RIP Willie McCovey

This is very sad.  Willie McCovey is no longer with us.  The Giants announced his death today at age 80 after a long battle with multiple health problems.  Willie McCovey was almost a magical name to me as a kid in the late 1960's.  I first became aware of Major League Baseball and the Giants in 1965 at the age of 9 when my mother started encouraging me to listen to games on the radio.  Willie Mays and Willie McCovey were larger than life batting 3'rd and 4'th in the Giants lineup.  The names seemed to kind of fit together and they complemented each other.  One Willie was right-handed, all round athlete, flashy.  The other was left-handed, big and slow but a fearsome hitter and presence at the plate.  Except for Jim Ray Hart, the rest of the lineup wasn't very good, but those 3 were a lineup all by themselves!  Every summer in the mountains of Napa County, I would set up a radio on our patio and a pitchback in the yard.  I would throw balls at the pitchback while listening to the games.  I couldn't wait for the middle of the Giants lineup to come around every 2-3 innings.  Mays, McCovey and Jim Ray.

Willie McCovey broke in with the Giants in 1959 at the age of 21.  In his very first MLB game, he went 4 for 4 with 2 triples.  He finished the season with a .354 BA and a .656 SLT% in 219 PA's.  He continued to mash at the plate but had to battle for playing time with Orlando Cepeda, another slugging Giants youngster.  Perhaps Willie Mac's most memorable moment came in game 7 of the 1962 World Series in what Fangraphs has called the single highest leverage AB in the history of baseball.  The Yankees were clinging to a 1-0 lead as the Giants came to bat in the bottom of the 9'th inning.  The Giants got runners at 2'nd and 3'rd with 2 outs when Willie McCovey stepped to the plate.  Willie smashed a line drive to the right of 2B.  Yankees 2B Bobby Richardson took 2 step, reached out and snagged it.  Game over and the Giants lost. It wasn't so much the difficulty of the catch that got noticed but how hard Willie hit the ball.  1-2 feet further to the right and it might have carried all the way to the fence! All it needed to do was get past Richardson and the two runners would score for a Giants win.

McCovey and Cepeda both developed bad knees and could only play 1B so the Giant finally resolved that dilemma by trading Cepeda to the Cardinals for Ray Sadecki in one of the more maligned trades in a long history of Giants trades that turned out badly.  In reality, they were better off with McCovey as their full-time first baseman and Ray Sadecki actually pitched pretty well for the Giants, but Cepeda was the final piece of a juggernaut Cardinals team that included Lou Brock and Bob Gibson in their primes as well as an All-Star catcher in Tim McCarver.  The Cardinals ran away with the NL pennants in 1967 and 1968 and Cepeda won an MVP.

Meanwhile, Willie McCovey continued to put up tremendous offensive numbers of his own with the Giants during one of the most pitching dominant eras in baseball history.  He won an MVP of his own in 1969 with a slash line of .320/.453/.656 with 45 HR's.  Among his many accomplishments, Willie Mac hit 18 grand slam HR's in his career which I think is still a NL record.  I know I was listening on the radio when several of those grand slams were hit.  None other than Bob Gibson called him the "scariest hitter in baseball".

The Giants tore their team down as baseball entered the free agent era and McCovey was traded to the Padres where he struggled with injuries.  He hit just .203 with 7 HR's in 71 games for the Padres in 1976.  The Padres sold his contract to the A's late in the season.  Willie Mac hooked back on with the Giants in 1977, coming to spring training without a guaranteed contract. He was a bright spot in an otherwise dismal season hitting 28 HR's to lead the team by a wide margin.  It was the last really good season of his career.

After retirement, Willie McCovey remained a valued member of the Giants organization and much beloved in the Bay Area.  He was active in the Junior Giants program and had a special award for the team's most inspirational player each season named after him.  He remained an avid fan of the team and attended most of their home games in person.  When the Giants moved to what is now AT&T Park, they erected a statue of Willie Mac swinging his bat out beyond the RF wall by an inlet of the bay which became known as McCovey Cove.  How fitting that making a "splash hit" in McCovey Cove has become recognized as a special feat of power hitting!

Sadly, a series of surgeries on his knees that did not go well left Willie McCovey unable to walk in his later years.  This led to other health problems and repeated hospitalizations.  His long battle with these recurrent illnesses ended today in Stanford Hospital.  Willie Mac is gone at the relatively young age of 80, at least by today's standards.  He is gone, but won't be forgotten as McCovey Cove and the Willie Mac Award will be a constant reminder of his greatness as a baseball player and person.  RIP, Willie Mac!