Tag Archives: San Francisco Giants

Ron Hunt, RIP: Plunk rock

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Ron Hunt

“He crowds the plate like Raquel Welch crowds a bikini.”–The Pittsburgh Press, about Ron Hunt, long after he left the Mets in a heartbreaking trade.

Many enough in New York were impressed early and often with Ron Hunt, the first Met to earn a starting berth in an All-Star Game (1964, played in newborn Shea Stadium), aside from us kids who believed the comically inept Mets were just that much more human than the aloof, imperial Yankees.(“The Yankees,” Bill Veeck once wrote, “always took the attitude that they were doing you a favour by permitting you to watch them perform.”)

The impressed included Roger Angell, in only his second year of writing literarily virtuosic baseball reports, opinions, asides, and epitaphs for The New Yorker. “The sun’s brightest rays this spring,” Angell wrote, in a May 1963 essay, “have shone around the middle of the [Mets’s] infield.”

Ron Hunt, a skinny twenty-two-year-old second baseman up from the Texas League . . . has quick hands, excellent range to his left, and a terrier’s eagerness for a moving ball . . . [He] has kept his [batting] average close to .300. He reminds me of Pee Wee Reese at the plate—an unassuming, intelligent swinger who chokes up on the bat and slaps singles to all fields.

Hunt ripped a walkoff double for the first Mets win of 1963; original owner Joan Payson sent his wife, Jackie, two dozen roses. He actually finished second to Pete Rose in the National League’s 1963 Rookie of the Year vote. A year later, Hunt impressed Angell yet again. “The Mets are short on heroes,” Angell wrote.* “Their gamecock, their small nova, is Ron Hunt, the second baseman.”

Now in his second season, Hunt appears to be one of those rare ballplayers who improve from year to year. Four years ago, he batted .191 in the low minors. Last year, as a major-league rookie, he hit a solid .272, and so far this young season a stream of modest singles and doubles has kept him constantly above the .300 mark. Originally a third baseman, he now has mastered the pivot at second and he fields with assurance, if not brilliance. His new partnership with Roy McMillan, the veteran shortstop just purchased from the Braves**, cements the Mets’ infield. McMillan has slowed down a step or two and is having trouble at the plate, but he is a tough, tobacco-chewing, old-time pro and a boon to this young team.

He also began mastering the art of taking one for the team, quite literally. His 243 lifetime drills were a modern major league record when he retired in spring 1975. (“He gets good flesh on the ball,” cracked one newspaper once upon a time.) If they’d had walkup music in that era, you could have had a field day picking Hunt’s. He was 1960s/1970s baseball’s great plunk rocker.

In May 1965, Cardinals infielder Phil Gagliano blasted Hunt on a takeout slide as Hunt tried to pick a slow grounder by Hall of Famer Lou Brock. That shoulder separation almost killed a season which began with Hunt missing its first fifteen games with a jammed finger. He came back early that August but the season was more than lost.

After returning to form enough to make the NL All-Stars in 1966, Hunt ran afoul of Mets manager Wes Westrum (Casey Stengel’s successor) and was dealt to the Dodgers with outfielder Jim Hickman for former NL batting titlist Tommy Davis and outfielder/infielder Derrell Griffith, who’d never play a single major league game for the Mets or anyone else again.

Ron Hunt

Hunt’s final Topps baseball card as a Met. He didn’t exactly look the junkyard-dog type.

“The trade broke his heart,” wrote Hunt’s Society for American Baseball Research biographer Tad Myre. “The Hunts loved New York City, the Mets team, and the Mets fans. Ron figured he’d be a Met forever and wanted to be around when the club started to win. It did not help that he had to learn of the trade from sportswriter Dick Young.”

With the Dodgers for a season, the Giants (after a trade) for three, the Expos for three and two thirds, and his hometown Cardinals for shy of a third, Hunt broadened his reputation as a baseball junkyard dog. For seven straight years he led the National League in getting hit by pitches, and for the first six he led the entire Show. He also walked far more than he struck out, but he once said pitchers told him if he got them to 3-1 in the count they might as well drill him.

