A Season in the Sun

by Randy Roberts

  Something of the swagger of the younger Babe returned in 1927. Ruth batted third in the lineup, with Lou Gehrig hitting cleanup behind him, which meant pitchers were forced to pitch to Babe. Putting Ruth on base with a walk and bringing Gehrig to the plate was a dangerous strategy in its own right. Better to “pitch and pray” that the Babe of 1927 was not the Babe of 1921. Suddenly it appeared that Ruth had discovered a fountain of youth at the same time that Gehrig emerged in full force. From April to mid-August the two dueled for the home run title, almost daily matching each other in four-baggers. By August 15 the younger man had taken the home run lead: thirty-eight to thirty-six. Gehrig was the first player to challenge Ruth’s home run supremacy. (When Ruth lost the title in 1922 and 1925, he had missed long stretches of the season.)4

  The Bambino responded by hitting two blasts in Chicago to pull alongside Gehrig. The race was still on. By the end of August Babe had hit forty-three home runs, and Gehrig was close behind at forty-one. With a month remaining in the season, the teammates accounted for eighty-four homers, more than any team other than the Yankees had ever hit in a single season. But for all that, Babe was nowhere near his record of fifty-nine. With no one close to the Yankees in the standings, Ruth and Gehrig had no incentive to deliver wins.

  By the second week of September, Gehrig had reached forty-five, but at that point he dropped out of the race. He hit only two more home runs the rest of the regular season. Then, with the pennant won and the season grinding toward the World Series, Ruth sprinted toward immortality. In September 1927 he cemented his legacy. By September 26 he had hit a staggering thirteen home runs that month. And with four games remaining in the season he had raised his home run total to fifty-six, only three behind his single-season record.

  On September 27 he launched fifty-seven, a magnificent grand slam off the Philadelphia Athletics’ future Hall of Famer Robert “Lefty” Grove. The Yankees finished the season in New York with a three-game stand against the Washington Senators. In the first inning of the first game, Ruth hit fifty-eight. Then in the fifth inning he came to the plate with the bases loaded and two out. On a 3–2 count, right-hander Paul Hopkins threw Babe a slow, snakelike curve. “A beautiful curve,” the pitcher reminisced seven decades later. “It was so slow that Ruth started to swing and then hesitated, hitched on it and brought the bat back. And then he swung, breaking his wrists as he came through it. What a great eye he had! He hit it at the right second. Put everything behind it. I can still hear the crack of the bat. I can see the swing.”5

  As Hopkins watched admiringly, fifty-nine sailed over the right-field fence. Improbably, Babe had tied his record, and two games remained in the season.

  Ruth didn’t need both to reach sixty. On a muggy September 30, the Yankees and Senators played a game that was meaningless in the standings, yet all-important for Ruth and the millions of Americans enthralled with his pursuit of the record. With the score tied 2–2 in the eighth inning, he came to the plate. Pitcher Tom Zachary recalled, “Everyone knew he was out for the record, so he wasn’t going to get anything good from me.” On a 1–1 count, Zachary threw a screwball, down and in, ankle high, “as good as I had,” he remembered. Babe swung like a golfer taking a tee shot. As everyone in Yankee Stadium seemed to hold their breath, the ball tracked in a high arch toward the right-field foul pole and then dropped, dropped, dropped—into the bleachers, inches inside the pole. Zachary threw down his glove, yelling, “Foul ball! Foul ball!” and argued with the umpire. But it was already in the books. Sixty! Ruth didn’t even need the final game.6

  Babe celebrated in the clubhouse. “Sixty, count ’em, sixty!” he shouted. “Let’s see some other son of a bitch match that!”7

  NO ONE IN THE NEXT generation of hitters could match the feat. A few hit over fifty home runs, and Jimmie Foxx and Hank Greenberg reached fifty-eight, but well more than half of the home run champions in the major leagues won their crowns with fewer than forty. Ruth’s 60 home runs in a season, as well as his lifetime total of 714, set him apart from all other hitters. Babe Ruth, most baseball experts agreed, was an outlier, a phenomenon, an exception that proved the rule. “Who do you think you are, Babe Ruth?” was an instant rebuke to any player from the Little Leagues to the majors who was a bit too full of himself. There was only one Babe Ruth, and consensus had it that there would never be another. As great as he was, even Joe DiMaggio could not match Babe’s batting average, let alone his home run records.

