Adam Gopnik remembers the baseball player Willie Mays, who famously played for the New York Giants.
It is possibly the seemingly both blind and sighted nature of the player as he runs that moves us so. He has an inner confidence about the intersection of his track and the ball’s, and knows what we don’t: that he’ll get there. A tenth of a second later, and the ball would have dropped, for extra bases. But there would be no such tenth.
No more interesting point has been made about him than Tim McCarver’s: that Mays was so knowing he would sometimes deliberately miss a hittable curveball, in hopes that the pitcher would therefore try it again, later, in a more crucial circumstance. Yet we keep him close as a local hero. New York baseball, though it continues to thrive, has essentially two historic high points.
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