Boly -- Problem was, as Mays has frequently pointed out, the 'team' didn't play disciplined baseball; they didn't do the 'little things' that needed to be done to win.
Rog -- I certainly wouldn't argue with Willie, but I think the problem was with the pitching. That, and there were some very good teams in the sixties the Giants were competing against, especially the Dodgers and Cardinals.
I looked at the Giants' won-loss record in one-run games from Hart's first full season in 1964 through the last year of the 1960's. There wasn't much difference in their one-run records except in 1967 and 1969.
In 1967 they lost by 10.5 to a very strong Cardinals team, so unless they won about 80% of their one-run games, it wouldn't have mattered.
1969 was the only season it could have made a difference. The Giants finished four games behind the Braves, so if they could have turned their poor 27-32 won-loss record in one-run games into 31-28, they would have won.
I think the primary problem was the pitching, as do most people.
But as it turns out, we're wrong. The pitching was actually good in those season, good enough to win it in some years if the Giants' offense was hitting on all cylinders. The problem actually was the lack of depth beyond the top hitters. The Giants had a lot of scruffy hitters in their lineup that decade.
Boly mentioned Ducky Schofield. He wasn't the only bad hitter the Giants started in the sixties.
Another indication the Giants weren't losing games because of the little things is that their actual record exceeded their Pythagorean record by nine games in those six seasons. The Pythagorean record of a team is the number of wins one would expect from their run differential.
The Giants actually played better than their run differential would indicate, indicating they likely fared pretty well in their close games.
Perhaps if we went back game by game, we could see where Willie was right. But looking from a broader standpoint, it doesn't appear so.
I may study the situation further, but I've learned something here. The Giants' pitching in those six years averaged about third in the (10-team) league. The pitching certainly wasn't LEADING them to wins, but based on the top hitters the Giants had, it should have been enough.
I think the lack of lineup balance was what hurt the Giants. Schofield wasn't the only player who didn't hit as well as the Giants needed.
Injuries to some of their top players hurt, as well. And as mentioned, the Dodgers and Cardinals put together some very good seasons in a time during which only one team in the National League went to the post season.
If there had been a wildcard back in those years, the Giants may have fared far better. The Giants were pretty consistent in the sixties, but they often fell just short.
If we look at the one playoff they had, they came from behind in the ninth inning of the deciding game to beat the Dodgers. And when they lost the deciding game of the World Series by one run, it was really the Yankees' defense that made the difference in a low-scoring game.
Tom Tresh backhanded Willie Mays' bid for a run scoring double off Ralph Terry in the bottom of the 7th inning, to keep the score at 1-0. In the ninth, it was the wet grounds and a fine defensive play by Roger Maris that kept Matty Alou from scoring the tying run.
Then Willie McCovey hit a ball hard enough that four out of five times would have been a hit and won the Series. But that time he hit it where Bobby Richardson could reach out and snare it for the game-ending out.
I don't see where doing the little things better would have made a huge difference. With the exception of 1969, when the Giants lost out on the NL pennant, either they lost by a host of games (1967 and 1968, both to the Cardinals) or had good records in one-run games, indicating they weren't hurt by a lack of the little things.
Going back to 1962, they battled like crazy to overcome a 4-game deficit to the Dodgers with 7 games to go. They tied it in the 162nd game of the season on a Willie Mays 8th-inning home run off Turk Farrell IIRC. They won it with a comeback win in the 165th.
Then they had the misfortune to lose that final game of the World Series due to excellent Yankees late-inning defense -- and the horrible luck of having Willie McCovey hit the heck out of what would have been the Series-winning hit if not for the well-positioned Richardson.
By the way, would you have pitched to the lefty-hitting McCovey if you were the Yankees, or would you have put him on first so the right-handed Terry could face right-handed hitting Orlando Cepeda?
McCovey was hitting only .214 in the World Series before that key at bat, but Cepeda was hitting just .158. Cepeda had hit right-handers better than lefties that season, but not as well as McCovey did.
I'm going to go with the decision the Yankees made, although it would likely go the other way in today's game. I think McCovey was the more likely of the two to get a hit, but not by so much that I would have walked him and created the possibility that Cepeda would have walked in a run, as he did in the 9th inning of the final playoff game to put the Giants ahead for good.
Tough call, but there you have my opinion.
One other point: Had Richardson played way over into the hole in what later became the "McCovey shift," Willie's drive likely would have gone through, and the Giants would have gone home World Series champs, with Matty Alou scoring the tying run and Mays the decider.
Not only that, but if you look at the 1965 and 1966 seasons, argueably the three (3) best that the three of them had as a unit, the one HUGE thing they really lacked was a lead off hitter.
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