  Yet, a month into the 1956 season, veteran sportswriters were using the yardstick of Babe Ruth to measure the accomplishments of Mickey Mantle. At the beginning of May, when the Yankees returned to New York for a fourteen-game home stand, low attendance plagued their weekday afternoon games, a continued cause of concern throughout professional baseball. Bill Corum of the New York Journal-American blamed the nasty spring weather and counseled fellow scribes to stop writing about sagging attendance figures. Focusing on the issue, an editor from The Sporting News insisted, only compounded the problem.8

  Mantle was the solution. On May 1 he homered in the first inning against the Detroit Tigers, threw a runner out at home plate from center field, and led the Yankees to a 9–2 victory. So what if only 6,771 spectators attended the contest? They saw Mickey and Whitey Ford at their best. The next day was cold and overcast, with rain and darkness forcing the Yankees to turn on the lights in the seventh inning. New York’s play matched the weather. Ford was not on the mound, and the Tigers clocked Johnny Kucks for eight runs in less than three innings. But Mantle was unaffected by the conditions or the score. In the last inning he prevented a shutout by pounding a home run deep into the right-field stands.9

  The chilly rain in the fifth inning chased away many of the 5,318 spectators, including recently retired heavyweight title holder Rocky Marciano, who watched Mickey’s home run on television in the toasty Stadium Club. Marciano and Mantle were friends and, when both were in New York, often enjoyed dinner and a night on the town together—along with a dozen or more associates and hangers-on. Since Rocky made a practice of never paying for anybody, someone was always with him to pick up the check. Frequently Marciano would appear at an event without a coat and tie, insisting that someone buy one for him. Then at elegant clubs he would overeat, grabbing oily plum tomatoes with his hands, and wiping his fingers on his coat sleeves. And Mickey, along with everyone else, would laugh with the champ as if he had uttered a memorable bon mot.10

  That, Mantle observed, was celebrity style. Men gladly paid to bask in the radiance of a star athlete. They bought drinks, paid hotels bills, purchased clothes; they provided what was necessary to be part of the scene. At the top of the celebrity pyramid stood the heavyweight champion of the world and the best hitter of the New York Yankees—Jack Dempsey and Babe Ruth in the 1920s, Joe Louis and Joe DiMaggio in the 1930s and 1940s, and Rocky and Mickey in the 1950s. Marciano’s boorishness and Mantle’s sullen indifference were a product of the same irreducible fact: It just didn’t matter. As long as they knocked out opponents and belted out home runs, they could do or say almost anything. They got a pass, a get-out-of-jail-free card.

  In 1956, as Marciano’s star faded, Mantle’s brightened. The wind of celebrity was at his back—the Yankees were winning, and he was seeing the ball as if it were the size of a grapefruit. The Kansas City Athletics came to town for a three-game series, and the Yanks won two. Mickey went 2–4 with a home run in an 8–7 loss in the first game, then 2–3 in the second, and in the final contest of the series pounded two more homers. The first blast landed in the right-field upper deck; the second kicked off the facade of the upper deck and bounded back onto the field. When the Saturday Ladies’ Day game ended, Mantle had raised his season home run total to nine and his batting average to .433.11

  Nine homers in sixteen games was nothing less than Ruthian. After the Kansas City series the ghost of the Bambino haunted virtually every newspaper’s sports section. “The time has come, perhaps, to acknowledge that Babe Ruth’s record
of 60 home runs in a single season is in greater jeopardy than ever before,” wrote Shirley Povich. “Another fellow with Yankee lettering across his chest, Mickey Mantle, is taking such dead aim at the record that his challenge must be honored even with the season only three weeks old.”12

  Povich admitted that some fans would be saddened to see Ruth’s 1927 total surpassed—“The Babe’s record comes closer to being sanctified than any other in baseball.” And he confessed that other experts might think he was ludicrously premature to talk about records while spring was still in the air. “But Mantle is a very special challenger. He hits the ball farther than anybody since Ruth, and some of his blows in Yankee Stadium have reached sectors that not even the Babe’s wallops attained.” No doubt about it, Povich concluded, Mantle had the talent to break the record. His power from both sides of the plate, increased patience in the batter’s box, and advantage of hitting in front of Yogi Berra were auspicious signs. Joseph M. Sheehan of the New York Times agreed, emphasizing that in 1927 Ruth didn’t hit his ninth home run until his twenty-ninth game.13

  MANTLE’S TORRID PACE piqued the interest of fans as well as sportswriters. On May 6, 49,016 spectators paid to watch him in a doubleheader against the Chicago White Sox. He collected two hits, drew two walks, and scored twice as New York swept Chicago, an unspectacular performance by his standards. But his presence dominated the day. He was all that the players and coaches wanted to discuss. White Sox manager Marty Marion had predicted his team stood a good chance of winning the pennant, but after watching Mantle he changed his mind. “All I talked about [during the pregame meeting] was how to pitch to Mantle,” he told reporters. “A fellow’s got to throw very hard and in a spot to get Mantle out,” he explained. “And there aren’t many in the league who can throw that hard.… He’s really great. Looks wonderful.”14

  In 1956 the Babe’s monument in center field of Yankee Stadium cast a long shadow over Mickey Mantle as he chased Ruth’s single-season home run record. His pursuit of Ruth’s feat made him the story of the season. Both Yankee sluggers fulfilled American desires for heroes who demonstrated awesome power. Courtesy of Getty Images.

