The next inning, batting from the right side of the plate against Preacher Roe, Mantle smacked a single into center field, driving home Gil McDougald. In the end, the Yankees won Game Seven 4–2 on Mantle’s decisive swings. The Yankees, Jackie Robinson said, “didn’t miss Joe DiMaggio.” “It was that Mantle, that Mickey Mantle killed us,” he added. “Mantle was the difference.”11
Three years before reporters began naming a World Series MVP, Mantle was undoubtedly the most valuable Yankee. In each of the team’s four victories, he made critical, game-changing plays. It appeared that he had seamlessly replaced DiMaggio. “There may be no ceiling on the lad’s skills,” Povich concluded after the series. An intimidating slugger, the “golden boy,” Roger Kahn wrote in the New York Herald-Tribune, had become a bona fide star, a true “hero.” And he already seemed poised for an encore.12
YANKEES PUBLICIST RED PATTERSON had been waiting for this moment. On April 17, 1953, World Series winner Mickey Mantle, batting right-handed, dug his cleats into the dirt around home plate, concentrating on Washington Senators southpaw Chuck Stobbs. Mantle’s eyes scanned the field as a brisk wind unfurled the American flag above the center-field wall. With the Yankees leading 2–1 in the top of the fifth inning and a runner on first base, Stobbs ran his fingers over the seams of the baseball. When he delivered a high fastball right over the heart of the plate, Mantle punished him, crushing it high into the cloudy gray sky. Senators second baseman Wayne Terwilliger swore that the ball flew so high that Mantle had already rounded second when it eclipsed the left-center-field bleachers of Griffith Stadium. After it clipped the National Bohemian Beer sign—about 460 feet from home plate and nearly 60 feet above the outfield grounds—it bounced onto Fifth Street. According to baseball lore, Patterson bolted out of his press box seat and declared, “That one’s got to be measured!”13
A former sportswriter who had covered the Yankees for the New York Herald-Tribune, Patterson knew a good story when he saw one. He later claimed that a boy named Donald Dunaway had retrieved the scuffed baseball and led him to the exact spot where he found it: the backyard of a modest two-story redbrick row house at 434 Oakdale Street. According to Patterson’s exaggerated calculations, Mantle had hit the ball farther than any previous home run: 565 feet. Patterson rushed back to the stadium’s broadcast booth, nearly out of breath, and convinced radio announcer Bob Wolff to report the record. “He was the Yankee PR man,” Wolff said years later. “You accepted what he said.”14
The following morning, newspaper headlines trumpeted Patterson’s tall tale. “Ruth Never Slugged a Baseball Farther Than Mantle’s Homer,” the Washington Post declared. That day Patterson popularized the “tape-measure home run.” He told reporters that he paced 105 feet from the spot where Dunaway found the ball to the edge of the stadium—failing to mention that the houses on Fifth Street and the backyard fences would have prevented him from walking in a straight line—and added the 460 feet from there to home plate. Based on his “scientific calculations,” he concluded that the ball had traveled 565 feet. Padding the distance from home plate to the house on Oakdale Street, he labeled Mantle as the greatest power hitter in history. “It was my job,” he reflected, “to make Mickey look good.”15
Patterson understood that the Yankees were not just selling baseball; they were selling entertainment in a big city that offered customers plenty of options. “Look,” he said years later, “I saw that the Yankees were not just competing against the Giants and Dodgers. They were competing against every leisure-time activity that you have in summer. If you decided to go to Jones Beach, you didn’t go to Yankee Stadium. You didn’t buy our tickets, pay our parking charge, eat our hot dogs, or drink our beer. I was trying to make the Yankees more interesting than the Giants and Jones Beach as well.”16
He succeeded. In 1953, Brooklyn Dodgers outfielder Duke Snider hit forty-three home runs, third overall in the major leagues. Yet nobody expected him to fulfill the same grand expectations foisted onto Mantle. Snider literally played on a smaller stage. Ebbets Field was a mom-and-pop ballpark, and Yankee Stadium was baseball’s equivalent of vaudeville’s Palace Theater. Writers and fans presumed Snider would perform like a regular All-Star, but they didn’t view him as a legend in the making, as they did Mantle. Both men were among the most talented power hitters in the sport, but only Mantle had Red Patterson magnifying his achievements. When he hit home runs, Patterson recalled, “I made a point of leaving the ballpark and measuring them down to the last inch. Or so I told the writers. Duke Snider hit very long home runs, but nobody in the Brooklyn organization realized the extra press mileage they could get with a two dollar tape-measure.”17
