A Season in the Sun

by Randy Roberts

  Gradually, the Yankees’ front office realized that Mickey’s ascent from Class C to the big leagues had been too quick. After his strong first month at the plate, pitchers soon discovered the holes in his swing, exploiting his penchant for chest-high fastballs. Mickey struck out with increasing regularity, about 20 percent of the time. Trembling, he would erupt in the dugout, smashing bats against water coolers, and pounding his fists against concrete walls. Embarrassed, he tried to hide his tears, shrinking in the corner, his face turning tomato red. He could hardly bear to go back onto the field, standing out there all alone, hearing the fans curse his name: “Go back to Oklahoma you big bum!”40

  Mantle started to brood, and his mood darkened. One time, when he returned to the dugout after a failed at bat, cursing and yelling, a season-ticket holder Mickey knew only as “Mrs. Blackburn” chastised him. Sitting near the Yankees’ on-deck circle, she scolded, “Stop that talk.” Seething, Mickey snapped, “Shut your goddam mouth!”41

  Trying to compensate for his frequent strikeouts, Mickey seemed to swing even harder. By mid-July he had fifty-two strikeouts in sixty-nine games. He also had the third-most hits on the team and the second-most RBIs, but it wasn’t enough. He had become a liability in the lineup, hitting only .260. Mickey sensed what was coming. On a train ride to Detroit to play the Tigers, he overheard Stengel talking to the coaches about sending him down to the minors. Perhaps, he thought, his major-league career had already ended.42

  On July 15, Stengel called him into the visiting manager’s office at Detroit’s Briggs Stadium. Mantle could see the concern on the skipper’s wrinkled face. Stengel told him that he looked uncomfortable at the plate. Mickey was swinging at too many bad pitches, but someday, he said, “you’re gonna develop into a big league star.”

  Mickey feared what Stengel might say next.43

  Finally, the skipper delivered the news, telling Mantle to pack his bags. Mickey was going back to the minors.

  Heading to the airport with Red Patterson, Mantle didn’t know what to say. He only knew that he was joining the Yankees’ minor league club, the Kansas City Blues, in Milwaukee. Patterson handed him his one-way ticket and offered words of encouragement: “You’ll be back to play in the next World Series,” he predicted. But Mantle wasn’t so sure.

  THE DEMOTION MADE MANTLE miserable. After bunting for a single in his first plate appearance, he went hitless in nineteen straight at bats. A reporter described him as a “dejected and harassed young man” who had lost all joy in playing the game. He lacked confidence and was ready to give up. It seemed like he had forgotten how to hit a baseball. With every flailing swing, his frustration grew. He feared letting everyone down in Commerce: his friends, his family, and especially his father.44

  On July 22, he called home from Kansas City. He had not spoken to his dad since being reassigned to the Blues. When Mutt answered the phone, Mickey sounded defeated, explaining that he just couldn’t hit anymore.45

  Mutt interrupted him. He explained he wouldn’t listen to any more of this “can’t” business from his son. “Hell you can’t. Where are you staying?”

  “The Aladdin Hotel,” Mickey answered.

  “Okay. I’ll be there,” his father said, hanging up the phone without saying good-bye.

  About three hours later, after a long drive north, Mutt arrived at the hotel with Mickey’s mother, brother Larry, sister Barbara, and girlfriend Merlyn. Mickey hoped Mutt would cheer him up with some fatherly encouragement. “I guess I was like a little boy, and I wanted him to comfort me,” he said later. Instead, he recalled, Mutt entered the room and gave him a sharp stare that “cut me in two.” Then Mutt asked everyone to step outside while he spoke privately to his son.

  Mickey began complaining about how he couldn’t hit. He said he just wasn’t good enough to play professional baseball. It was time, he said, for him to come home and work in the mines.

  Mutt wouldn’t accept that. He’d listened to everything Mickey had said, and now it was time for him to speak his mind. Mickey recalled that his father told him to grow up. Mutt reminded him that he wasn’t a child anymore. It was time to be a man in a man’s world. He didn’t raise his son to be a quitter. “You don’t get nothing without fighting for it.”

  Mickey felt guilty. His father looked haggard and underweight, his shirt dangling loosely around his lean frame. He wasn’t quite sure what was wrong with his dad, but he knew that Mutt lived in misery from the backbreaking work in the mines. “Deep down,” Mickey thought, “my failure pained him more than that ache in his back.”

