A Season in the Sun

by Randy Roberts

  Yet, by the end of the Korean War—an unsatisfying stalemate that concluded in 1953—Americans had begun questioning the country’s strength and influence abroad, wondering what happened to America’s heroes on the battlefield. It was the season of the Red Scare, a troubling time when Americans worried about Communist subversion, Soviet spies, and the atomic bomb. Alarmed by the increasing protests over segregation, conservatives fretted that Communist agents were organizing civil rights demonstrations. Throughout the 1950s parents feared that “Pinkos” would recruit their children to the fifth column. Equally troubling, newspapers exaggerated an increase in juvenile delinquency, publishing stories about teenagers running wild in the streets, joining gangs, robbing old ladies, and smoking reefer.12

  Yet sports, parents believed, offered an antidote to juvenile delinquency, and baseball formed the front line in the defense of the nation’s youth. Team sports taught children the importance of building character, being a good teammate, fitting into a group, and playing fairly—democratic values that many believed made America exceptional. The success of the team, coaches reminded young players, mattered more than self-interest.

  But these myths were shattered in 1951—the same year Mantle first joined the Yankees. Americans awoke to a series of scandals in their sports: Dozens of college basketball players had accepted bribes in exchange for shaving points and dumping games. Ninety cadets at West Point, half of them football players, had violated the honor code, many of them guilty of academic cheating. And the Department of Justice launched an investigation into the International Boxing Club for its monopoly on major championship fights: no boxer could rise through the ranks without selling his soul to gangster Frankie Carbo and the mob. Corruption tainted American sports, a troubling sign that young people could no longer look to athletes as role models—unless they played baseball.13

  During the early years of the Cold War, baseball represented a model of Americanism. Adults believed that youths who played baseball would absorb its democratic virtues and resist communism. Idaho senator Herman Welker, a former miner and avid sports fan who scouted baseball players in his free time, feared that the country was losing the fight against the “Red Rats.” For Welker, baseball was central to building consensus and unquestioned loyalty. “I never saw a ballplayer who was a Communist,” he said.14

  J. Edgar Hoover and other national leaders agreed. In 1950, the FBI director wrote a letter published in Little League Hits, arguing that youth baseball was an effective means of combating subversive forces and juvenile delinquency. Playing baseball, he wrote, prepared boys for the “rigorous competition of life” and bolstered old-fashioned “Americanism.” In 1954, there were over 3,000 Little Leagues organized throughout the country, and Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. praised youth baseball in that year’s Little League Official Program. “The Young Americans who compose Little League,” he wrote, “will provide a hitless target for the peddlers of a godless ideology.” The following year, schoolboys began reciting the Little League Pledge before every game: “I trust in God / I love my country / And will respect its laws…”15

  Mickey Mantle was the perfect idol for the 1950s. A tabula rasa, he was complicit in letting others craft his image. Like Joe DiMaggio and Joe Louis, he was a malleable figure Americans shaped according to their own fears and desires. Mute on social and political issues, he was a hero suited for the age of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. He was strong and tight-lipped, a man of action respected solely for his deeds. Sportswriters and advertisers portrayed him as an exemplary role model, the great American athlete, a tough, clean-living family man who inspired youth to play the National Pastime.

  Mantle personified the paradox of the 1950s, the tension between Cold War anxieties and burgeoning economic prosperity. By mid-decade, Americans embraced a “boom mentality,” developing rising expectations of what they could accomplish. In the summer of 1956, Mantle challenged Babe Ruth’s single-season record of sixty home runs. His chase fulfilled Americans’ longing for heroes who epitomized unlimited potential, strength, and grand achievements. He appealed to younger Americans yearning to reach new frontiers. That season millions of fans bought tickets to see “Mighty Mickey,” the quintessential hitter for the atomic age: a big, muscular, crew-cut slugger who embodied baseball’s “big bang” style of offense.16

  ALTHOUGH WE OFTEN THINK that Mantle played during baseball’s “golden age,” his breakout season occurred at a moment when the sport desperately needed a marquee player. In the early 1950s, game attendance began to slump. Owners and journalists speculated about the causes: suburbanization, television, and antiquated stadiums with few parking spaces at a time when more and more Americans owned cars. Others suggested that baseball had become a predictable, one-dimensional game that relied too much on hitters swinging for the fences.