“He even practised getting hit in batting practise,” said his Expos manager, Gene Mauch. “Hunt has had to fight for everything he got . . . Hunt has a big day, goes four-for-four, the next day he’s out early wanting to work on some things, wanting to do it again, nor being satisfied.”

When his playing career ended, Hunt—who died last Wednesday at 85, after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease that may have come from four baseball concussions and “indeterminate” ones when he played high school football—involved himself in farming, liquor and sporting goods stores, and a youth baseball association from 1987-2003 aimed at preparing kids aiming to play college baseball.

The great plunk rocker also made sure that at least one piece of his Mets past stayed with him: he kept two pairs of seats from the late Shea Stadium in his home. (He was also known to have saved a good number of the balls that hit him during plate appearances as well.***)

Hunt was probably one of the most classic examples of the player whose guts you hated with a passion—until or unless he became your teammate. If you made him a friend, you had a friend for life, according to just about every published tribute to the man.

If you made him a husband, as his high school sweetheart Jackie Stewart did, you had what Myre called a marriage “for the storybooks” which produced two children, Tracie and Ronnie. “The happiest day of my life,” Hunt called his 1961 wedding day. “That’s what she told me to say.”

Ron and Jackie Hunt had a habit of making friends among the fans with whom they dwelled off the field. Veteran New York Post writer Ken Davidoff, profiling Hunt and his Parkinson’s battle in 2018, asked whether he wanted Met fans to pray for him. “Just tell them I said hi,” Hunt replied. “I don’t know them. They don’t know me personally. Just tell them I said hi. I’ll never forget you.”

His wife, children, grandchildren, fans, and friends won’t forget him, either. Here’s hoping Hunt’s entry into the Elysian Fields was gentler than his near-customary way of reaching base.

* Both Roger Angell essays quoted were included in the first of his imperative anthologies, The Summer Game. (New York: Viking Press, 1972; Nebraska: Bison Books, 2004.)

** Hunt himself was an acquisition from the Braves, the Mets having bought him after their first tremendously, hysterically horrendous (or should that be horrendously hysterical) season.

*** Don Baylor broke Hunt’s modern-era lifetime plunk record in 1987 and retired with 267. Hall of Famer Craig Biggio broke Baylor’s record in 2005 and retired with 285.)

“I’m really at peace with this”

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Clayton Kershaw

Kershaw gets to retire as few of the greats truly do—on his own terms.

Often as not, you learn more about those whose careers you admire by the way they face the end than by the ways they did what earned your admiration. In Clayton Kershaw’s case, it might not be learning but re-learning.

When Kershaw froze the Giants’ Rafael Devers like ice cream with a strike-three fastball that could have been accused of clogging up the passing lane to open the top of the fifth Friday night, his mates in the infield surrounded and hugged him, then he handed the ball to Dodgers manager Dave Roberts. Roberts’s final season as a player was Kershaw’s first.

Now, Roberts put an arm around Kershaw and congratulated him on the career that’s written his likely first-ballot Hall of Fame ticket. Kershaw had only one reply: “I’m sorry I pitched so poorly tonight.”

Then, the 37-year-old lefthander looked toward his wife and four and a half children (Mrs. Kershaw is expecting their fifth) in the stands and motioned to the Dodger Stadium crowd before walking down from the mound and toward the dugout. He gave the crowd the curtain call they all but demanded, knowing they’d seen him pitch at home for the final time, then disappeared.

“I’m kind of mentally exhausted today, honestly,” he said after the Dodgers finished the game with a 6-3 win, “but it’s the best feeling in the world now. We got a win, we clinched a playoff berth, I got to stand on that mound one last time. I just can’t be more grateful.” Note the order in which he listed all of it. We first, I second.

That attitude enabled Kershaw not just to rule the earth from the mound in his prime but to pick up, dust off, start all over again after more mound heartbreak than the all-time greats should be allowed. When he triumphed, it was splendor on the mound; when he didn’t, it was down at the end of Lonely Street to Heartbreak Hotel. Never once did Kershaw take the triumphs for granted or the heartbreaks for finalities.

