Willie Mays, Vic Wertz, and the Catch

On September 29, 1954, in the top of the eighth inning of Game 1 of the World Series, the score was tied 2-2. The Cleveland Indians had runners on first and second with nobody out. Vic Wertz, who had already driven in both Cleveland runs with a first-inning triple, stepped to the plate against Giants reliever Don Liddle at the Polo Grounds.

Wertz hit Liddle's fourth pitch on a line to deep center field. In most ballparks, the ball would have been a home run, scoring at least two runs and likely breaking the game open. But the Polo Grounds was not most ballparks. Its center field was the deepest in the major leagues, marked at 483 feet to the clubhouse entrance, with the warning track beginning at roughly 425 feet.

Willie Mays was playing shallow center field. When the ball left Wertz's bat, Mays turned his back to the plate and ran. He ran toward the wall at full speed, tracking the ball over his left shoulder, and caught it roughly 425 feet from home plate with both arms extended above his head. His hat flew off. His momentum carried him past the catch. He stopped, turned, and threw the ball back toward the infield in a single motion.

Larry Doby, the runner on second, had retreated to tag up after Mays made the catch. He advanced only to third. Al Rosen, the runner on first, held. Mays's throw prevented either runner from scoring. Reliever Marv Grissom replaced Liddle, walked Dale Mitchell to load the bases, then struck out Dave Pope and got Jim Hegan to fly out. The inning was over. The score was still 2-2.

In the bottom of the 10th inning, pinch-hitter Dusty Rhodes hit a three-run walk-off home run that barely cleared the right field wall, 270 feet from home plate. It was one of the shortest home runs in World Series history, following one of the longest outs. Al Lopez, the Indians' manager, summarized the game by saying, "We were beaten by the longest out and the shortest home run of the year."

The Giants swept the Series in four games, stunning a Cleveland team that had won an American League record 111 games in the regular season.

Mays himself never considered the Catch to be the best defensive play of his career. He cited a bare-handed running catch at Forbes Field in 1951 and a grab against the wall at Ebbets Field as more difficult. "I usually catch fly balls like that all the time," he told the United Press after the game. "I had a good lead on it all the way." Joe DiMaggio, watching from behind home plate, wrote in a syndicated column the next day, "Mays made one of the finest catches I ever saw." Bob Feller, the Indians' Hall of Fame pitcher who was in the Cleveland dugout, later said, "There's three things that made the catch memorable. One, it was a great play. Two, it was in a World Series. And three, it was on national television."

Feller was right. The 1954 World Series was broadcast live to a nation in which 65 percent of households now owned a television. Mays's catch was the defining image of the first generation of televised baseball, and it remains, seven decades later, the single most famous defensive play in the history of the sport.

Mays died on June 18, 2024, at the age of 93. The glove he used to make the Catch is on display at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.