Just two weeks ago, in the 10th inning of a College World Series regional game between Clemson and Florida, with two outs and Gators on first and second, Florida’s Ashton Wilson smacked a pitch high to deepest center field. It appeared certain to bounce into the wall — or go over it — to end the game.
But Clemson center fielder Cam Cannarella turned his back to the infield and took off in a desperate sprint.
For the first couple of seconds, he twisted his torso looking over his left shoulder for the flying object. Spying it, he then swerved a bit to his right and glanced back over that shoulder. And just before he got to the wall, the ball descended over his shoulder. He corralled it in his glove, turned upward as if to cup water to drink from some well. Then he crashed into the green padded wall.
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And almost immediately, an excited broadcaster exclaimed, “Say Hey, Willie Mays kid!”
That was nine days before Mays died Tuesday at 93, which set off a celebration of his nonpareil baseball career that culminated Thursday with a game at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Ala., the oldest professional ballyard in the country. It was where Mays first played as a teenager for a Negro Leagues team, the Black Barons, the season after Jackie Robinson was allowed to reintegrate Major League Baseball, as it was called by the White men who organized it. It was where America’s so-called national pastime alighted this week in another effort to exorcise its 60-year insult to men it refused to let play on its teams because of their African or Latin parentage.
But that call of the Clemson fielder’s catch is to me the most amazing thing about Mays’s career. Not the 660 home runs. Not the near quarter-century of all-star selections. Not the dozen Gold Gloves. Not the three consecutive seasons he led baseball in stolen bases. Because none of those numbers are the numbers. Someone else has more of any figure Mays wound up tallying.
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But 69 years, eight months and counting since Mays made the Catch, it remains a part of our collective sports psyche. It is not just etched in the memories of those who may have witnessed it at the time but has become embedded in the minds of fans who didn’t — and transcended the game’s lines as well.
The play’s transcendence is no easier a feat than Mays making the Catch itself in the 1954 World Series — off the bat of Cleveland’s Vic Wertz, in the deepest part of what was the gargantuan Polo Grounds. Because that’s ancient history. Almost three-quarters of a century ago. Less than a decade after the end of World War II.
And we live in a time of recency bias — or historical ignorance, take your pick. Kids in particular learn and know less and less about yesteryear.
But not with the Catch. It continues to be repeated. And repeated. And …
When I called Daniel Nathan, the Skidmore scholar who focuses on sports history and memory, he pointed out that he just co-edited a book with a chapter on the Catch, written by University of San Francisco anthropologist George Gmelch, who was in the Detroit Tigers’ minor league system in the 1960s.
Part of the remembrance and continued reference of Mays’s catch, Nathan reminded me Friday, is because it’s on film.
“There’s video of it,” Nathan said. “A lot of those like historic moments, like Babe Ruth’s called shot, there’s no real conclusive video. But there is with Willie. We’ve seen it over and over.”
And what you see on film is a thing of beauty. The sprint. The baggy clothes flapping in the wind. The remarkable conclusion. And then the ballerina’s twirl, his cap flying off, and the throw back to the infield.
“A lot of people who didn’t see Mays play very often, they could see, ‘Oh, this is what they’re all talking about,’” Nathan said. “And it imprinted on a generation, and then those guys told the story, and they repeated the video, and it became this memory marker about a guy’s greatness.”
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A few years earlier, baseball was treated to what became the “Shot Heard ’Round the World,” a walk-off home run by New York Giants slugger Bobby Thomson to win the National League pennant. But Mays did what he did in the World Serious, as the late great columnist I was lucky to work with, Blackie Sherrod, called baseball’s ultimate championship. And we now know some skulduggery was involved in Thomson’s home run. What Mays did is unassailable.
“There are studies to show memories are modified over time and they’re fragile,” Nathan said. “It’s a fragile way of knowing the past, and it’s susceptible to all kinds of change.
“But the thing about this is, it’s so well documented. There were a lot of photographers there, and it’s on TV, and there’s video.”
There’s an entire book about the day of the Catch. Artists have painted the moment. People born decades later hang images of it on their walls.
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And the Journal of Sport History that Nathan edits is compiling an In Memoriam section on Mays’s historical and cultural significance that will, of course, include a discussion of the Catch.
“It’s become almost mythological, but it’s better than some other mythological moments because it’s documented, it’s verifiable, we can see it,” Nathan explained. “And we can appreciate the beauty of it, like that line, ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever.’”