Clayton Kershaw

Kershaw beginning to deliver the strike three freezer to the Giants’ Rafael Devers, his final regular season batter and strikeout in Dodger Stadium.

No worse hour befell him, perhaps, than the night the Nationals yanked the Dodgers out of the 2019 postseason. The division series night Roberts sent Kershaw in relief of Walker Buehler and Kershaw yanked the Dodgers out of a seventh-inning Game Five jam by striking Adam Eaton out on three pitches. The night Roberts should have met Kershaw en route the dugout, given him the proverbial pat on the posterior, then taken the ball and brought Kenta Maeda in for the eighth to do what the manager later admitted thinking should have been done originally: face Anthony Rendon and Juan Soto.

Oops. Kershaw went out for the eighth. He threw Rendon a 1-0 fastball that looked as though it might catch the corner. Looks were so deceiving that Rendon sent it over the left field fence. The next pitch Kershaw threw, to Soto, was a slider that hung just enough for Soto to hang it into the right field bleachers. Then Roberts brought Maeda in. And Maeda struck the next three Nats out in order.

Those blows tied the game at three each, but Kershaw wasn’t anywhere near the mound when Howie Kendrick wrecked Joe Kelly and the Dodgers with the grand slam that punched the Nats’ tickets to the National League Championship Series. (And, to their eventual World Series conquest.) Some small packs of Dodger fans relieved themselves by running their cars over Kershaw jerseys in the postgame parking lot anyway.

Kershaw couldn’t bring himself to say what had to be said, that his manager inexplicably set him up to fail. Instead, he took the responsibility for himself.

“That’s the hardest part every year,” Kershaw said postgame. “When you don’t win the last game of the season and you’re to blame, it’s not fun . . . Everything people say is true right now about the postseason. I understand that. Nothing I can do about it right now. It’s a terrible feeling, it really is.”

He’d go forth to claim two World Series rings, in 2020 and 2024, even though his fractured toe kept him from pitching in last October other than cheerleading. His career 154 ERA+ leads all still-active pitchers. His 2.85 lifetime fielding-independent pitching rate is second among the active only to the often ill-fated Jacob deGrom. His resumé includes three Cy Young Awards, a Most Valuable Player award, and a no-hitter. Baseball-Reference considers Kershaw the number 20 starting pitcher who ever hit the mound; he was the best starting pitcher of his own time before his body finally started telling him, “That’s what you think.”

The fastball isn’t Little Johnny Jet anymore. The curve ball Vin Scully himself labeled Public Enemy Number One might be headed for Leavenworth. The slider that really turned Kershaw from good to great to extraterrestrial has lost just enough of its slide. But he is still Clayton Kershaw, and he will still have a role in the Dodgers postseason. Even if it’s coming out of the bullpen. He’ll be valued, even if he’ll let other arms hog the headlines for better or worse.

He didn’t pitch as poorly as he thought he did Friday night. Sure, he surrended a pair of earned runs and walked four while scattering four hits otherwise, but he struck six out in his 4.1 innings’ work. Even if that freezer to Devers looked borderline enough that you could wonder whether plate umpire Lance Barksdale might have let the moment and the legacy inform his judgment.

Kershaw Family

L to R—Cooper, Charley, Chance, Ellen, and Cali Kershaw contribute to the ovation for their future Hall of Famer as he’s about to begin his final regular-season Dodger Stadium start.

The night before, Kershaw made his pending retirement official, after an annual flirtation with the idea. True to form, he was humble and appreciative, right down to letting his wife share the moment by way of reading a letter she wrote him for the occasion:

From my perch, I have been uncomfortably pregnant, nursed newborns, rocked them to sleep to the roar of the seventh-inning stretch to get their last nap in. Fed them baby food, pouches, teething with crackers, changing blowout diapers, been frazzled with toddlers, tantrums and meltdowns, chased them through the concourses. A Mary Poppins bag filled with tricks and games to keep them occupied, and ironically teaching them the ins and outs of baseball. Explaining all the numbers on the scoreboard and the concession line, the ballpark food.

