants at Candlestick Park.
Chili played 19 years in the majors. He was also an All-Star in 1986 and 1994, won a World Series title with the Twins in 1991, the Yankees in 1998 and 1999. He has the seventh-highest total of home runs by a switch hitter.
We had a player on the Isotopes named Nick Buss from 2013-14. He’s one of my all-time favorites. One of Nick’s middle names was Chili … because his father was a huge fan of Chili Davis.
Chili Davis also has the distinction of getting his cleats stolen by Willie Mays.
It came at an Old Timer’s Game at Candlestick. Chili had a brand new pair of cleats with orange shoestrings at his locker. He was extremely proud of them. Couldn’t wait to wear them in a game.
Mays’ makeshift one-day locker was next to Chili’s. He saw the cleats and liked them so much, he helped himself. Chili thought they were stolen, until he realized the thief was the Say Hey Kid.
After the game, Willie said with his high-pitch laugh, “now the cleats have hits in them!” when he returned them to Chili.
Chili decided to have Willie sign the cleats and never wore them in a game.
If you enjoyed this week’s “Scribbled Notes on a Cocktail Napkin” you might enjoy these similar essays.
Yes to more games in unique locations! Couldn’t agree more.
“expand them, without expanding them so much they no longer become special“
Kinda like baseball ruined interleague play. I mean, how intriguing is a Royals-Marlins series!