Things you may not know about that game where Mays made the catch.

 

Vic Wertz, the strapping Cleveland first baseman, had been ripping the ball all day. A two-run triple and two singles off Sal "the Barber" Maglie. After being robbed by Mays in the 8th inning, in the top of the 10th he hit a double—kept to a double only by Mays cutting it off and making a great throw, keeping Cleveland off the scoreboard.

But about that ball in the 8th...

Ball game, thought Roger Kahn, watching it fly from the lower deck of the Polo Grounds.

"None, that I recall, ever hit a ball any harder than this one by Wertz in my presence," Giants fan Arnold Hano, who would turn his experience into the book, A Day in the Bleachers.

Hano wasn't concerned at first. 

"Then I looked at Willie, and alarms raced through me," he recalled—just because Mays was running full out. "I knew then that I had underestimated, badly underestimated, the length of Hertz's blow."

"I had the ball all the way," said Willie.

This was not mere braggadocio, after the fact. On the tape that survives, you can see Mays tap his glove repeatedly as he ran half-the-length of a football field after Wertz's drive—his signal that he knew would catch it.

"This time I'm going back, a long way back, but there is never any doubt in my mind. I am going to catch this ball," he would say. "I turn and run for the bleachers. But I got it. Maybe you didn't know that, but I knew it. Soon as it got hit, I knew I'd catch this ball."

As he caught up to it, Mays reached out with the peculiar grip he'd perfected, palm out, with his fingers extended just a vital few more inches. Catching the ball as softly as possible.

"Oh, my! Caught by Mays! Willie Mays just brought this crowd to its feet with a catch that must have been an optical illusion to a lot of people. Boy!" kvelled Jack Brickhouse on NBC's national broadcast.

The crowd was actually a little late in rising, unable to quite believe it. You can see a single fan stand up, slap his forehead, and mouth the words, "Oh, my God!"

Maybe even more amazing was what Willie Mays did after he caught the ball. 

Somehow, he didn't run into the wall. Somehow, he managed to turn and whip the ball back toward home, fearful that Larry Doby might try to score from second base on a fly out—as Mays himself sometimes did.

"What I have to do is this: after I make the catch, turn. Pour all my momentum into that turn. To keep my momentum, to get it working for me, I have to turn very hard and short and throw the ball from exactly the point that I caught it. The momentum goes into my turn and up through my legs and into my throw."

And so it did.

"This has to be the best throw anybody could ever make," veteran umpire Jocko Conlan, out at second base, thought. 

He turned "like some olden statue of a Greek javelin hurler, his head twisted away to the left as his right arm swept out and around," Hano would write, producing, "the throw of a giant, the throw of a howitzer made human."

So after this, and after cutting off Wertz's double in the 10th (Wertz: "I think Willie may have made a better play on me in the tenth."), Mays walked to lead off the bottom of the 10th. Cleveland had its third-string catcher, Mickey Grasso, in the game—and Mays had noticed that, when Grasso was warming up Bob Lemon to start the inning, that the catcher seemed to have a sore arm.

He got permission from Durocher to steal if he got on—and did so, putting the winning run in scoring position. The Indians walked Hank Thompson intentionally—only to see Dusty Rhodes hit a 257-foot homer down the line.

"It was the longest out and the shortest homer of the season," Cleveland manager Al Lopez lamented afterwards. But he also conceded: "That was the greatest catch I've ever seen. Just the catch, mind you. Now put it all together. The catch. The throw. The pressure on the kid. I'd say that was the best play anybody ever made in baseball."

Arnold Hano agreed. So did Joe DiMaggio, who also praised Mays' courage for running full out, so close to the wall.

The only people who disagreed...were some of Mays' teammates. As Leo Durocher put it:

"What the fuck are you talking about? Willie makes fucking catches like that every day. Do you keep your fucking eyes closed in the press box?"