The Catch’ eternally links Willie Mays and Vic Wertz

Willie Mays, who recovered the ball, has died at the age of 93.

“My grandfather passed away before I was born,” said Rachel, a professional photographer in Pennsylvania. “But for me, as long as I can remember, it was always ‘The Catch’ and Willie Mays.”

She was talking about September 29, 1954, the first game of the World Series between the old New York Giants and Cleveland, the score tied 2-2 in the top of the eighth inning at the now long-demolished New York Polo Grounds.

Cleveland first baseman Vic Wertz, Rachel’s grandfather, came with two men. Wertz was on fire, cruising to a four-hit game. He quickly drove a Don Liddle throw at least 450 feet, a decisive blast almost anywhere else.

Not with Mays at center. He ran towards the wall, dead sprinting. He caught the ball in an act of pure beauty, then pivoted to make a stunning throw to second. Larry Doby scored, but stopped at third. Al Rosen stayed at first. New York won the game.

Mays’ catch — while the nation was still pausing to collectively focus on the afternoon’s World Series games — became the most celebrated moment for a baseball player many consider the greatest to have never set foot on the field.

And while Cleveland would lose the series in four games, Vic Wertz – whose rise to the majors, after World War II, began in earnest with a fine minor league season in Buffalo – became the other half of the one of baseball’s most durable players. moments:

For Mays to pull off such a celestial catch, he needed someone who could hit this Valhalla of a ball.

To Terry Wertz and his daughter Rachel, who both felt such a sense of loss this week, this is what ties Willie Mays and Vic Wertz together.

It also explains why Buffalo is important to this story: Records in the Buffalo History Museum’s research library indicate that Wertz and his wife, Bernice, once lived at 61 Maple Street. This was after Wertz first joined the Bisons as an 18-year-old. hit .222 in 1943, before leaving to serve in World War II.

Upon his return in 1946, Wertz hit .301, with 19 home runs and 91 RBIs. Brian Frank – baseball historian and founder of the Herd Chronicles – found newspaper clippings that highlight how pivotal this season was for Wertz.

According to an early-season account by Cy Kritzer of the Buffalo Evening News, Wertz changed his batting stance and thrived as a hitter after a “former major leaguer…passed on information” regarding Wertz’s form. to Bisons manager Gabby Hartnett, now in the Hall of Baseball. of glory.

It was career-saving advice. Wertz later told Kritzer that he had been so frustrated that he was ready to quit the match.

Instead, he began hitting the ball in the old Offermann Stadium, beginning a trajectory that led him to the Polo Grounds and that moment of destiny with Mays.

In Buffalo, Wertz hit three home runs in an 11-10 win over Newark at Offermann. A few weeks later, he hit a beacon home run that Kritzer called the longest in stadium history — at least until Luke Easter came along a decade later.

In 1946, Jackie Robinson played for Montreal in the International League, one season before breaking the “color line” that kept blacks out of the American and National Leagues. Frank wrote how Robinson and his groundbreaking African-American teammate Roy Partlow were greeted with ceremonial warmth when they played in Buffalo for the first time.

In the second game of that doubleheader, Frank wrote, Robinson made two “extraordinary ground plays on Vic Wertz dunks,” an early lesson in having hits stolen from a legend.

The following year, Wertz played for Detroit. According to baseball historian and researcher Mark Armour, who wrote about Wertz for the Society for American Baseball Research, Wertz hit a home run in the 1951 All-Star Game as a Tiger off Sal Maglie – the same native of Niagara Falls pulled by Giants manager Leo Durocher. in 1954, just before Wertz launched his immortal batting streak.

Earlier in the 1954 season, Armor writes, Wertz had been traded from Baltimore to Cleveland, where he played a key role for a club that ultimately dislodged the Yankees — winners of five consecutive world titles — as champions of the AL.

That was the backdrop at the Polo Grounds, where a power hitter who found his rhythm in Buffalo launched the eighth-inning World Series explosion that linked Mays and Wertz eternally.

By this time, Wertz and Bernice had divorced. Terry Wertz and his sister Pat lived with their mother in Pennsylvania, where Terry remembers watching the game with his maternal grandfather. After Mays grabbed the child, the older man looked at the child and said prophetically:

“They’ll probably lose the game now.”

Terry said his father always thought about how “The Catch” was remembered better than if Wertz had doubled or tripled the play. And Wertz’s true triumph, Terry said, would involve much more than baseball.

In 1955, as Wertz recounted in an interview with Arthur Daley of the New York Times, he suddenly began suffering from headaches and nausea. After a few days, I had trouble breathing.

Wertz suffered from polio, a viral disease that attacks the spinal cord or brainstem – and a disease whose devastating effects terrified the nation. “We didn’t know what was going to happen,” recalls Terry Wertz, but his father – who told Daley of his grief at seeing children hospitalized, affected for life by the disease – managed to recover after month of rest and to return to the country. baseball.

By the end of 1963, Wertz was with the Twins and nearing retirement. At age 15, Terry was in Baltimore when his father hit his 266th career home run against the Orioles. Wertz gave the ball to his son, although neither of them realized it would be the last home run of their big league careers.

After baseball, Wertz moved to Michigan with his second wife, Lucille, to run a beer distribution business. In 1983, while on his way to the airport to visit Terry, his wife Linda and Jessica, their eldest, he suffered a massive heart attack. He died a few days later, during bypass surgery.

Wertz was only 58 years old. Rachel, born in 1985, never knew him. Terry remembers his father as “someone who did a lot of things for people quietly, who did a lot for charity,” although many of these efforts are forgotten over the years.

What millions remember is “The Catch.”

Armor said it’s difficult to find a comparable sports connection: His best suggestion is how Bobby Thomson of the Giants and Ralph Branca of the Dodgers have always been linked, after Thomson’s 1951 homer against Branca – with Mays on the bridge – sent the Giants to the World Series.

Brian Frank, the Buffalo historian, said the most exquisite detail of the Mays-Wertz connection boils down to this: Usually with a great baseball story, one person has to fail. A pitcher gets pounded or a batter is out. But Wertz hit the ball a mile away, exactly what he was supposed to do.

Except Mays, unforgettable, somehow caught it.

This is at the heart of the sense of disappearance of Rachel and her father, who felt that Mays – over the course of his long life – maintained this moment, this mystical connection.

The glove Mays used to make the catch is at the Cooperstown Hall of Fame, where Terry and Rachel both saw it — and where many pilgrims quietly admired it this week. Armor noted that Wertz and Mays had played golf together at a tournament shortly before Wertz’s death, a kinship that reinforced a truth of lasting significance for the family:

If “The Catch” had been directed by someone else, Armor said, it might be all but forgotten. But Willie Mays is as great as anyone who has played this game, what if the most famous catch he ever made endures forever, even beyond death itself?

The name of the man who hit the ball too.