(3 of 8)
Once, after a night game, Willie burst into tears. "Boss," he sobbed to Manager Leo Durocher, "you better bench me or send me back to the Millers. I'm hurtin' the team." Tough-minded, tough-tongued Leo knew better. He put his arm across Willie's shoulders. "Son," he said, "you're not going anywhere but here. Just keep swinging, because you're my centerfielder, even if you don't get a hit for the rest of the season."
"Wait Till Next Year." From then on, Willie was on fire. Up against Boston's Speedballer Warren Spahn for the first time in the Polo Grounds, he teed off on a three-and-one pitch and lofted it over the leftfield roof for a homer. His batting average started to climb. In the field he could do no wrong, did much that was phenomenal. He had an unconscious knack for doing the spectacular, an uncanny instinct for anticipating batters and baserunners. Once, when he dove out from under his cap (Mays frequently loses his cap) to catch a sinking line drive, he reached back, caught his cap in one hand and the ball in the other. Against the Dodgers one day, he raced into right center after a long fly, snagged it with a prodigious stretch, spun completely around, off balance, and rifled a perfect strike to the plate to throw out the Dodgers' speedy Billy Cox. Around big-league locker rooms, that play is still referred to as "The Throw."
Willie's personal bonfire soon ignited all the Giants. The pitchers began throwing like winners, and Outfielder Don Mueller pieced out a 19-game hitting streak. The infield tightened into one of the best in the league. It was perilously late in the season—the Giants were 13½ out of the lead on Aug. 11. But in a wild and breathless finish, they tied the Dodgers on the last day of the season, beat them in the playoff for the pennant, with Bobby Thomson's last-ditch "Home Run Heard 'Round the World." When they lost the World Series to the Yankees, the Giants comforted themselves with thoughts of next year.
But the Giants had to play through without Willie; his draft number came up. Mays applied for a deferment on the ground that he was the principal support of his mother and a passel of nine half-brothers and sisters back in Alabama; it was not granted. He flunked his pre-induction aptitude test. But the Army prevailed nonetheless. With Mays gone, the Giants finished 1952 in second place, 4½ games behind the Dodgers.