Bill Mazeroski, the Hall of Fame second baseman who won eight Gold Glove awards for his steady work in the field and the hearts of countless Pittsburgh Pirates fans for his historic walk-off home run in Game 7 of the 1960 World Seriespassed away at the age of 89.
Pirates owner Bob Nutting said, “Maz was one of a kind, a true Pirate legend. … His name will always be associated with the greatest home run in baseball history and the 1960 World Series championship, but I will remember him most for the person he was: humble, kind and proud to be a Pirate.”
Mazeroski died Friday, the Pirates said. No cause of death was given.
Elected to the Hall by the Veterans Committee in 2001, he was in some ways not a superstar. Mazeroski had the lowest batting average, on-base percentage and lowest stolen base total of any second baseman in Cooperstown. He hit just .260 lifetime, with 138 home runs and 27 stolen bases in 17 years, and had an on-base percentage of .299. He never hit .300, never approached 100 runs batted or 100 runs scored and finished in the top 10 for Most Valuable Player only once.
His best qualities were both tangible and beyond the box score. His Hall of Fame plaque praises him as a “defensive wizard” with a “hard nose” and a “quiet work ethic.” A ten-time All-Star, he racked up a Major League record of 1,706 double plays, earning the nickname “No Hands” for the speed with which he fielded and relayed grounders. He led the National League in assists for second basemen nine times and is cited by statistician Bill James as the game’s best defensive player at his position – by far.
“I think defense belongs in the Hall of Fame,” Mazeroski said defensively during his Hall of Fame induction speech. “The defense deserves as much praise as the pitching and I am proud to be a defensive player.”
Mazeroski’s signature moment came in the batter’s box, when the tobacco-chomping Mazeroski, the son of a West Virginia miner, made the dream of so many kids who thought about playing pro ball come true.
The Pirates had not reached the World Series since 1927, when they were swept the New York Yankeesand faced the Yankees again in 1960. While New York was led by Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, Pittsburgh had few prominent names besides a young Roberto Clemente. They relied on hitters ranging from shortstop Dick Groat to outfielder Bob Skinner, and starting pitchers Vernon Law and Bob Friend. Mazeroski, who turned 24 in September, finished the season with a .273 average and typically batted eighth.
The series told one story in series runs and another story in wins and losses. The Yankees defeated the Pirates 55-27 and 38-3 in the three games they won. Mazeroski’s counterpart in New York, Bobby Richardson, drove in a record twelve runs and was named MVP of the series even though he was on the losing team. Whitey Ford shut out the Pirates twice en route to a then-record 33 2/3 consecutive scoreless World Series innings for the Yankees ace.
The Pirates’ first three wins weren’t nearly as spectacular, but they were wins — and Mazeroski helped. He hit a 2-run homer in the fourth inning off the Yankees’ Jim Coates in Game 1, a 6-4 Pirate victory, and a 2-run double in the second inning off Art Ditmar in Game 5, a 5-2 Pittsburgh victory. In Game 7, he saved his big hit for the end.
Some 36,000 fans at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, and many more tuning in on radio and television, were haunted by one of the Fall Classic’s wildest and most emotional conclusions. The lead swung back and forth as Pittsburgh scored the first four runs of the game, only to fall behind when the Yankees rallied in the middle innings to take a 7-4 lead in the top of the eighth. Pittsburgh retook the lead with five runs in the bottom of the eighth, helped in part by an apparent double play grounder that took a bad hop and hit Yankees shortstop Tony Kubek in the throat. But the Yankees came right back and tied the score at 9 in the top of the ninth.
The bottom of the ninth was relived, not always by choice, by the two teams and by generations of fans. The New York pitcher was Ralph Terry, a right-hander who manager Casey Stengel had brought in during the previous inning and would later acknowledge had a tired arm. The right-handed Mazeroski, who had batted into a double play in his previous outing, rose first.
Terry led off with a fastball, called high for a ball. After briefly consulting with catcher Johnny Blanchard, who reminded him to keep his pitches low, he threw what Mazeroski would call a slider that didn’t slide. Mazeroski got under it and slid it to the left, the ball going higher and higher as it reached the high, ivy-covered brick wall, while Yankees left fielder Yogi Berra circled underneath and then turned away in defeat. The whole town seemed to erupt, as if everyone had swayed with him, as if he was every underdog eager to beat the hated Yankees. Mazeroski stormed around the bases, grinning and waving his cap, accompanied by revelers from the stands who had rushed onto the field and followed him to home plate, where his teammates hugged him.
“I just wanted to get on base,” he told The New York Times in 1985. “Nothing big, just looking for a fastball until he got a charge on me. I thought it was going to come off the wall, and I was going to get to third when the ball deflected off Berra. But as I got around first and was digging for second, I saw the umpire waving circles above his head and I knew it was over.”
It was the first time a World Series had ended on a home run, prompting continued waves of celebration and despair. Pirate followers memorized the date, Saturday, October 13, 1960, and the local time of Mazeroski’s hit, 3:36 p.m. Forbes Field was demolished in the 1970s, but ten years later fans began gathering every October 13 at the park’s only remnant, the center field wall, and listened to the original broadcast.
Meanwhile, Mantle cried on the plane ride home in 1960, insisting the better team had lost. Ford would remain angry at Stengel for years – fired five days after the Series – for using him in Games 3 and 6 and not making him available for a third time. The late singer Bing Crosby, former co-owner of the Pirates, was so afraid of upsetting his team that he listened to the game with friends across the Atlantic in Paris.
“We were in this beautiful apartment listening to shortwave, and when it came close, Bing opened a bottle of whiskey and tapped it on the mantel,” his widow Kathryn Crosby told the Times in 2010. “When Mazeroski hit the home run, he hit it hard; the whiskey flew into the fireplace and started a fire.”
Mazeroski was a Pirate his entire time in the Majors and was a team guy off the field. His wife, Milene Nicholson, was a front office executive whom he met through Pittsburgh manager Danny Murtaugh. They married in 1958, had two sons and remained together until her death in 2024.
William Stanley Mazeroski was born in Wheeling, West Virginia, during the Great Depression, grew up in eastern Ohio and lived for a time in a one-room house with no electricity or indoor plumbing. His father, Louis Mazeroski, had hoped that he would become a baseball player and encouraged his son’s love of sports, even practicing with him by having his son throw field tennis balls against a brick wall.
Although he was a star in basketball and football, he preferred baseball and was good enough to be drafted by the Pirates in 1954 at the age of 17. Mazeroski was a shortstop for a team with numerous prospects at the position, having moved to second in his rookie year of 1956. Even as a part-time player late in his career, he was a leader and a steady presence on the 1971 team with Clemente and Willie Stargell, beating the Baltimore Orioles in the World Series.
After his final season, 1972, Mazeroski briefly coached for the Pirates and the Seattle Mariners and was an infield instructor for Pittsburgh during spring training. In 1987, the Pirates retired his uniform, No. 9. The 50th anniversary of his Game 7 heroics was marked in 2010 by the unveiling — on Bill Mazeroski Way — of a 15-foot-tall, 4,000-pound statue of one of Pittsburgh’s greats, around the bases, at the top of the world.