(I’ve) cried over some really hard losses and some really incredible milestones. (I’ve) watched our kids fall in love with the game, with the players and watching you pitch. Singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” chasing beach balls, ducking from fly balls, spilling food and popcorn all over the fans below them. (I’ve) done it thousands of times, thousands of bathroom runs, all in the stadium. The workers and ushers are (our) best friends now.

A tear crept down Kershaw’s cheek as he read it.

“I’m really not sad. I’m really not,” he said later in the conference. “I’m really at peace with this. It’s just emotional.”

Few of the greats get to choose their own retirement terms. But they show more of what they’re made of when they do so than they ever showed on the field. Kershaw facing the end, whenever it may prove to be, showed more than any triumph and transcended any tribulation. No wonder grown adults wept for and with him.

The Red Sox Devers-ify . . .

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Rafael Devers

Devers in the on-deck circle. He now joins the Giants in a deal that may not bear immediate fruit for the Red Sox but manna at the plate for the Giants.

Even leading the 21st Century in World Series titles (four), the Red Sox haven’t lost their capacity to stun. They can sweep their eternal rivals and neutralize those rivals’ number one hitting threat one moment (they held Aaron Judge to 1 bomb, while striking him out 9 times during the sweep) and trade a slugging three-time all-star the next.

Yes, that sounds too simple. So we’ll flesh it out a big more. A relationship fractured by foolishness on both sides ends with Rafael Devers going to the Giants and left-handed pitcher Kyle Harrison, right-handed pitcher Jordan Hicks, outfield prospect James Tibbs, and minor league right-hander Jose Bello going to the Red Sox.

Almost five years after the Red Sox traded Mookie Betts rather than think much about paying him his true value, they’ve unloaded a far more problematic player than Betts ever was. That won’t make the deal go down any more smooth for a Red Sox Nation too much flummoxed by the team’s front office follies in recent seasons, alas.

The deal also means the last of the Red Sox’s 2018 World Series winners are gone. The Mookie Monster has since been a critical element in two Dodgers world champions; Xander Bogaerts has become a mainstay in San Diego and a few National League pennant races.

Say what you will about Devers, the man can hit. His to-date .858 OPS, his average 33 home runs per 162 games lifetime, both prove it. His batting eye improves with age; he led the American League in walks at the time of the deal. And he took care of the second of two runs the Red Sox needed to finish sweeping the Yankees with a hefty 2-out home run in the bottom of the fifth. The Giants may have a home ballpark nowhere near as hitter-friendly as Fenway Park, but they’re getting a guy to whom the dimensions don’t matter so long as he can tee it up and swing big.

Part of the problem, and a critical reason why things came to Devers’s transcontinental change of baseball address, is that when you play him at third base “poisonous” doesn’t begin to describe it. He led the league in errors in six of his first seven seasons and the entire Show for the first four of those. He was 80 defensive runs below league average. (Fair disclosure: Bogaerts hasn’t exactly been toxin-free at shortstop, not being 27 defensive runs below league average for his career to date.)

That’s a compelling reason why the Red Sox thought signing free agent third baseman Alex Bregman was a smart idea. The problem was that the Red Sox took the clumsy way to handle both that and the little matter of convincing Devers that the longer he stayed at third base the more likely the Red Sox were to declare the area off limits pending a hazmat cleaning.

How would Devers have done at first base? We won’t know, at least regarding the Red Sox, because Devers didn’t exactly pounce on the opportunity when it was offered as Triston Casas hit the injured list. He won’t be taking a new shot on third in San Fran, either, since the Giants have a verified Gold Glover holding it down (Matt Chapman). He may not get a crack at first, either, with the Giants having a willing Wilmer Flores to move over in case former Met Dominic Smith needs a break or can’t hold it down longer-term.

But Devers will provide the Giants with something they haven’t had since their freshman top executive, Buster Posey, was last seen behind the plate for the Giants — a great hitter. Posey may also give Devers what the Red Sox couldn’t for whatever reason, a clear presentation of the “why” behind any move without insulting Devers’s considerable pride. Posey had bloody well better, too, considering the Giants have taken on the remainder of Devers’s contract — running through 2033 and paying him a nifty $250 million plus.

