Willie Mays was discharged from the Army on March 1, 1954, and reported to the Giants' spring camp in Phoenix. What followed is the season people still describe him by: a .345 average that won the batting title, 41 home runs, 110 runs batted in, the league lead in triples and in slugging, and the National League's Most Valuable Player award.
Then, on September 29, in the first game of the World Series at the Polo Grounds, with the score tied 2–2 in the eighth inning, Vic Wertz hit a long fly to deep center field and Mays ran it down. The Giants won that game in ten innings and swept Cleveland in four.
He came home on March 1. By October he had the batting title, the MVP and the Catch.
This card was in the stores all that season. The 1954 Topps design was the company's first to put two pictures on a front: a large color portrait from the chest up and a smaller black-and-white figure in action, with the team logo at the top and a facsimile signature at the bottom. The color runs to the top edge with no border, and Mays's is a bright yellow.
Number 90 is in the third and largest series, numbers 76 through 250, and the set has no high-number problem and no short prints. The back holds a green statistics table and a three-panel cartoon, and because of the way the sheets were laid out, half the backs in the set read one way and half the other.
The 1954 Topps cards are known for print defects and soft corners, and a flat yellow ground hides neither.
