One more word on Willie Mays.

The saddest thing about Willie Mays' career was that he was untimely ripped from the place where he was adored, New York City, and transplanted to San Francisco by the Giants' drunken lout of an owner, Horace Stoneham; there to play in a windy, freezing abomination of a ballpark.

Mays being Mays, he soon managed to adjust even to Candlestick Park. But it took years for the weird fans of San Francisco to embrace him.

"This is the damnedest city," wrote Frank Conniff of Hearst newspapers. "They cheer Khrushchev and boo Willie Mays."

Well, they didn't boom him for long. But the second saddest thing about Mays' time in the bigs was how little action he got to see in October.

There was the World Series in his rookie year, when the still-NY Giants lost to the Yanks in six (And when, eerily, it was Mays who hit the routine flyball that led to Mickey Mantle falling in the sprinkler hole and wrecking his knee.).  This was bookended with his poignant, 1973 World Series with the Mets, at the very end of his career, when the Metsies lost to Oakland in seven.

In between, there was his great triumph, The Catch in 1954, the one ring he took, a disappointing, seven-game loss to the Yanks in 1962, and a division championship in 1971 (followed by a three-game sweep by the Pirates).

That was it, all too short a stay on baseball's greatest stage—and games in which, much like Ted Williams, he never really got the chance to get going at the plate.

Year after year, Stoneham's sieve-headed front office managed to lose close races to teams such as the Dodgers and Cardinals—mostly by utterly failing to trade their seemingly inexhaustible supply of talented outfielders and first basemen for first-rate pitchers.

Bill White, Orlando Cepeda, Felipe and Matty Alou, and even Willie McCovey, eventually, were all dealt away for the likes of Toothpick Sam Jones, Ray Sadecki, Bob Shaw, Joe Gibbon, and Mike Caldwell. 

At one point, 1965-1969, the Giants finished second 5 years in a row—3 of those times by 3 games or fewer. 

Sound familiar?

Looking at that record, it seems to me that Aaron Judge must've been nuts to sign a big contract with Brian Cashman's personal plaything two years ago. Who knows? Maybe Judge and/or his wife just love New York. Or they love us, which seems hard to believe. Though New Yorkers would never cheer Putin.

But for whatever reason, he did. And it's hard now, in the wreckage of yet another misplayed season by his team's uncaring and indifferent management, to believe that Aaron Judge will ever see a World Series. 

Which is a helluva shame. At least Willie Mays—and the fans of New York—always had 1954.