What do the Red Sox get other than out from under Devers’s remaining money and maybe a little more egg on their faces considering they didn’t exactly handle Devers with graceful hands and heads?

Harrison — Considered highly talented and still only 23, so he has time to put things together despite his 4.56 fielding-independent pitching rate to date. Depending on the Red Sox pitching injury picture, Harrison just might be seen in Red Sox silks before the stretch drive arrives. And that might occur next to any pitching the team ponders acquiring at or before the trade deadline now that they have about $250 million to play with.

Hicks — Serviceable relief pitcher whom the Giants tried out of the rotation last year, but when that experiment imploded Hicks went back to the bullpen, and the Red Sox are liable to keep him there.

Tibbs — A first-round pick last June, he’s been showing plenty of upside in the minors, but the Red Sox will likely wait for his AA-level results before thinking of him as Show bound.

Bello — Has bullpen upside to burn, from the look of his minor league life to date.

The rest of the Sox — With Devers gone, it looks as though there will be plate appearances to spare to spread around especially in dispersing an outfield crowd partially. But it’s an open question as to just whom would replace Devers’s plate production. For now. And maybe longer. Which means the Red Sox’s re-entry into the AL East race picture may be an arduous re-entry to sustain.

Published originally by Sports Central.

Orlando Cepeda, RIP: “Winter always turns to spring”

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Orlando Cepeda

Cepeda was the Giants’ first San Francisco idol from the moment he emerged in 1958.

It took the late Hall of Famer Willie Mays more time than he deserved to become a San Francisco treat as a New York import. It took the now-late Hall of Famer Orlando Cepeda, who died Friday at 86, five minutes during the Giants’ first season by the Bay.

OK, that’s only a slight exaggeration. But having no tie to the Giants’ New York past, having a blast against the Dodgers in the Giants’ first San Francisco regular season game (a home run against Don Bessent with one out in the fifth), and posting a Rookie of the Year season with 25 bombs and a National League-leading 38 doubles, Cepeda became a Giants’ matinee idol at once.

It didn’t hurt that this son of Puerto Rican baseball legend Pedro (The Bull) Cepeda found San Francisco a treat from the word go, either. “Right from the beginning,” the Baby Bull would remember to Sports Illustrated‘s Ron Fimrite in 1991.

There was everything that I liked. We played more day games then, so I usually had at least two nights a week free. On Thursdays, I would always go to the Copacabana to hear the Latin music. On Sundays, after games, I’d go to the Jazz Workshop for the jam sessions. At the Blackhawk, I’d hear Miles Davis, John Coltrane . . . I roomed then with [outfielder] Felipe Alou and [pitcher] Rubén Gómez, but I was the only one who liked to go out at night. Felipe was very religious and quiet, and Rubén just liked to play golf, so he wasn’t a night person. But I was single, and I just loved that town.

Show me a ballplayer who loves a good jazz jam and I’ll show you my kind of ballplayer, folks. The only thing that would make my jazz heart go pitty-pat a little more would be discovering Cepeda in the Blackhawk audience on the April 1961 nights that produced the classic Miles Davis In Person Friday and Saturday Nights at the Blackhawk.

Imagining the smiling Cepeda at the Blackhawk raptly listening to a Davis quintet running the range from Miles’ modal classic “So What” to Thelonious Monk’s equally classic “Well, You Needn’t” and back to, say, Johnny Mercer’s “Autumn Leaves” or Miles’s own blues, “No Blues,” is an imagining worth securing.

The sole sore spot was Cepeda’s early tussle with fellow Giants comer/Hall of Famer Willie McCovey for playing time at first base. Cepeda won the early battles when McCovey, an equally likeable soul, struggled to find consistency, compelling Giants manager Bill Rigney to switch the pair off between left field and first base, a switchoff that didn’t always sit right with Cepeda.

“I know I could’ve played left field if I’d put my mind to it,” he’d remember to Fimrite, “but I was only 21 years old and very sensitive. Friends and other players kept telling me I should demand to play first. It was all pride with me. And ignorance.”