  Mutt’s tough talk inspired Mickey to return to the ball field. Looking back, Mickey believed that evening at the Aladdin Hotel turned out to be the “greatest thing my dad ever did for me. All the encouragement he had given me when I was small, all the sacrifices he made so I could play ball when other boys were working in the mines, all the painstaking instruction he had provided—all of these would have been thrown away if he had not been there that night to put the iron in my spine when it was needed most.”46

  By challenging his son’s manhood, Mutt had motivated him. Mickey soon found his confidence again at the plate. Over the next forty games, he hit eleven home runs and drove home fifty RBIs, bringing his average with the Blues up to .364. Yankees scouts were so impressed that on August 20, George Weiss recalled him for the stretch run. When he returned to the Bronx, a crisp, clean jersey with a new number hung from his locker. Wearing number seven, Mantle hit consistently as a regular starter for the rest of the season. And on September 28, the Yankees clinched the American League pennant.47

  Red Patterson was right: Mickey Mantle played in the next World Series.

  IN THE FIFTH INNING of Game Two of the 1951 World Series, with the Yankees leading the New York Giants 2–0, Willie Mays, then a sensational twenty-year-old rookie outfielder, strode to the plate. Mickey positioned himself in deep right field, while Joe DiMaggio shaded toward left center, anticipating that Mays would pull the ball. Mantle never really felt comfortable sharing the outfield with DiMaggio. Yankees coach Tommy Henrich had drilled him repeatedly: “You play off DiMaggio.” The code among outfielders required that they defer to the man playing center field, which meant that Mickey had to react to the ball and to DiMaggio. But Stengel had instructed him to pursue any ball that he thought he could catch. DiMaggio, nursing a sore Achilles tendon and an aching heel, could not glide the way he used to. “The dago’s heel is hurtin’. Go for everything.”48

  Facing “Steady” Eddie Lopat, a junk pitcher, Mays sliced a looping drive into the gap between center and right field. As the ball took off, DiMaggio and Mantle bolted toward it. Second baseman Gil McDougald drifted into the outfield, figuring that the sinking ball was Mantle’s since it was closer to him than anyone else. But when Joe yelled, “I got it!” Mickey took his eyes off the ball and saw Joe charging near him. “Oh, shit!” he thought to himself, “I’m gonna hit DiMaggio!”

  As Mantle broke hard, his right shoe caught the rubber cover of a drain, his right knee buckled, and he crumpled to the ground. Sitting a few rows above the Yankee dugout, Mutt watched his son collapse onto the grass. After DiMaggio caught the ball everyone in Yankee Stadium turned to Mickey. Mutt knew that his son was hurt, but he did not know how badly. His mind raced back to Oklahoma. He could only imagine how scared Mickey’s mother felt listening to the game on the radio.

  Writhing in pain, Mantle lay sprawled on the field, his right leg folded beneath his body. “What happened, kid?” DiMaggio asked, kneeling beside him. “Mickey, what happened?” Face down, Mantle groaned, burying his head between his arms.

  Panicked, DiMaggio told him not to move and waved for help. “They’re bringing a stretcher, kid.” A group of teammates ran from the bullpen toward Mickey. Coach Frank Crosetti placed a towel under his head while Mantle curled up in a fetal position. Mutt anxiously watched four of Mickey’s teammates carry him off the field. After they reached the clubhouse, the trainer, Gus Mauch, wrapped h
is knee with ice and placed splints on both sides of his leg.

  In Game Two of the 1951 World Series against the New York Giants, Mantle streaked after a Willie Mays fly ball, venturing into Joe DiMaggio’s center-field territory. When, at the last moment, DiMaggio hollered, “I got it!” Mickey “slammed on the breaks.” His spikes caught on a rubber drain cover, and the ligaments in his right knee twisted and tore. When his teammates carried him off the field on a stretcher, Yankee fans feared that the promising rookie might not fully recover. Courtesy of the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

  The New York newspapers announced that Mantle was done for the rest of the series due to “a sprained muscle on the inside of the knee.” But the injury was much worse than a knee sprain. Mantle had shredded the ligaments, cartilage, and tendons in his right knee. He worried that he would never fully recover his speed and strength and that his career might be over. Years later Mantle said, “I was never right again.… So far as I’m concerned that was the worst thing that could ever have happened to me.”49

