In a fair world, Willie Mays doesn’t catch that ball.
In a fair world it would have been well into the stands for a home run, because the ball had been hit 420 feet or more. In every ballpark in baseball today, it would have been a home run. In nearly every ballpark in 1954 it would have been a home run, too.
But the world isn’t fair, and the Polo Grounds had the deepest center field in baseball, and Willie Mays was a unicorn, and so the ball was caught. It wasn’t the home run it would have been today. It wasn’t even the double or triple it surely would have been on that day if Mays wasn’t playing center field. The two runners on base at the time didn’t score, and neither did the Indians, and so they lost Game 1 of the 1954 World Series in extra innings, and were ultimately swept despite their gaudy total of 111 regular season wins.
Vic Wertz deserved better.
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