When does a city still remember a baseball player that played there in only 35 games──60 years ago?
When the city is Minneapolis and the ball player is Willie Howard Mays.
On May 24, 1951 the New York Giants recalled Mays from their Triple A Millers farm team in Minneapolis. The news broke the hearts of Millers fans and there was such a fuss that Giants owner Horace Stoneham bought a Minneapolis newspaper ad explaining his actions to Minnesotans.
In his 2008 book Beyond the Sports Huddle, WCCO Radio sports talk host Dave Mona stated the following: “Minneapolis did not like Willie. They loved and adopted him. Old fans of seventy loved him because he did things they had never seen before. …Kids loved Willie because he came early to games and stayed late to sign autographs. He kept broken bats to give to the little leaguers who waited faithfully outside the gate after each game.”
Mays had his 20th birthday on May 6, 1951 and although he was playing only his second season of minor league baseball, he was causing a sensation in Minneapolis and other towns in the American Association. Even the casual observer could see the shy center fielder from Alabama was a five-threat player with extraordinary skills to hit for average and power, field and throw, and run the bases.
Despite his inexperience and a controversy among baseball authorities whether he was ready for the majors, the Giants brought him to New York to help a struggling team with faltering attendance. If he could even approach his performance in Minneapolis that included a .477 batting average, packing Nicollet Park and drawing rave reviews from the press, then Stoneham was going to be thrilled.
The Giants had fallen on difficult times and were a family owned franchise that was the No. 3 baseball draw in New York behind the Yankees and Dodgers. While those teams were winning on the field and drawing fans, Stoneham might have been contemplating moving his club to Minneapolis. If he wasn’t thinking about it in 1951 when he issued the damage control newspaper ad, he surely was later in the 1950s.
Back then he was talking with Minneapolis civic officials about bringing his team here and replacing the minor league Millers with the Giants, a glorious National League franchise dating back to the 1800’s. He knew a Mays homecoming and the arrival of big league baseball in the city would jump-start Giants attendance and line his pockets with ticket revenues and other monies.
After the new Metropolitan Stadium was opened in 1956, Stoneham had sent the Giants and Mays to an exhibition game against the Millers. The reaction showed that neither the fans nor media had forgotten their six weeks love affair with Mays.
But Dodgers’ owner Walter O’Malley wanted out of Brooklyn by 1957 when his efforts to secure public backing for a domed stadium failed. He knew Los Angeles meant riches for him and he told Stoneham to join him on the West Coast. San Francisco pitched hard for the Giants and it made sense to have two baseball teams on the left coast, not one.
Mays and the franchise became the San Francisco Giants in 1958, ending the dream that perhaps baseball’s greatest player would come back to Minneapolis. For generations, Minnesotans could only look back and wonder what if.