From the moment Patterson paced the distance of Mantle’s dinger in Washington, fans and sportswriters expected Mickey to continue hitting spectacular home runs. It was no longer satisfying simply to count his homers; each one had to be measured, not only in distance but also against the stars from the past. Baseball’s mythical timelessness—the idea that the game and the players themselves remained essentially the same—led writers and fans to compare the very best players to former legends without considering the context in which each man played. For many, Mantle was so outrageously talented that his performances could only spark new interest when he challenged records set by the greatest players who came before him. And now, it seemed, the twenty-one-year-old had satisfied the Yankees’ expectations. “Only Ruth and Lou Gehrig, left-handers, and [Jimmie] Foxx, a right-hander, compare with Mickey in hitting long ones,” Casey Stengel contended. “He might go on to become the greatest left-handed hitter and the greatest right-handed hitter.”18
Mantle’s power evoked the protagonist of Bernard Malamud’s novel The Natural, a Herculean figure who could knock the cover off the ball. Like Malamud’s Roy Hobbs, a prodigy plucked out of the plains by a lucky scout, Mickey appeared divinely gifted. Yet, unlike Hobbs, his preternatural strength didn’t come from a baseball bat hewn from the pure white ash of a tree “split by lightning.” Rather, his power came from swinging a sixteen-pound sledgehammer as a “screen ape” for the Eagle-Picher mine, crushing large rocks. As a teenager, during long, hot summer days, Mantle built up his back, shoulders, and arms working in the mines, digging graves, and carrying tombstones for a friend who owned a cemetery. When he first joined the Yankees, Casey Stengel started calling him “the boy with the man’s back.”19
Mantle’s incredible performances early in the 1953 season convinced writers that he was on the verge of canonization. He was batting so well in early June that New York Times columnist Louis Effrat suggested that he might become the youngest player in history to win the Triple Crown. As the next great superstar, however, he was obligated to do more than perform on the field. Charles Dexter wrote in Baseball Digest, “He must be an example to American youth, a public speaker and TV personality, one of the nation’s ten best-dressed men, a husband, father, and friend of the small fry everywhere.” But Mickey was made to swing a baseball bat, not to play these roles. Although he became a spokesman for Wheaties, Camel cigarettes, Gem razor blades, Haggar slacks, and Louisville Slugger bats, off the field he appeared uncomfortable standing in front of photographers and television cameras. Embarrassed by the attention, he squirmed in front of reporters. He wasn’t any more relaxed around the beat writers than he had been during his rookie season. He simply couldn’t understand why they asked him so many questions. “What’s so special about me?” he wondered. Before joining the Yankees, he’d never had to explain himself, and now the reporters were asking him to do just that. He thought that his performance spoke for itself. 20
Just when Mantle seemed on the top of his game, injuries dashed his hopes for another spectacular season. In late June he sprained his left knee and missed six games. Then, on August 8, in the fifth inning of a game against the Chicago White Sox, Bob Boyd drove a ball into the left-center-field gap. Mantle charged toward it, halting to scoop it up. Breaking hard, he pivoted to make the throw to second bas
e and wrenched his knee, the same one he had injured in the 1951 World Series. After the game, the team physician reported that Mickey had sprained his knee, but he had actually torn ligaments again.21
Somehow Mantle limped back to the field later that month, wearing a knee brace. Since the All-Star break, injuries had cost him twenty-seven games, but even before he twisted his right knee, he had already started unraveling at the plate. “Muscles,” reporters affectionately called him, seemed to swing for the fences during each at bat. His strength, however, could not help him catch up to shoulder-high fastballs. The more he struck out, the harder he swung. And the harder he swung, the more he missed. From July 10 until the end of the season, he hit only .269, an abysmal average for a player anointed as the premier batter in the game. He finished the season with a respectable batting average (.295), but reporters couldn’t ignore that he had slipped sixteen points from the previous year and finished second among American League batters in strikeouts (ninety). And he had hit fewer home runs (twenty-three to twenty-one), triples (seven to three), and doubles (thirty-seven to twenty-four) than he had in 1952 (albeit in nearly ninety fewer at bats). By the end of the regular season, critics considered Mantle “the bust of the Yankees, merely because so much has been expected of him.”22