A 1961 knee injury left Cepeda to play in pain for most of the rest of his Giants tenure, but it didn’t stop him from leading the National League with 46 home runs and finishing second to Hall of Famer Frank Robinson in the league’s Most Valuable Player Award vote. Somehow, Cepeda would manage to post performances through age 26 that would make him a rival to Hall of Famers Jimmie Foxx and Lou Gehrig (and, retroactively, Hall of Famer in waiting Albert Pujols) for first basemen.

The knee pain was nothing compared to the psychic pain of playing for Rigney’s successor manager Alvin Dark. Dark was known too well to mistake Cepeda and his fellow Latinos’ effervescence for indifference, to say nothing of Dark despising their speaking Spanish among each other. The manager also thought Cepeda was exaggerating the extent to which his knee bothered him.

“Some people think that because we are Latins — because we did not have everything growing up — we are not supposed to get hurt,” he told another SI writer, Mark Mulvoy, in 1967. “But my knee was hurt. Dark thought I was trying not to play. He treated me like a child. I am a human being, whether I am blue or black or white or green. We Latins are different, but we are still human beings. Dark did not respect our differences.”

Dark’s successor, Herman Franks, suspected Cepeda of loafing in spring 1965 when in fact Cepeda found it difficult to put his full weight on the bothersome knee. He’d spend May through August on the disabled list, have surgery on the knee in the offseason, and lose the first base job to McCovey at last. In May 1966, after another spell in left field and despite hitting reasonably, Cepeda was traded to the Cardinals for pitcher Ray Sadecki.

Shocked at first, Cepeda welcomed the deal quickly when he made two discoveries. The Cardinals needed a first baseman in the worst way possible, and his new teammates plus manager Red Schoendienst took a quick liking to his upbeat personality and his equal loves for jazz and Latin music. They nicknamed him Cha-Cha; he returned the favour by nicknaming the 1967 Cardinals El Birdos.

Orlando Cepeda

He nicknamed his 1967 Cardinals El Birdos, and they went on to win that World Series while he won the NL’s MVP.

Well, now. El Birdos would go all the way to winning the World Series and Cha-Cha would go all the way to winning the NL’s MVP. Inexplicably, though there’s always the chance that his repaired right knee might still have tried to rebel, Cepeda went from first to worst of his career to date, sort of, in 1968. Hoping to make a 1969 comeback, he was dealt to the Braves for catcher/third baseman Joe Torre before spring training ended.

Leery about the South (he’d learned the hard way about Jim Crow as a minor leaguer in Virginia over a decade earlier), Cepeda relaxed when reunited with former Giants teammate Felipe Alou and making a new friendship with Hall of Famer Henry Aaron. His regular season was a struggle, but in the new divisional play format with the Braves winning the NL West, Cepeda hit a ton in a losing cause (1.448 OPS) as the Braves got swept in the best-of-five by the Miracle Mets.

He hit a ton in 1970 (34 bombs; .908 OPS) as the Braves fell to fifth place otherwise, but in 1971 his good knee gave out on him. He’d never be the player he once was again other than a surprise 1973 in which he became the Red Sox’s first official designated hitter. Released for youth in 1974, he tried a comeback in the Mexican League and a brief spell with the Royals before calling it a career at last.

Hall of Famer Roberto Clemente’s tragic death in 1972 led Puerto Rico to anoint Cepeda a hero, but in December 1975 his astonishing arrest for accepting a delivery of 170 pounds of marijuana (he claimed he was expecting a smaller amount, for himself) sent him from hero to poison. There wasn’t a jazz performance alive that could save him from that.

“He and his family received death threats,” observed his Society for American Baseball Research biographer Mark Armour. “He lost all of his money on his legal case, which caused him to miss child-support payments and led to more legal trouble. He finally stood trial in 1978, was found guilty, and was sentenced to five years in prison. He served ten months in a minimum-security facility in Florida.”

Cepeda struggled further after his release, losing a job as a White Sox minor-league hitting coach and his second marriage. Somehow, he took up Buddhism and there lay the key to changing his life permanently. “It allowed him to take responsibility for the mess he had made of his life,” Armour wrote, “to get control of his shame and his anger, and to help him find a path forward. He also met Mirian Ortiz, a Puerto Rican woman who eventually became his third wife. He and Mirian moved to the Bay Area, close to where his baseball journey had begun 30 years earlier.”

