Mays or Mantle?

[sharksrog]

I don't think there is any way to know whether Willie Mays or Mickey Mantle was more popular. BOTH were extremely popular, and it may be that one was more popular at one point in his career and the other at another point.

As an example, I'll bet after the 1954 World Series, Willie was more popular. He was coming off an MVP season, and his Giants had just swept the highly-favored, 111-43 Indians.

And after Mantle's Triple Crown season of 1956, I'll bet it was he who was more popular.

Going backward, in early 1952, it might have been Mays. According to John Saccoman in the SABR Baseball Biography Project:

Red Smith chronicled Mays's last game before his military call-up, in Brooklyn's Ebbets Field: "... there was a fine, loud cheer for Willie. This was in Brooklyn, mind you, where 'Giant' is the dirtiest word in the language."

I would say Willie had come a long way very quickly, based on:

In a 1996 interview with the "Academy of Achievement Museum of Living History," Mays recalls: "I was the first black in that particular league. And we played in a town called Hagerstown, Maryland. I'll never forget this day, on a Friday. And they call you all kind of names there, 'nigger' this, and 'nigger' that. I said to myself ... 'Hey, whatever they call you, they can't touch you. Don't talk back.'"

[sharksrog]

Before being drafted into the Army, Willie played just under half the games the Giants played in the 1951 and 1952 seasons. Willie didn't hit nearly as well those two seasons (.266 with a .459 slugging percentage) as he would hit later in his career.

Yet in those 155 games the Giants went a robust 108-47 (.690). In their other 156 games, they won 83 and lost 73, a .532 winning percentage.

When Mays returned from the Service in 1954, the Giants had a gap of 35 games to make up on the Dodgers. The Dodgers had won the 1953 National League pennant with 105 wins. The Giants had won just 70 games.

With Willie batting a league-leading .345 in 1954, the Giants won 97 games and finished 5 games ahead of the 2nd-place Dodgers. The Giants had picked up an incredible 40 games on the Dodgers from one season to the next.

Willie helped that turnaround in two ways. Clearly his own play, which included 41 homers, 13 triples, 119 runs scored and 110 RBI's, made a huge difference. But his return also freed the Giants to trade the hero of "The Shot Heard 'Round the World," Bobby Thomson. Thomson had played center field before Mays arrived in 1951 and had retaken the position while Willie was in the Army.

Thomson was traded for 24-year-old southpaw Johnny Antonelli, who in 1954 led all NL pitchers with a 2.30 ERA and a .750 winning percentage (21-7).

Mays was actually ahead of Babe Ruth's 60-home-run pace when on July 28th, manager Leo Durocher asked Mays to stop swinging for the fences and instead begin hitting to right field for the benefit of the team. Mays hit only five more homers, but batted .379 the rest of the way.

Entering the last day of the season, Willie was embroiled in a fierce 3-way battle for the NL batting championship. Willie's .3422 was actually third, behind teammate Don Meuller's .3426 and Duke Snider's .3425. Willie went 3-for-4 in the season finale, winning the batting title with a .345 average, narrowly beating Mueller's .342 and the Duke's .341.

All that set the stage for the original "The Catch" in the 1954 World Series. As Mays has said many times, it wasn't the catch -- it was the throw that followed. Here is how it was described:

As Arnold Hano described it in A Day in the Bleachers: "{He} whirled and threw like some olden statue of a Greek javelin hurler... What an astonishing throw... This was the throw of a giant, the throw of a howitzer made human."

[donk]

one stat that was very telling on what Willie meant to the Giants....there was a span of several seasons that the Giants never won a game when Willie was forced to sit out the game...

Willie made better throws than the one in the series, but like "the catch" the ones in the WS get bigger every year....

[sharksrog]

Don -- one stat that was very telling on what Willie meant to the Giants....there was a span of several seasons that the Giants never won a game when Willie was forced to sit out the game...

Rog -- That is something I had also heard -- along with Willie's never being thrown out at third base over some extremely long period of time. The latter would be very hard to research, but as I made the above post, I was actually thinking about researching the first.



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