Despite Mantle’s injuries, the Yankees met the Dodgers in the World Series again. Playing in his third straight Fall Classic, Mantle struggled miserably against the Brooklyn pitching staff. In twenty-four at bats, he managed only five hits, though he did smack two important home runs. In Game Two, with the score tied 2–2, Mantle thumped a two-run homer in the eighth inning off Preacher Roe, giving the Yankees the lead and ultimately the win. In Game Three, Dodgers ace Carl Erskine struck him out four consecutive times. The next day, he fanned twice more. Humiliated, he returned to the dugout each time with his head down, his cap pulled low over his eyes.23
In the third inning of Game Five, Mantle stepped into the batter’s box with the bases loaded, two outs, and the Yankees leading 2–1. Facing Russ Meyer from the left side of the plate, he clubbed a grand slam into the left-field upper deck of Ebbets Field. His homer proved the difference in the Yankees 11–7 victory and momentarily relieved the pressure of being Mickey Mantle.24
He hardly enjoyed the moment. Failure, he feared, would reduce him to an ordinary, meager existence. Even after playing in two All-Star games, he felt insecure about his career. “That grand slam was a big moment in my life because baseball wasn’t a game to me as the spectator understands it,” he said. “It was my job and my living and all I knew. Without it, I was going to be digging fence posts back in Commerce or carrying a pick down to the zinc mines.”25
Although the Yankees won their fifth consecutive World Series, Stengel remained disappointed with Mantle. He fixated on his shortcomings. “They had the kid cold,” he said, “and we knew it and we kept telling him he had to cut down on his swing and hit down on the ball.” He reminded Mickey that he didn’t have to knock the leather off the ball. Stengel yammered in his ear, but Mantle just tuned him out.26
By the end of the 1953 season, most baseball writers concluded that Mickey lacked maturity and ambition. After only three seasons, they questioned whether he could overcome persistent injuries and his weaknesses at the plate. Perhaps he had already reached the ceiling of his talent. “If Mantle never achieves greatness,” Joe Trimble wrote in the Saturday Evening Post, “it will probably be because he’s willing to settle for less.”27
“I’M NOT HAVING ANY operation,” Mickey insisted. “That’s final.” The thought of surgery paralyzed him. But when Dr. Dan Yancey, an orthopedist in Springfield, Missouri, showed Mickey his X-rays, he reluctantly agreed to the procedure. On November 2, 1953, Yancey successfully removed part of the cartilage in Mickey’s right knee, but without reconstructive surgery his ACL would never fully heal.28
For the rest of his career—another fifteen seasons—Mickey played with a partially torn ACL. Every day during the season, he bandaged his right leg from ankle to thigh before putting on his uniform. Yankees trainer Joe Soares explained, “His muscles were so large, but his joints—wrists, knees, ankles—were frail. This discrepancy between the awesome muscles and the weak joints caused the vast majority of his muscle tears and injuries.” From the moment he wrecked his right knee in 1951, he favored his left leg, the one weakened at the ankle by chronic osteomyelitis.29
He struggled just to get dressed before games. Cleveland Indians pitcher Early Wynn recalled seeing a trainer wrap Mantle’s legs and ankles with several rolls of tape before an All-Star game. “I watched him bandage that knee—that whole leg—and I saw what he had to go through every day to play,” he remembered. “He was taped from shin to thigh.” Wynn and Mantle’s teammates respected him for playing through throbbing knees, strained hamstrings, and sore ankles. “I’ll tell you who I admired most on the team—Mantle,” Yankees first baseman Bill “Moose” Skowron said years later. “He played when he was hurt.”30