“Buddhism cleared the air for me,” Cepeda said. “I discovered that winter always turns to spring.”

In time, Cepeda re-established ties with the Giants, first with fantasy camps, then with scouting and roving instruction, and finally as a humanitarian ambassador. He was also elected to the Hall of Fame by the 1999 Veterans Committee, the second Puerto Rican (behind Clemente) to be elected, five years after he missed Baseball Writers Association of America election by seven votes in his final year of eligibility.

Shy of a decade later, Cepeda became the fourth Giant to be immortalised in bronze outside what’s now Oracle Park, joining Mays, McCovey, and Hall of Fame pitcher Juan Marichal, shown standing tall with his customary smile, wearing a first baseman’s mitt and holding a baseball inches from the webbing. It was a long, hard enough road for the man who’d had to use his Giants signing bonus to pay for his father’s funeral.

Let’s pray his widow and five sons find comfort in his eternal serenity in the Elysian Fields. And, that they can’t resist saying, “It figures,” if they discover one of the first things he did upon arrival was seek out a Miles Davis Quintet here, a John Coltrane Quartet there, a Mongo Santamaria group yonder, and engage the only swinging that ever engaged him above and beyond his own with a bat.

“Let him hear you, he’s listening.”

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Heliot Ramos

Willie Mays played with Gary Mathews.. Who played with Edgar Martinez.. Who played with Ichiro.. Who played with Tim Beckham.. Who played with Blake Snell.. Who played with Heliot Ramos.. Who homered tonight while playing CF for the Giants… In Willie Mays’ first pro ballpark. Baseball!—Jayson Stark, Hall of Fame baseball writer.

In the first professional baseball park where the late Hall of Famer Willie Mays played as a Birmingham Black Baron, it was illegal until 1963 for white and non-white players to play on the same field. On Thursday, white and non-white players converged for the San Francisco Giants and the St. Louis Cardinals to play an official major league game.

None but the blind or the bigoted pretends racism is eliminated from American life entirely. But the Giants and the Cardinals, playing a game umpired by the Show’s first all-black umpiring crew, managed to keep it outside the gates of a ballpark where Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson played on the first interracial team Rickwood Field hosted.

That was then: Jackson’s parent club, the then-Kansas City Athletics, moved its AA-level minor league team into Birmingham at the insistence of its owner, Charles Finley, a Birmingham native who could be flagrantly wrong about many things but stood on the side of the angels when it came to racism. Jackson remembers only too well.

“I walked into restaurants and they would point at me and say, ‘The n—–s can’t eat here’,” Jackson said aboard the Fox Sports pre-game broadcast.

I would go to a hotel and they’d say, “the n—–s 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. 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.

This is now: The Negro Leagues are recognised formally (and appropriately) as having been major leagues. This year, the known statistics of Negro Leagues players and managers (surely there will be more to exhume, however long it might take) began becoming integrated into major league statistics at last.

Bill Greason

The Rev. Bill Greason, former Birmingham Black Baron who got to pitch very briefly for the Cardinals in 1954.

Thursday evening, the oldest former Negro Leagues player, pitcher turned minister Bill Greason (99), was escorted to halfway between the mound and the plate by Cardinals coach and former player (and the National League’s 1985 Most Valuable Player) Willie McGee to throw a ceremonial first pitch. To Ron Teasley, Jr., whose father is the second-oldest living former Negro Leaguer.

Greason was six years Willie Mays’s senior when they were Black Barons teammates. “He was a determined young man,” the former pitcher told Ken Rosenthal. “He had the gifts, the talent, and he was sensitive to listening to those who were older than he was. It was a tremendous blessing, and we turned out to be real close. Like brothers.” Just the way Mays would look toward former Newark Eagles star Monte Irvin when Irvin was a third-year Giant and Mays a nervous Giants rookie.

