Maury Wills

Maury Wills

Excerpt from "After Jackie – Pride, Prejudice, and Baseball's Forgotten Heroes: An Oral History" by Cal Fussman, ESPN Books, 2007. Page 108

When I was going for the stolen base record in 1962, Sandy Koufax and I read each other's mail. His locker was right across from mine, and he'd open my mail for me, and I'd open his for him.

See, what with me being black and him being Jewish, we both got a lot of hate mail.

"Oh, you probably don't want to read this one," Sandy would say. Or, "Hey, this one's okay. Some little kid wants an autograph." And sometimes, "Oh my God! You don't want to see this…"

Every time he'd come across one of those, I'd always go, "C'mon, let me see it." And he'd say, "Nah, nah, it'll only mess you up."

So we had some fun with it.

We even got to the point where we could recognize the same guy writing different hate letters: "Look, he must use a ruler to get the margins so straight."