In late 1953, Mantle could not have known that the injury, and the pain, would dog him for the rest of his playing days. After spending eleven days in the hospital and departing on crutches, he anticipated only a long, dull winter. He was supposed to recuperate at home, but when his teammate and friend Billy Martin surprised him in Commerce, Merlyn worried they would get into trouble. She blamed Martin for her husband’s late-night drinking and carousing. Merlyn resented his intrusion, especially since she was nursing her first baby. But Martin didn’t know where else to turn. His wife, Lois, had recently served him with divorce papers, taking their daughter away from him. And his draft board, after reviewing his hardship case and reclassifying him 1-A, called him into service. The thought of not playing baseball with the guys—his second family—devastated him.31
Merlyn was not the only one concerned about Mickey’s friendship with Billy. George Weiss was convinced that Martin corrupted Mantle. The general manager heard rumors that the “M&M boys” stayed out all night like a couple of fraternity brothers. One evening during the 1953 season, they returned to the Kenmore Hotel in Boston a few minutes past midnight. Hurrying toward the lobby entrance after curfew, they noticed Stengel holding court with a group of writers, so they slinked behind the hotel, searching for another door. Prowling down an alley, they spotted a locked door and an open transom window. That gave Martin an idea.32
“I’ll get up on your shoulders,” Billy suggested, “and climb through the window, then I’ll come around and open the door for you.” Wearing a brand-new sharkskin suit, Mickey grudgingly agreed to Billy’s plan. Standing on a garbage can, Mantle boosted him up as Martin stepped onto his shoulders. Billy climbed through the first floor window and momentarily disappeared. When he returned to the window, he poked his head out and explained that he could not unlock the backdoor. “Nighty night, Mickey,” Billy said with a sly grin. “You’re on your own.”33
Fuming, Mickey started stacking garbage cans, but each time he lost his balance, toppling the cans as he fell onto the pavement. Finally, after three or four tries, he pulled himself through the window, covered in garbage. His suit, soiled with rotten lettuce and tomatoes, was ruined. It was a typical Billy and Mickey story, straight out of an Alphonse and Gaston routine. Martin, the city slicker, shrewdly avoids trouble, while Mantle, the overwhelmed rube, stumbles after him.
Later that season, after the Yankees clinched the pennant, Billy, Mickey, Whitey Ford, and a few other players celebrated at the Latin Quarter, a Times Square nightclub known for its brass bands, beautiful chorus girls, and shady clientele. After enjoying drinks and a show, the players and their wives ran up a staggering bill. Feeling generous, Martin tossed a roll of cash onto a table. His teammates refused to let him pay the check, and one of them suggested that they let team owner Dan Topping cover it. “He’s got a million bucks,” the player said, as he signed the check under Topping’s signature. Topping wasn’t amused when he received the bill. Convinced that Martin was behind the prank, he orde
red Weiss to punish each of the players who were with Billy at the night club. with a $500 fine. From that moment forward, the Yankees’ front office scrutinized every move Martin made.34
Mantle and Martin misbehaved everywhere they went. And in the boredom of a Commerce winter, they sought a break from their sorrows: Mickey, still mourning the death of his father, feared his damaged knee might never fully recover, while Martin lamented the end of his marriage and the loss of the upcoming baseball season to military service. Cruising around the icy dirt roads of Commerce, they listened to country music and drank Jack Daniel’s. They lived recklessly, drag racing like two teenagers in a James Dean movie. One time, they were racing so fast that Martin lost control of his Cadillac and crashed it at the bottom of a hill.35
That winter, Mickey rarely stayed home. Merlyn hardly knew when he was coming or going, and she became increasingly concerned about his drinking. Years later he admitted, “The drinking escalated after the ’53 season, when Billy came to live with me and my wife.” For them, drinking became a competition to see which could chug harder and longer than the other. “Billy and I were bad for each other,” he said. “We were always on the go—rushing out the door, telling Merlyn we were going fishing but, instead, heading straight to a bar.”36
Feeling suffocated by the responsibilities of marriage and fatherhood, Mantle often left Merlyn at home alone with the baby while he drank away the day with friends at a local watering hole. Unlike Mutt, who was a constant presence in his son’s life, Mickey was almost indifferent to fatherhood. “I wouldn’t even think about going home,” he said later. When spring training started, he cut back on the booze while he worked off his winter weight. During the season, Mickey, Billy, Whitey, and the guys spent their evenings bar hopping around town.37
A Season in the Sun Page 6
