A magical Mays memory

Baseball legend's kindness to an awestruck boy hasn't been forgotten

- JIM BYERS

A Willie Mays bobblehead has been one of Jim Byers' prized possessions for decades.

It might have been 1962. Perhaps 1963. It was a simpler time. And I wore, to paraphrase Billy Joel, a much younger man’s clothes.

My family lived in a small, suburban town in the San Francisco Bay Area called Castro Valley. And we were baseball fans.

Football was catching on, and a few people liked the NBA at the time. But in the early 1960s, Americans were obsessed with baseball.

We carried transistor radios to hear the ball game announcers, and we tore into the local newspaper the next day to read the box scores. In my case, the local paper was the San Francisco Chronicle, which oddly printed its sports section on green paper. Everyone called the sports section “The Green Sheet.”

My dad was, for a short time anyway, a bat boy for the Oakland Oaks, a Triple-A baseball team. A good deal of my youth was spent on baseball diamonds.

And a major source of entertainment was a long drive over to Candlestick Park to watch the San Francisco Giants.

The team had moved to California in 1958, when I was two years old. And they were a powerhouse. Willie McCovey, a gentle giant, shared first base and the outfield with Orlando Cepeda, until Cepeda was traded to St. Louis. Juan Marichal intimidated hitters with his massive leg kick and powerful fastball.