  Critics identified another cause: many of the best power hitters played outside the New York media’s orbit. Few fans outside Kansas City, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati bought tickets to see Gus Zernial, Del Ennis, or Wally Post and Gus Bell play. Of course, baseball did not lack for great players, with Yogi Berra, Willie Mays, Duke Snider, Stan Musial, and Ted Williams, among others, giving fans reason enough to show up and cheer. However, as Roger Angell lamented, none of them possessed the drawing power of a “true star” like DiMaggio.

  Two years before Mantle’s historic season, Angell, a loyal Yankees fan, admitted, “Baseball has not quite been the same for me since Joe DiMaggio retired. Joe was my boy, my nonpareil, my hero.” The Yankee Clipper “had the knack which almost all great stars have shared—the ability of making his every move on the field seem distinctive and exciting.” DiMaggio was the kind of player who prompted schoolboys to read the newspaper and study box scores; he turned casual fans into devoted followers. In 1941, during his record fifty-six-game hitting streak, people across the country asked complete strangers, “Did he get one yesterday?” The question required no explanation. Everyone knew who “he” was.17

  No player evoked that same kind of daily intrigue until Mickey Mantle in 1956. He differed from the other great players of his era. Unlike the spectacular Mays, he was white and so possessed mass appeal at a time when many white fans only grudgingly accepted the presence of black players. Unlike Ted Williams, he rarely expressed an opinion, let alone a controversial one. Unlike Berra, he hit towering home runs. And unlike Snider and Musial, he played in Yankee Stadium, which made him the natural successor to DiMaggio. New York Post columnist Jimmy Cannon recognized that the Yankees center fielder had become a unifying force in the city and a national attraction. “He has brought this town together and made other cities smaller, too,” he wrote. “They hoot pitchers who walk him in parks where the Yankees are despised. When he bunts, they feel they have been swindled. But they talk about him all the time.” While Mantle chased Ruth’s home run record, New Yorkers riding the subway, sipping beer on a barstool, or buying a paper at the corner newsstand echoed a similar question from fifteen years earlier: “What did Mickey do today?”18

  In 1956, Mantle moved to the center of America’s imagination because he dramatized the daily struggle for individual achievement. Etching his name into the record books, he emerged as a symbol of American progress. His life bridged two worlds: the city’s modern commercialized culture and the folklore of baseball’s bucolic origins, a romantic ideal where country boys like Mickey played the game in unkempt fields. His success story promoted the myths around baseball’s meritocratic values and shaped his heroic status. Mantle’s hardscrabble origins reminded the country that anything seemed possible through baseball.

  During Mickey’s season in the sun, Yankees pitching coach Jim Turner sensed that a new hero had arrived. “That Mantle is something America has needed,” he said, “and something America hasn’t had since DiMaggio.”19

  CHAPTER 1

  A Father’s Dream

  “There never was any talk about what I’d be in life. Dad and I knew I was going
to be a ballplayer.”

  —MICKEY MANTLE, 1953

  A baseball weighs between 5.00 and 5.25 ounces and measures between 9.00 and 9.25 inches in circumference. For most of the twentieth century, it was covered by two horsehide strips tightly held together by 108 slightly raised double stitches. In the hands of an expert pitcher, the stitches determine the way the ball swerves, curves, and dips. The pitcher’s power and technique account for the speed at which the ball travels the 60.5 feet from the mound to the plate. A good major-league pitcher can hurl it at 90 mph. An exceptional power pitcher can occasionally reach 100 mph. At that speed, the ball reaches the plate in 396 milliseconds.1

  How does the batter experience this? Consider a voluntary blink, suggests physicist Robert K. Adair, which takes about 150 milliseconds. A major-league fastball reaches the plate in about three blinks of an eye. But to the batter, it feels faster than that, as the minimum time it takes to initiate a muscular response to a visual signal is about 150 milliseconds. Subtract that from the 396 milliseconds, and a batter has around two blinks to decide whether to swing and, if he chooses to do so, to calculate the relative speed of the ball and where it will cross the plate in the strike zone and to manipulate a two-pound bat so that the round barrel makes contact with it. Of course, the batter might anticipate a certain pitch and identify its speed and location from the angle of the thrower’s arm, but even so, he faces a daunting task.

