Willie “Stretch” McCovey

If you've ever paddled a kayak into the water beyond right field at Oracle Park, you've been sitting in Willie McCovey's living room. When the ballpark opened in 2000 they named that water for him, because everybody in this town knew exactly where his line drives would have gone.

Willie Lee McCovey was born January 10, 1938, in Mobile, Alabama, the seventh of ten kids. His father Frank worked for the railroad and didn't say much, and when he did, the kids listened. Willie was delivering papers at 12, dropped out of high school to work full time, and was living with his brother in Los Angeles when his mother wrote that a Giants scout named Alex Pompez was looking for him. He went to the tryout camp in Melbourne, Florida, at 17, 165 pounds, and later said he was scared to death and couldn't have impressed anybody. Pompez had already seen him play. He signed for $175 a month.

He hit everywhere they sent him: 19 homers at Sandersville in 1955, 29 homers at Danville, and then in 1959 at Triple A Phoenix he had 29 homers and 92 RBIs in 95 games while hitting .372. The Giants had no choice anymore. They called him up on July 30, 1959.

That night at Seals Stadium, batting third between Willie Mays and Orlando Cepeda against Robin Roberts, he went 4 for 4 with two singles and two triples. He hit .354 with 13 homers in 52 games and was the National League Rookie of the Year anyway. It's one of the great debuts in baseball history.

Then came the hard part. The Giants had two first basemen, him and Cepeda, born four months apart, and they spent most of seven years trying to make it work. McCovey slumped in 1960, got sent down for a few weeks, and got booed at Candlestick. In 1962 Alvin Dark stuck him in left field, where the joke was that he didn't need a glove, just a blindfold and a cigarette. He still hit 20 homers in 229 at bats. Mays, playing next to him, kept telling him what to do and let him make plays Mays could have made himself.

In the 1962 World Series he homered off Ralph Terry in Game 2 for a 2 to 0 win, and then in the bottom of the ninth of Game 7, down 1 to 0, with Matty Alou on third and Mays on second and two outs, he hit a screaming line drive right at second baseman Bobby Richardson. Two months later Charles Schulz had Charlie Brown wailing in Peanuts: why couldn't McCovey have hit the ball just three feet higher?

He tied Hank Aaron for the league lead with 44 homers in 1963. He struggled in 1964, the year his father died and a painful foot problem started. When Cepeda's knee gave out in 1965, McCovey went back to first base and hit 39 homers, and in May 1966 the Giants finally traded Cepeda. First base was McCovey's for good.

In 1968, the Year of the Pitcher, he led the league with 36 homers and 105 RBIs. In 1969 he was the most feared hitter alive: 45 homers, 126 RBIs, .320, a league leading .453 on base percentage and .656 slugging, and 45 intentional walks, a major league record that stood until Barry Bonds. He hit two homers in the All Star Game and won the MVP of that, then won the National League MVP over Tom Seaver. In 1970 he hit 39 more and walked 137 times.

The knees started to go after that. He tore cartilage in the spring of 1971 and played the whole year on it anyway, then went 6 for 14 with two homers in the NLCS against Pittsburgh. A collision at first base broke his right forearm early in 1972. He still hit 29 homers in 1973, and then on October 25 the Giants, shedding salary, traded him to San Diego for Mike Caldwell. He spent two good years with the Padres and finished 1976 as a designated hitter in Oakland.

In 1977 he came back to the Giants with no promise of a job, made the club, and the home opener crowd gave him an ovation that went on for minutes and made him cry. At 39 he hit 28 homers with 86 RBIs and was named Comeback Player of the Year. He hit his 500th homer in Atlanta on June 30, 1978, and his 521st and last on May 3, 1980, in Montreal, tying Ted Williams and making him one of the few players to homer in four different decades. His final at bat, on July 6, 1980, at Dodger Stadium, was a go ahead pinch hit sacrifice fly.

He went into the Hall of Fame in 1986, his first year on the ballot, with 81.4 percent of the vote. The Giants retired his number 44, have given out the Willie Mac Award every year since 1980, named McCovey Cove when the new ballpark opened in 2000, and put up his statue at McCovey Point across the water in 2003. He hit 231 homers at Candlestick, more than anybody ever hit there.

His last years were hard on his body. Both knees replaced, four back surgeries, a wheelchair for more than a decade. In 1996 he pleaded guilty to a tax charge over memorabilia show income and was pardoned by President Obama in January 2017. On August 1, 2018, he married Estela Bejar at the ballpark, and he died at Stanford on October 31, 2018, at 80, with his friend Joe Morgan at his bedside.

McCovey's clutch case starts with the people who had to pitch to him. In 1969 teams walked him intentionally 45 times, a record that lasted 33 years until Bonds broke it. In 1970 they did it 40 more times. Managers decided they'd rather put a man on base than let Stretch swing with anybody aboard.

When he did get something to hit, it went a long way at the worst time for the other side. He hit 18 grand slams, a National League record. In the 1962 World Series his solo homer off Ralph Terry was the difference in a 2 to 0 win in Game 2. In Game 1 of the 1971 NLCS he hit a two run homer off Steve Blass that put the Giants up 5 to 2 in a game they won 5 to 4. And Don Drysdale, a Cy Young winner, gave up a .336 average and 12 homers to him over their careers.

Even the out everybody remembers is a clutch at bat. Down to the last out of the season, Ralph Houk chose to pitch to him instead of walking him to get to Cepeda, and he hit a bullet. It just went right at somebody.