Here's an article from The Athletic from last August about the greatest baseball team ever. They went 28-0.
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"Sixty-six years have passed, but “The Catch” is so iconic, it doesn’t need any labels. Those two words still suffice. You hear them, and you know who was involved (Giants center fielder Willie Mays and Indians power hitter Vic Wertz), when it happened (Game 1 of the 1954 World Series), and where it happened (the expansive Polo Grounds in upper Manhattan).
Wertz launches a 2-1 fastball deep, and that’s Mays’ cue to start hustling. In the film, you don’t see his face, just the number – 24 – on the back of his jersey as he sprints toward the center-field wall, his head tilted as far back as it’ll go, staring into the sun, trying to trace the round white projectile so it’ll slip right into his glove as he nears the 483-foot marker. And it does, as he replaces his long, graceful strides with short, hurried steps to jerk his momentum back with so much force that he loses his cap.
And then there’s the throw. He fires to the infield, mustering all the strength his body can offer, pirouetting a full 180 degrees as the baseball leaves his right hand. He loses his balance and hits the warning track, but his eyes are fixed on his delivery as it arrives in the glove of second baseman Davey Williams.
Retired Dodgers All-Star Don Newcombe and his son, Don Jr., were sitting in front of a TV screen a few years ago, watching Mays in all of his dynamic glory, and Don Jr. posed a question: Was this the greatest catch we’ll ever see? he asked, fully expecting his father to say yes.
“Hell no,” Don Sr. retorted. “That catch was nothing compared to what I saw Willie do with the Mays-Newcombe All-Stars.”
It was 1955, and the scene was remarkably similar: a baseball powerfully launched toward center field, Mays running, his head tilted back, tracing the ball, only this time, it went a little bit farther. It was about to go over the fence. That wouldn’t do, so Mays scaled it, pushed himself up with one arm, robbed what would be a home run with his other arm, and nailed the runner at second.
When his father described Mays’ 1955 grab, Don Jr. was in disbelief. Which team was this? How had he never heard of it, let alone this play? He needed to find out more, so he asked his father’s friend and former Mays-Newcombe All-Stars teammate Larry Doby, who was on second base when Mays made “The Catch” and on the bench when Mays went up the wall a year later.
“Oh yeah, that one,” Doby said. “Your father’s absolutely right.”
Mays’ play in 1955 has no designated name. It is not iconic (although it should be). It needs as many identifiers it can get. Don Jr. doesn’t know who hit that ball, or when it happened, or where it happened. All he knows is that it did happen, and all he has is his father and Doby’s word.
It’s quite possible that the 1955 Mays-Newcombe All-Stars might be the best baseball team ever assembled — and the best team you’ve never heard of. Game stories and box scores documenting the All-Stars are scarce. If you really want to understand how great this team was, word of mouth is the way to go, and it has only two surviving members — Mays and Hank Aaron — who are 89 and 86 years old, respectively.
But they still remember.
As a playful jab at Newcombe, who died in 2019, Mays refers to his former squad as the “Willie Mays All-Stars,” through his assistant, Rene Anderson. Aaron insists that regardless of who they played, the All-Stars were the best team in baseball history.
“We would challenge anybody that put on a uniform, no matter whether they came from the New York Yankees, or whether they came from the Minnesota Twins,” Aaron said. “We had as much talent on that team as anybody. We could do anything. The only thing we didn’t have was knockout pitching like certain teams did. But we could score an awful lot of runs.”
Newcombe would win 20 games in 1955 and 27 in 1956. His former Brooklyn teammate Joe Black had been named National League rookie of the year in 1952. In 1955, the Cubs’ Sam Jones became the first Black pitcher to throw a no-hitter. Brooks Lawrence was coming off a 15-win season with the Cardinals and would earn an All-Star nod with the Reds in 1956. The All-Stars’ rotation wasn’t bad — some might say it was strong — but it wasn’t Hall of Fame caliber. And on this team, any position that wasn’t filled by a future Hall of Famer could be labeled a weakness.