  As Ted Williams, perhaps the greatest, most successful hitter in the modern game, insisted in 1970, “Hitting a baseball… is the most difficult thing to do in sport.” What is there, he asked, that requires “a greater finesse to go with physical strength, that has as many variables and as few constants, and that carries with it the continuing frustration of knowing that even if you are a .300 hitter—which is a rare item these days—you are going to fail at your job seven out of ten times?”2

  Because hitting a baseball is so difficult, and failure is so much more common than success, predicting which batters will make it to the major leagues has always been challenging. When Yankees scout Tom Greenwade first noticed him, Mantle was a skinny seventeen-year-old shortstop with remarkable speed and surprising power. Living out of a suitcase, Greenwade, “a gaunt, Lincolnesque man” who wore rimless bifocals, crisscrossed Arkansas, Colorado, Texas, Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma searching for the next great prospect. Retelling the story of how he “discovered” Mantle, he exaggerated his own talent for identifying future stars. “I knew he was going to be one of the all-time greats,” he said. “The first time I saw Mantle I knew how Paul Krichell felt when he first saw Lou Gehrig.”3

  There’s no way even a veteran scout could possibly predict that a scrawny teenager would one day become the most devastating slugger in the big leagues. In baseball most players spend their professional careers in the minor leagues and never even get “a cup of coffee,” as the saying goes, in the majors. Even for the most talented players, there are no guarantees.

  And if the odds of making it as a hitter are slim, they are even slimmer for switch-hitters. Only about 6 percent of professional baseball players, in the history of the major leagues, have batted from both sides of the plate, and very few of them have been .300 hitters. In addition, most of them have been lightning-fast single hitters, making it to first base more through foot speed than hitting prowess. Almost none have combined speed with the ability to hit with power. Before Mickey Mantle, no switch-hitter had amassed 150 career home runs, and only three had hit more than 100. None had won a Triple Crown. Mantle would finish his years with the New York Yankees with 536 home runs, and he remains the only switcher to win a Triple Crown. He was the rarest of the breed, the million-to-one-shot switch-hitting slugger who went all the way.4

  THE LIVES OF THE Mantle men were stitched as tightly to the game as the two pieces of leather that form the cover of a baseball. Mickey’s grandfather Charles had pitched left-handed on the sandlot squads in pre–Dust Bowl Oklahoma and Missouri, and his father, Mutt, had thrown right-handed from the mound of his Eagle-Picher Mining Company team. Even his mother, Lovell, had a passion for the game. She listened to the St. Louis Cardinals’ afternoon contests on the radio and faithfully reported the exact sequence of the action to Mutt and Mickey at the dinner table.

  The boy’s name spoke to his father’s plans for him. Mickey Charles Mantle: Charles after his grandfather, Mickey after Gordon Stanley “Mickey” Cochrane, the Hall of Fame catcher who played for the Philadelphia Athletics in the 1920s and early 1930s. Cochrane, Mutt’s favorite player, had started in the 1931 World Series only a few weeks before Mickey was born. It is doubtful if Mutt ever knew the catcher’s full name. In any case, “Gordon Stanley” was not the sort of tag a father would pin on a son in Spavinaw, Oklahoma, where Mickey was born on October 20, 1931.5

  Likewise, a job at the Eagle-Picher Mining Company in Commerce, where Mutt worked when Mickey was old enough to begin swinging a bat, was not the sort of employment a father hoped to pass on to his boy. During Mickey’s childhood in the 1930s, Oklahoma captured the imaginations of millions of Americans. It was not the dreamland of farmers and cattlemen portrayed on stage by the 1943 production Oklahoma!, unless one considered brooding, threatening, violent Jud Fry the protagonist of the show. Nor was it the Oklahoma that featured an impeachment of a governor during a “pajama session” of the legislature, a race riot in Tulsa, or the murderous exploits of “Pretty Boy” Floyd. Rather it was the Oklahoma of the Dust Bowl and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, of thousand-foot tsunamis of grit washing across a godforsaken landscape and caravans of turtle-like jalopies, filled with Okies in search of phantom jobs, crawling across a harsh desert toward California.

