Jimmy Hughes was the only Black kid in my sixth-grade class, though he wasn’t the only Black person. Our teacher was Mr. Hughes, Jimmy’s dad. I thought immediately of Jimmy when I heard of the passing this week of Willie Mays at age 93. Jimmy was a passionate fan of the “Say Hey Kid,” and I was just as passionate about Willie’s contemporary, Mickey Mantle.
Jimmy and I lived in the small, south-central Connecticut town of Colchester. The population in the 1960s probably wasn’t much different than it is now — around 15,000. Jimmy’s dad was a superb elementary school teacher, my father was in the Navy at the base in New London, about 20 miles south of Colchester. Many of our neighbors also served in the Navy or worked in jobs associated with the large naval base on the Thames River that led to the Long Island Sound and on to the Atlantic Ocean.
While my father wasn’t very good at many aspects of parenting, he did a great job of teaching me by age 5 or 6 how to catch, throw and hit a baseball. But it was his mother, my paternal grandmother, Delsie Brown, who taught me the love of the game.
It was in the summer of ’61 when Grandma Brown traveled cross country from her home in Los Angeles to visit our family. It was an exciting year to be a baseball fan, with Mantle and Roger Maris of the New York Yankees in a race to surpass the single-season home run record of 60, set 34 years earlier by Babe Ruth.
Each afternoon, my grandmother and I would wait for The New London Day newspaper to be delivered so that she could explain to 7-year-old me how to read a baseball box score — AB for at bats, H for hits, R for runs, BI for runs batted in, and, of course, the truncated names in order to fit them into the narrow agate of a newspaper scoreboard page.
There was, of course, no ESPN, internet, social media or any other means to get baseball scores and updates, other than the 10 p.m. news, which was past my bedtime. So, the afternoon newspaper was often the first time I could find out whether my Yankees won (living between Boston and New York, you were either a Yankee or Red Sox fan; I clearly made the right choice), and to get the latest on the home run counts for Mantle and Maris — the M&M Boys, as they became known.
I gravitated toward Mantle, largely, I suppose, because he had been a Yankee far longer and was without question one of the top two or three players in the game — and No. 1 in my book. Maris, on the other hand, was a somewhat stoic figure who had been a Yankee for only a year, having been traded to New York from Kansas City after the 1959 season.
As most sports fans know, Maris pulled away at the end of the season and hit his 61st home run in the year’s last game, eclipsing Ruth by one. Mantle finished with 54, in part because he sat out the final several weeks due to an abscessed hip — one of the many health and injury issues that haunted him throughout his career.
My love for baseball and the Yankees only grew from there. I distinctly remember keeping score anytime the Yankees were televised on our black-and-white TV on Saturday afternoons. When I had my tonsils removed in 1963, the only thing I wanted in the hospital (other than ice cream) was a copy of the Street and Smith’s baseball magazine with young Yankee star Tom Tresh on the cover.
So it was that by the sixth grade, I was a true blue pinstriped fan of the Yankees and “The Mick” in particular. I had never known Jimmy Hughes until we ended up in his dad’s class at Bacon Academy, the elementary school in Colchester that was constructed in 1803. How we began talkin’ baseball, I don’t recall, but we always were on opposite sides of the debate over who was the better player — Mantle or Mays.
Both players were just a bit past their prime by 1965 and ’66 — Mantle, especially, in part due to the succession of injuries that began when he was in high school, as well as his excessive drinking and partying. I knew nothing of the latter until the publication in 1970 of former Yankee pitcher Jim Bouton’s book Ball Four, which included numerous stories about the off-the-field exploits of the Yankee superstar — my boyhood hero — as well as other players.
But I was well aware of his injuries, and they were a common part of my arguments that Mantle was better than Mays. Without being born with the bone disease osteomyelitis, tearing his anterior cruciate ligament as a rookie with the Yankees and many other serious injuries, I posited that he would have been the greatest player of all time. That argument still holds up pretty well today, though Shohei Ohtani will have something to say about that.
Jimmy, on the other hand, pointed to Mays’ all-around game. He hit for power and average, he led the National League in stolen bases four times, and he was a 12-time Gold Glove centerfielder. His old-school career “slash line” of a .302 average/660 home runs/1,903 RBIs are undeniably spectacular in any era, and his over-the shoulder catch of a long Vic Wertz drive to center field in Game 1 of the 1954 World Series remains among the most incredible plays in the sport’s history.
Despite his injuries, Mickey was and remains the greatest switch-hitter of all time. He was the American League’s Most Valuable Player three times (to one MVP for Mays), won the 1956 Triple Crown (leading the AL in average, home runs and RBIs), won seven World Series titles (to one for Mays) and still holds the World Series record for home runs with 18. His slash line reads .298/536/1,509.
The careers are remarkably close in both time and production — and off the field in retirement. From 1980 to 1983, they both were suspended from any association with baseball for serving as greeters and signing autographs at casinos in Atlantic City (so ironic, today). In rescinding the suspensions, commissioner Peter Ueberroth said, “I am bringing back two players who are more a part of baseball than perhaps anyone else.”
One obvious difference between the two men was race. And yet, when Jimmy and I would toss baseball facts back and forth throughout the 1965-66 school year, race never was mentioned. He never accused me of preferring Mantle because we were both white, and vice versa. This was at the height of the Civil Rights Movement in America, but for two kids in Colchester, Connecticut, the only thing that mattered was what happened between the lines.
My family moved from Colchester to Colorado Springs in the summer of ’66. I’ve neither seen nor heard from Jimmy since.
But Jimmy was right. Willie was better — but just barely. May he rest in peace.
Dennis Brown is an assistant vice president in Notre Dame’s Office of Public Affairs and Communications.