AUDIO: Vin Scully tells about the best catch he ever saw
Let's listen to the great Vin Scully talk about the greatest catch he ever witnessed. Hint: He told the story on the occasion of Willie Mays's 82nd birthday.
By
Dayn Perry
•
1 min read
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In the late innings of Monday night's Diamondbacks-Dodgers game, the inestimable Vin Scully spun a wonderfully meandering yarn about the best catch he'd ever seen. Not a surprise: It was made by Willie Mays. Surprise: It was not Mays's famous thievery of Vic Wertz in the 1954 World Series.
Here, let Mr. Scully himself tell you about it ...
No surprise that, more than 60 years later, Scully -- raconteur among raconteurs -- has most of the details absolutely correct. The game in question was this one, on April 18, 1952, and it was indeed Giants-Dodgers at Ebbets Field. The ball was indeed smote by Bobby Morgan, although it happened in the bottom of the seventh and not, as Scully recalls, the bottom of the ninth (but that's a better story!). The Dodgers went on to win in the 12th inning, but as this excerpt from an AP gamer makes clear, Mays's ranging, daredevil snag was the story ...
Just like the man told you! In addition to Hank Thompson's "evidentiary helping hand" that Scully mentioned, here's this remembrance from Mays regarding the hazy aftermath (source: The Baseball Page):
"The first guy that I saw - there were two guys - when I open my eyes, was Leo Durocher and Jackie Robinson. And I'm saying to myself, 'Why is Jackie out here?' Jackie came to see if I caught the ball, and Leo came to see about me."
The previous Oct. 3, Robinson was the last Dodger on the field, as he wanted to make darn sure that Bobby Thomson touched every last base. So Mays's little story is quite easy to believe.
In '52, Robinson's Dodgers would go on to win the pennant by 4 1/2 games over Mays's Giants. As for Mays, about six weeks after making the best catch that Vin Scully ever did see, he'd find himself in Fort Eustis, Va., for a lengthy hitch in the Army that would keep him out of the majors until 1954. But things would turn out OK for him.
