I’ve talked to a few men who played in the Negro Leagues from 1920 to 1948: Riley Stewart, a coach and vice principal at my high school; Buck O’Neill, whom Ken Burns made famous; Verdell Mathis, from Crawfordsville in the Arkansas Delta; Joe B. Scott from Memphis, who once hit .714 over 58 games; and once, over the phone when I was a little kid, Willie Mays.

My conversation with Mays was brief; he said hello, I said nothing, he laughed brightly and handed the phone back to my Uncle Philip, a San Francisco antiques dealers and interior designer who’d taken advantage of Mays and his then-girlfriend/later wife Mae Louise wandering into his store.

My uncle often took me to baseball games when I visited him. We had a special signal to let him know I had arrived safely at home after one of my visits. I would place a collect call to him from “Willie Mays.”

He would politely decline the charges, telling the operator he didn’t know a Mr. Mays and that he must have mis-dialed the number. (Because, kids, they used to charge you for long distance calls.)

Mays is one of three men left alive who played in the Negro Leagues before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier; he is the youngest of the survivors at 93.

And I am old enough to have watched him patrol center field in Candlestick Park; I was behind the first-base dugout on April 11, 1970, when, with two outs in the third inning, the Cincinnati Reds’ Bobby Tolan hit a towering fly ball that looked like it would clear the chain-link fence for a home run at the 375-foot mark right-center field.

Mays was 39 that season, but hardly washed up. He sprinted toward the ball, as did right-fielder Bobby Bonds. They leapt at the same time and collided in mid-air. Their gloves flopped over the fence, they tangled together and collapsed on the warning track, Mays flat on his back. At first it was unclear if the ball had gone over the fence for a home run or if it had been caught. Bonds plucked the ball out of the motionless Mays’ glove and held it up for the world to see.

Some reports say Mays was knocked unconscious; maybe he was just stunned. It was a long and fraught moment before he stirred, Tolan and Reds’ right fielder Pete Rose came over to check on him as they took their positions. He stayed in the game. The Giants won 2-1.

Since the game was broadcast on NBC’s Game of the Week, a 13-second YouTube clip of that catch lives online. It is jarringly violent, and remarkable that neither Mays nor Bonds was seriously hurt. That catch is the greatest play I have ever seen.

And it’s not in the Top 10 of Mays’ career highlights.

I did not see—except on grainy black-and-white footage, many years after the fact—what is often purported to be Mays’ greatest defensive play (and the greatest defensive play in baseball history), the over-theshoulder catch he made of a drive by the Cleveland Indians’ Vic Wertz in game one of the 1954 World Series. Some who witnessed the play say it wasn’t close to the most spectacular

catch then-23-year-old Mays made in his career.

But consider the circumstances: The score was tied 2-2 in the top of the eighth inning. Giants’ pitcher Sal Maglie started off the inning by walking the Indians’ Larry Doby.

Al Rosen then singled, putting runners on first and second. Giants manager Leo Durocher brought in left-handed reliever Don Liddle to face lefty-hitting Wertz, who already had two singles and a triple in his first three at-bats.

With the count two balls and one strike, Wertz ripped Liddle’s fourth pitch to deep center field, approximately 420 feet away.

In many stadiums of the era, the ball would have been a home run but the Polo Grounds had a cavernously deep center field—483 feet to the deepest part.

Mays was cheating a little, standing in shallow center field to try to keep Doby from scoring the go-ahead run on a sharply struck single. (Liddle’s best pitch was his curve ball, more likely to be hit on the ground than in the air.)

Here’s how Mays described the play to sportswriter Roger Kahn:

“Wertz hits it. A solid sound. I learned a lot from the sound of the ball on the bat. Always did. I could tell from the sound whether to come in or go back. This time I’m going back, a long way back, but there is no doubt … I am going to catch this ball …

“But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was Larry Doby on second base. On a deep fly to center field at the Polo Grounds, a runner could score all the way from second. I’ve done that myself and more than once. So if I make the catch, which I will, and Larry scores from second, they still get the run that puts them ahead. All the time I’m running back, I’m thinking, ‘Willie, you’ve got to get this ball back into the infield.’”

What’s most impressive about the catch is Mays’ processing; he’s alert to the game situation and thinking about the throw he’ll have to make even as he’s running full speed away from the infield. On the video it seems he slows a touch before the ball settles into his glove.

“I have to turn very hard and short and throw the ball from exactly the point I caught it,” Mays told Kahn.

“The momentum goes into my turn and up through my legs and into my throw.” As the great baseball writer Arnold Hano wrote in his wonderful 1955 book “A Day in the Bleachers,” Mays made the catch and “like some olden statue of a Greek javelin hurler, his head twisted to the left as his right arm swept out and around,” as his cap flew off.

“What an astonishing throw, to make all other throws ever before it … appear the flings of teenage girls. This was the throw of a giant, the throw of a howitzer made human, arriving at second base … just as Doby was pulling into third.”

One point about this famous play I’ve never heard much about: Mays threw to second base, not third, because he anticipated Doby running with the crack of the bat, figuring that no one was going to catch up with Wertz’s drive.

But Doby—another former Negro Leaguer—held up, just in case Mays caught the ball. He knew that if it fell in safely he’d have plenty of time to score. And he was fast enough to have a chance to score from second even if Mays caught the ball. Doby was able to take third not because he outran Mays’ throw, but because Mays threw behind him.

Both Mays and Doby made exceptionally heady decisions on the play. It was not just athletic talent and instinct. Mays understood the racism implicit in that.

It seems ironic that Mays’ career batting average dipped a point—from .302 to .301—when his Negro League statistics were finally applied to his career record last week.

The integration of the Negro League numbers into Major League Baseball statistics has disrupted the record books, and made some small repair to justice.