Mays’s number 24 was painted in large white numerals behind the plate. A Giants uniform with his number hung in the Giants’ dugout. The Giants and the Cardinals—wearing the uniforms of, respectively, the San Francisco Sea Lions (West Coast Negro Baseball League, 1946) and the St. Louis Stars (Negro National League, 1920-1931)—wore circular patches on their jerseys with Mays’s surname and number.

Mays’s son, Michael, urged the Rickwood crowd to make some noise for his father before the game. “Birmingham, I’ve been telling y’all,” the younger Mays said, “if there was any way on Earth my father could be here, he would. Well, he’s found another way . . . Let him hear you, he’s listening. Make all the noise you can.” The Wil-lie! Wil-lie! chant just about drowned every other sound out.

Mays had issued a statement Monday saying his health would keep him from attending the game. The following day, he died at 93. America couldn’t decide whether to grieve over yielding Mays to the Elysian Fields or be grateful that he remained among us as long as he did.

“In a sense, Mays was too good for his own good,” wrote George F. Will in tribute.

His athleticism and ebullience—e.g., playing stickball with children in Harlem streets–encouraged the perception of him as man-child effortlessly matched against grown men. He was called a “natural.” Oh? Extraordinary hand-eye coordination is a gift. There is, however, nothing natural about consistently making solid contact with a round bat on a round ball that is moving vertically, and horizontally, and 95 mph. Because Mays made the extraordinary seem routine, his craftsmanship and intelligence were underrated.

The late Willie Mays, as a young Birmingham Black Baron. (Photo: Birmingham Public Library.)

The arguable greatest position player ever to play major league baseball may have been watching and listening from his Elysian Fields roost on Thursday, but he surely lamented his Giants losing by one run to the Cardinals. Not for lack of trying.

The Athletic‘s irrepressible Hall of Fame writer Jayson Stark couldn’t resist pointing out: “Willie Mays played with Gary Mathews.. Who played with Edgar Martinez.. Who played with Ichiro.. Who played with Tim Beckham.. Who played with Blake Snell.. Who played with Heliot Ramos.. Who homered tonight while playing CF for the Giants… In Willie Mays’ first pro ballpark. Baseball!”

That would be Ramos tying the game at three-all when he took hold of a two-on, one-out, one-strike service from Cardinals starting pitcher Andre Pallante and launched it the other way, over the painted Budweiser ad on the right field fence.

The Cardinals kind of snuck back into the lead an inning later on a sacrifice fly (Nolan Gorman) and a run-scoring (Alec Burleson) wild pitch (from Giants reliever Randy Rodriguez), and padded it to 6-3 in the bottom of the fifth when Brendan Donovan sent home his third run of the game, singling up the pipe to score Burleson. The Giants got two back in the top of the sixth on an RBI single (Wilmer Flores) and a sacrifice fly (Nick Ahmed), but that was the end of the game’s scoring.

The all-black umpiring crew even managed to behave, from Alan Porter behind the plate onward. Perhaps wisely, they confined the otherwise dubious C.B. Bucknor to second base, where he couldn’t possibly commit half the mischief he normally does when he’s assigned to call balls and strikes.

For one evening Rickwood Field became the Show’s oldest park in which to play a game; built originally in 1910, it’s two years older than Fenway Park and four older than Wrigley Field. It also became the place where racism’s ghosts were made unwelcome, even as few, perhaps, beyond the assembled former Negro Leaguers, might have guessed whom its most troublesome ghost might have been.

The once all-white minor league Birmingham Barons, to whose games Mays listened as a youth, had a radio play-by-play announcer from 1932-1936 named Bull Connor, who just so happened to be Birmingham’s commissioner of public safety at the same time. “Pretty good announcer, too,” Mays once remembered of him, “although I think he used to get excited.”

That pretty good announcer eventually ordered fire hoses and attack dogs turned upon student civil rights demonstrators, in 1963, the horror of which helped speed the writing, passage, and acceptance of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Connor is long gone. So is the legal framework by which Jim Crow wreaked his infamy. But only that.

There remain miles to go yet before racism’s cancer is eradicated entirely from too many hearts and minds, still, who might have remained oblivious Thursday night to what its absence can achieve, even on a baseball team. Thursday was one more round of chemo, but an instructive and endearing one.