  When Mickey woke up the following morning, his knee had swollen into the size of a watermelon. He needed crutches just to stand. When a taxi dropped him and his dad off at the Lenox Hill Hospital, Mutt stepped out first. Easing out of the cab, Mickey placed his hand on his father’s shoulder for support. But when he leaned on him, his dad collapsed onto the sidewalk. His father had always been a strong man, so something was clearly wrong with him, as Mickey had suspected. Gaunt and hollow cheeked, he looked like he had not eaten anything for days. Mutt was never one to complain, but he could no longer bear the excruciating pain in his back.50

  Mutt checked into the hospital and spent the next few days in the same room as his son. While Mickey rested in his hospital bed, doctors performed a battery of tests on Mutt. During Mickey’s recovery, father and son watched the Yankees win the World Series on a rabbit-eared black-and-white television set. Occasionally, Mutt reminded Mickey that he needed to improve if he was going to become a trusted regular on the team. Even when he was laid up in a hospital bed, Mickey’s baseball career consumed his father.51

  Mantle recalled Mutt’s doctor knocking softly on the door and entering the room. He told Mickey that he had some bad news. “Your father is dying of Hodgkin’s disease,” he said. Mickey was certain that his father had suffered a miner’s fate. There was nothing the doctor could do to save his dad and nothing he could say to console Mickey. Mutt had always been at his side. But for the first time in his life, Mickey confronted the reality that someday soon his father wouldn’t be there.52

  CHAPTER 3

  The Natural

  “I am retiring from baseball. The game is no longer fun. The aches and pains aren’t worth it.”

  —JOE DIMAGGIO, December 11, 1951

  The great DiMaggio left the biggest stage in baseball, retiring a nine-time World Series champion. Without him Yankee Stadium lost much of its aura.

  His presumed replacement limped into spring training. In late February 1952, when Mickey Mantle arrived in St. Petersburg, Florida, his coaches and teammates doubted he would be ready to play at full strength by opening day. In December, team physician Sidney Gaynor had examined him in New York and declared that there was no damage to his knee cartilage and that the torn ligament on the inside of his right leg had fully healed. Mantle was relieved, but he still felt soreness in his thigh. Gaynor prescribed a series of exercises to strengthen the leg, which Mickey promptly ignored.

  It didn’t matter though. No amount of exercise could prevent the degeneration of his right knee. In an age before magnetic resonance imaging and arthroscopic surgery, Mantle’s doctors could not see that he had a torn anterior cruciate ligament (ACL). As long as he played baseball, running and cutting across the field, his knee would continue to deteriorate, and the pain would linger.1

  He had spent the winter in Commerce, sulking around the house, wearing a heavy brace on his right knee. His father’s terminal diagnosis weighed on him. Mutt’s cancer sapped his strength, forcing him to quit work. Seeing him languish, Mickey felt helpless. He recalled spending most nights lounging on the couch, staring at the television with a beer in his hand. He gave little thought to his rehab exercises, figuring his body would recover naturally. “I was twenty years old,” he said later, “and I thought I was superman.”2

  In Florida, he worked with the team trainer and gradually regained stability in his leg. Still, on opening day against the Philadelphia Athletics, Casey Stengel questioned Mickey’s ability to cover the gaps, so he sent him back to right field. Yet Mantle played with confidence and vigor, notching three hits in four at bats, knocking in two runs, and stealing a base. He performed so well early in the season that the Yankees traded Jackie Jenson, Mantle’s primary competition to replace DiMaggio in center field.3

  Three days after the trade, on May 6, 1952, Stengel called Mickey at the Grand Concourse where he stayed with Merlyn, now his wife of hardly four months. Casey had just finished speaking to Mickey’s mother, Lovell, on the phone. She asked Stengel to forward a devastating message to her son: Mutt had died earlier that morning in a Denver hospital. He was only forty years old.4

  Merlyn would never forget that painful moment, watching Mickey hammer his fist against the wall. She tried to console him, but he rejected her embrace. She asked when they would leave for Oklahoma, but he shook his head and told her that she didn’t need to go with him. He just wanted to be alone.5