  Yet even that Oklahoma, that tale of human and ecological disaster and heartbreak, was not Mutt and Mickey’s Oklahoma. The suffering in Mutt’s Oklahoma took place under, not above, ground. At the end of the nineteenth century around Commerce, in the tristate region where Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma meet near Route 66, a farmer digging a shallow well discovered substantial lead and zinc deposits. Once rail lines connected the region to smelters in Galena, Kansas, and Joplin, Missouri, the rush commenced. Camp towns in Ottawa County, with names like Peoria, Quapaw, Cardin, Picher, and Commerce, boomed, drawing money and men into the region for much of the next half century. The nation’s two world wars spurred the growth of the tristate mining industries. Munition manufacturers, the notorious “merchants of death” of the 1930s, and paint companies needed the lead for their products. And zinc was crucial in the production of galvanized steel and sink linings.6

  The profits for the Eagle-Picher Mining Company swelled. So did the giant mounds of chat, the waste by-product of the hunt for lead and zinc. Mining towns like Commerce paid dearly for their mineral “blessings.” Crisscrossing mineshafts left the land unstable, subject to periodic cave-ins and lurking sinkholes that swallowed homes and sections of road. The chemicals used in the mining process bled into the quarries, reservoirs, and streams like Tar Creek, which soon ran blood red. They also created singularly misnamed dry alkali “fields,” smooth, lifeless, grassless places where Mickey and his friends played the game of baseball. Red-ringed eyes were a telltale sign for Mickey’s mother that he had been swimming in a quarry or playing ball in a blighted field.7

  If the mining process was slowly poisoning life above ground, work below ground was far more perilous. To the men who labored in the mines, life was so harsh and unforgiving that almost all of them were permanently marked by the job. It was grueling, backbreaking work. After blasting a rock face, miners had to load the shattered pieces into enormous steel buckets for transport to the surface. Imagine shoveling wet snow from a sidewalk. A good shovelful might weigh twenty pounds. A shovelful of lead-infused rock would weigh at least double that. Now imagine loading those buckets for nine or ten hours each day in a perpetual dusk, starved of good air, forced to breathe in the fumes produced by rocks lined with precious lead and zinc.

  Acc
idents were almost as common as sore backs and scarred lungs. Deaths occurred with alarming frequency. Between 1924 and 1931 the Tri-State Zinc and Lead Ore Producers Association reported that 173 miners died in accidents, but that organization only represented about half of the operators. A violent end lurked in every step of the mining process. Rock crushed some miners, and machines mangled others. Some fell down shafts, and others died in cave-ins. And, of course, thousands of these men with muscles like steel cables worked for years and then started to find it increasingly difficult to breath, even outside the mines. They coughed blood, struggled to get oxygen into their lungs, and often died of silicosis or tuberculosis.8

  “I always wished my dad could be something other than a miner,” Mantle later wrote. “I knew it was killing him.” He realized that underground, amid the toxic dust and debilitating dampness, his father was suffering a miner’s fate. Mickey watched as Mutt “coughed up gobs of phlegm and never saw a doctor. What for? He’d only be told it was ‘miner’s disease.’ He’d realize that if he didn’t get cancer he’d probably die of tuberculosis.” Seeing his two brothers die at thirty-four, sensing that he would be lucky to make forty, and adopting a fatalistic view of life, Mutt Mantle chain-smoked Camel cigarettes, did his time underground, and drew pleasure from the St. Louis Cardinals and his family.9