Behind the plate crouched Roy Campanella. Four Hall of Famers roamed the outfield alone: Aaron in right, Mays in center, and Doby and Monte Irvin, the team’s player-manager, platooning in left. The infield featured Cubs shortstop Ernie Banks, who, with second baseman Gene Baker, comprised one of the best double-play combinations of their time.
National League All-Stars Jim Gilliam and George Crowe anchored the infield corners. When Newcombe wasn’t pitching, he’d pinch-hit or play first base.
(Willie Mays and Don Newcombe in 1954: Associated Press)
According to James Hirsch, author of “Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend,” they scheduled 33 games across the Sunbelt over a six-week span. Five games were rained out, but the All-Stars won the rest, usually facing off against former Negro Leaguers and local teams. By 1955, the Negro Leagues, once rich with talent, were severely depleted. If you were still playing in the Negro Leagues at that time, it likely meant you didn’t have the ability to sign with a major league organization. Bob Kendrick, president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, says that in 1955, they were “the minor leagues at best.” Any remaining stars that didn’t make it to MLB were now in the twilight of their careers.
Aaron says that the All-Stars wanted to play teams that “had a reputation,” specifically some of the white barnstorming teams that traveled around the country providing entertainment. But none of them accepted an offer to suit up. Kendrick has a theory as to why.
“I’m sure there was an intimidation factor,” he said. “Think about it. Willie Mays hit what, 51 home runs that season? Newk with 20 wins? You’ve got a young Henry Aaron doing incredible things? I don’t think too many people were lining up to play these guys.”
Despite this, the Mays-Newcombe All-Stars and their Negro Leagues and semi-pro league opponents were bringing high-caliber baseball to parts of the country that hadn’t seen such a thing. In 1955, Major League Baseball didn’t exist west of Kansas City, or south of St. Louis, Cincinnati and Washington, D.C. The Giants and the Dodgers wouldn’t move west until 1958. The All-Stars brought their brand of baseball to Tennessee, to Mississippi, to Texas, to New Mexico, to California. Some of these games were blowouts, but in the end, more than 100,000 fans in dozens of small cities saw Mays, Aaron and other All-Stars and future Hall of Famers play baseball that winter.
“Nobody was going to touch this team,” Kendrick said. “Black or White.”
Twenty-eight games tacked onto a 154-game season is quite a bit of extra work, and the All-Stars — as passionate as they were — weren’t playing for free. Aaron says they made about $200 per game from gate receipts and would spend nearly all of that after they left the field.
“It’s been such a long time ago, I don’t even remember whether we got paid all our money,” he said with a laugh.
“My first few years,” Mays said to the New York Times in 1991, “I made more money barnstorming than I did with the Giants.”
If the fans showed up, barnstorming could be very profitable, and any team with Willie Mays’ name on it was almost guaranteed to sell out. And if a game sold out, Mays was going to put on a show. In Longview, Texas, on Oct. 27 of that year, so many fans swelled the ballpark that the game was delayed 25 minutes, to allow everyone to find seats before the first pitch was thrown.
Mays rewarded them by hitting a single, a triple, a homer and a “tremendous throw to nail a runner at third,” according to an account in the Sporting News.
Before 12,012 fans at Wrigley Field in Los Angeles, Mays hit a two-out, two-on home run in the ninth inning to preserve the All-Stars’ undefeated record in a 6-4 win over the Southern California All-Stars.
At Atlanta’s Ponce de Leon Park, he hit a 460-foot home run over the center-field wall. In Columbus, Georgia’s Golden Park, the Sporting News reported that Mays hit “one of the longest home runs ever seen,” one that cleared the light pole on its way into the left-field stands.
Ahead of the All-Stars’ first game in Knoxville, Tenn., the city’s recreation administrator said he had six dozen baseballs on hand, just in case they ran out.
“After I took a look at the number of home runs hit by Willie and his teammates during the past season, I’m afraid they’ll knock more than two dozen balls out of the park,” he told the Knoxville News Sentinel.