  Merlyn was crushed. She could not understand why her husband did not want her at the funeral. Offering no explanation, Mickey suppressed his emotions, just as his father had. He didn’t know how to be vulnerable with his young wife. He couldn’t allow her to see any weakness. His father had told him to marry Merlyn, but he never taught him what it meant to be a husband. “She’s your kind,” he said, implying that Mickey should avoid getting involved with a showgirl from the city who might distract him from his single priority: baseball. Merlyn, Mutt reminded him, was wholesome and loyal, a woman who loved Mickey unconditionally and understood where he came from. And so he had married her.6

  Frequent leg injuries and haphazard attention to rehabilitation made spring training an ordeal for Mantle. Occasionally it felt like he had to learn to run and slide on new, but not improved, legs. Courtesy of the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

  Overwhelmed by grief, Mickey felt guilty that he wasn’t at Mutt’s side when he died, that he had never said good-bye or told his father that he loved him. He escaped to the ballpark, his sanctuary, leaving Merlyn alone at the hotel. He dressed for the game against the Cleveland Indians but never left the dugout. It’s hard to imagine that he could have concentrated on the game. His father’s death left him feeling empty. Mutt had been everything to him: his mentor, coach, and best friend. He was irreplaceable.

  On May 11, two days after the funeral, Mantle returned to Yankee Stadium a changed man. He was only twenty years old, but baseball was no longer just a boy’s game. It was his profession. His father’s death meant that he had to step up as the man of the family. It also meant that he could not fail. Too much was at stake. He carried the burden of supporting Merlyn, his mother, and his four younger siblings. And in a year he would be a father himself.

  Playing on a fragile knee, Mantle wrestled with self-doubt. Struggling early in the season, he must have wondered if he was damaged goods. In a time before sophisticated knee surgeries, there were no guarantees that he would recover the speed and power he had displayed a year earlier. For all his talent, he understood that life promised him nothing.

  MICKEY MANTLE’s rookie season had ended with his teammates carrying him off the field on a stretcher. The sight of him collapsing was etched into the minds of everyone in Yankee Stadium that day. The club had great plans for him in 1952, banking that he would “move into the king’s row reserved for the Yankee greats.” Yet his career—and the Yankees’ season—was in question. If the Yankees were going to win another World Series, Mickey would not just have to re
cover. He would have to deliver a sensational sophomore campaign. And he did.7

  Mantle finished the season rated among the best hitters in baseball. In 142 games, he hit .311—good for third in the American League—with twenty-three home runs and eighty-seven RBIs. He also ranked among the top ten American League batters in hits, total bases, home runs, doubles, runs, walks, and slugging percentage. His 111 strikeouts—the most by any American League hitter not named Larry Doby—proved that the first-time All-Star had not yet mastered the strike zone. Nonetheless, in July the Washington Post’s Shirley Povich, one of the many impatient writers of the era, declared that Mantle—playing in just his first full season—was “finally coming of age as a big leaguer.” Most importantly, when the Yankees competed against the Cleveland Indians in a tight pennant race, Mantle demonstrated great composure, batting .362 over the final three weeks of the season.8

  In October, the Yankees met the Brooklyn Dodgers in the World Series. After the Yankees lost Game Five, they returned to Ebbets Field down 3–2 and on the brink of failure. However, in the eighth inning of Game Six, with the Yanks leading 2–1, Mantle launched a fastball into the deepest part of the left-center-field grandstand, boosting the Yankees lead by another run. After the Yankees tied the series with a 3–2 victory, New York Post columnist Jimmy Cannon wrote that Mantle had become the idol of every boy in New York. “How many kids,” he wondered, “pretended they were Mickey Mantle last night[?]”9

  In the crucial final game of the series, Mickey inscribed his name into Yankees lore. In the sixth inning, he settled into the left side of the batter’s box, facing Dodgers hurler Joe Black. With the game tied at two, Black knew he could not afford to make a mistake. His first two pitches fell wide of the plate, and his third nearly grazed Mantle’s jersey. On a 3–0 count, he finally threw a strike, as Mantle squared late, threatening to bunt. On the very next pitch, Black fired a fastball. Mantle uncorked his body and slugged it skyward. Calling the game for NBC, Mel Allen, his sweet southern voice rising with excitement, announced, “There’s a fly ball out to right field. That ball is going, going… it is gone!”10