Even batting practice was a show. The hometown paper in Victoria, Texas, reported that Mays’ first three swings that day sent three balls to left-center, after Banks and Jones (yes, starting pitcher Sam Jones) had hit home runs of their own.
Before one game in October, Mays was having so much fun swinging the bat that he had to be run out of the cage. The center fielder decided to stick around for infield practice, pushing Campanella aside so he could give catching a try.
“Man, you’ve got two or three different kinds of curves,” he yelled after one of Lawrence’s pitches whizzed past him.
These were technically exhibition games, but Mays had only one setting, and that was all-out. After the first few weeks, Irvin sat him down and tried to convince Mays to dial it back a little bit, so he wouldn’t burn himself out before spring training.
“Willie was playing his usual reckless game, and Monte reminded him to take it easy, that his career with the Giants was more important,” Banks told the Sporting News in 1959.
“Willie said, ‘This is the only way I can play.’”
(Hank Aaron and Ernie Banks in 1957: Bettman via Getty Images)
In Mays’ defense, he wasn’t the only one who was approaching these exhibition games with the intensity of a World Series matchup. On Oct. 10, a 21-year-old Aaron went 4-for-5 in Little Rock, Ark., and all of his hits came as home runs. On Oct. 12 in El Dorado, Ark., Black recorded eight strikeouts and Lawrence had six, allowing only one hit and combining for a near-perfect game. On Oct. 24, in Hazelhurst, Miss., the All-Stars decided to take it easy on their opponents, the Negro American League Stars, defeating them 20-1 and allowing only six hits. Newcombe played six innings in right field.
Part of this was an insatiable competitive fire — many of the All-Stars were hitting the prime of their careers in 1955 — but another part of this was pride. These 17 players represented the best that the Negro Leagues had to offer. They continued to collectively dispel the notion that there was any disparity in talent between Black players and White players. And now, they were playing together on the same team, giving fans a chance to relive the glory of the Negro Leagues five years before its demise.
“These were some great ballplayers, and they were great simply because of the Negro Leagues,” Aaron said. “Everything I learned about baseball, I learned in the Negro Leagues and through barnstorming.
“Was I proud to be a part of that team? Oh yeah. No question about it.”
There’s only one known photo of the Mays-Newcombe All-Stars, and it is striking. It’s one thing to hear about this team; it’s another to see them, in their home uniforms, lined up side by side. A baby-faced Aaron has yet to grow into his Braves uniform and has his hands on his hips, chest proud, next to Crowe. Mays has his arm around Hank Thompson, and Banks and Irvin are each crouched on one knee. Doby’s at the top right, Newcombe’s at the top left, and then, once all this star power begins to sink in, you realize that Campanella didn’t even make the shot.
Kendrick looks at this photograph, and he sees a team that might be the greatest ever. He sees a testament to the talent of the Negro Leagues. But he sees something else, too. He sees courage.
Aaron went 4-for-5 in Little Rock, Ark., two years before nine Black students integrated Little Rock Central High School. On Oct. 16, 1955, the All-Stars packed a sold-out and segregated stadium at Rickwood Field, a three-mile drive from the Birmingham jail where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would be held eight years later. They played in Montgomery, Ala., 42 days before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a White man on a city bus.
When Don Newcombe Jr. looks at this photograph, he sees “The Catch.” He’ll always view this team through the prism of Mays’ defining play, because without it, he wouldn’t have known the Mays-Newcombe All-Stars existed in the first place. He doesn’t have his father’s word to go by anymore, so he wonders what other moments he might be missing out on. For a squad with that much talent, you’d have to think that there were more physics-defying grabs from Mays, more multi-home run games from Aaron.
And as time goes by, and the living members of the Mays-Newcombe All-Stars continue to pass, it becomes harder to separate fact from fiction. Out of a roster that once stood 17 strong, Mays and Aaron are now the remaining keepers of these tales. Some of them might seem far-fetched. But they’re here to tell you that this team was real, and it was great, maybe the best ever, and if you don’t believe them, pull up a chair and listen for a while."
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