  And he did look wonderful. But, as always with Mickey, looks were deceiving. Despite appearing virtually indestructible, his body was sometimes as fragile as a Fabergé egg. Sportswriters knew his injury history and watched him on the field as closely as a thoroughbred trainer scrutinized a Kentucky Derby winner, looking for some hitch in his gait or grimace of pain. An end to Mickey’s brilliance was only a misstep away.

  In the second game against Chicago, he slightly pulled a muscle in his left groin. He pronounced himself fine, and two days later prepared to play in an afternoon contest against the Cleveland Indians. But on his first swing in batting practice, he fouled the ball onto his foot. Wincing, he limped out of the batter’s box. He had injured his right big toe and, after a few painful steps, headed toward the clubhouse, where the trainer iced his foot. He returned to the dugout a few minutes before the start of the game. A hole was cut in his shoe to take pressure off the swollen toe. Casey Stengel looked at the foot and asked, “Do you want to play?” It was Mickey’s call.15

  “You bet your life I want to play,” Mantle snapped. He knew Stengel’s question was a gambit in a psychological game.

  “Okay, you’re in,” Casey said.

  Mickey hit a home run and a single off future Hall of Famer Early Wynn to pace the Yankees for a 4–3 victory. It was his tenth homer of the season, but his injury was the story in the next day’s papers. Stengel thought it proved he could hit against the best pitchers in the league—even when he was hurt. Sportswriters reported it as another indication of how brittle the slugger’s body was. Although he had looked great at the plate, he had played the outfield cautiously, like an older player limping toward the end of his career.

  Mantle moved better the next day and, the day after that, swatted his eleventh home run of the season. During the same contest, a loss to the Indians, Yogi Berra hit his tenth homer. Stengel’s strategy was working perfectly. As long as Yogi remained hot, opposing pitchers did not have the luxury of playing coy with Mickey. They had to give him something in the strike zone, and he responded by ripping the ball. Not only was he far ahead of Ruth’s 1927 pace, but his batting average was inching close to .450. These were statistics worthy of celebration.

  Not that Mantle needed much of an excuse. After two years in the army, Billy Martin was back playing full-time with the Yankees. The army had granted him a temporary leave late in the 1955 season for the stretch run and the World Series, but after the Yankees lost to the Dodgers, he had returned to Fort Carson, Colorado. By the beginning of the 1956 season Casey Stengel’s favorite troublemaker had received his discharge papers as well as a divorce decree from a Berkeley court. With money in his pocket—something he had seldom had on his military pay—he was ready to play ball and resume his nighttime sprees with Hank Bauer, Whitey Ford, and especially Mickey.16

  FOR YOUNG, FAMOUS BALLPLAYERS in the 1950s, the lights of Manhattan beckoned like a wonderland. It was an eastern version of a Wild West cattle town. The saloons were open all night, beautiful women were only a nod away, and sports reporters stuffed away their note pads. Although a gossip columnist might write an innocuous line or two, generally what transpired after the moon came out was off-limits. What happened at night outside Yankee Stadium died with the morning’s first light.

  With his wife still in Oklahoma, Mickey operated out of a tiny suite at the St. Moritz Hotel at 50 Central Park South, on the east side of Sixth Avenue. A historian of the city described the thirty-eight-story building as “a picturesque cliff, amidst towering trees to the north and other soaring skyscrapers to the south.” Completely redecorated in 1950, the hotel featured redesigned rooms, the sidewalk restaurant Café de la Paix, and Rumpelmayer’s tea and pastry shop. Mantle wasn’t much of a tea drinker or, for that matter, a sidewalk-café sitter, but the St. Moritz was perfectly located for sampling less refined haunts that served stronger drinks.17

  Mantle, Martin, Ford, and other Yankees regularly ate at Danny’s Hideaway on Steak Row along East 45th Street. It was Martin’s favorite restaurant. Opened in the mid-1940s as a small bistro with Danny Stradella taking orders and tending the bar and Mamma Rosa cooking the meals, it became popular and expanded, eventually becoming the largest establishment along Steak Row. It attracted celebrity actors and writers. In 1956 Mantle and Martin met Elizabeth Taylor, Mike Todd, and Rock Hudson in Danny’s. The actors had just finished filming Giant, and Danny wanted a photograph of the entire group. Of course, the ballplayers agreed. After all, Stradella loved the Yankees, and Mickey never saw a tab on one of his tables. It was one of the smaller benefits of his status.18

  Some celebrities, to be sure, were renowned for their generosity—none more than Frank Sinatra, generally recognized as the biggest tipper in show business. When he was in New York every door opened. Once, during a slow day at the restaurant Toots Shor’s, Joey Rivera, one of the waiters, approached Toots himself and whispered something in his ear. “Okay, set up the table,” he replied.

  Less than an hour later Sinatra arrived with about twenty people. They had come from the cemetery where they had put Frank’s father to rest. Sportswriter Jack Lang recalled, “They sat down, with Sinatra at the head of the table, had one round of drinks, got up, and left.” The next day the singer tipped every waiter and every captain $100. “When Frank comes in, he pays the rent,” said Rivera.19

  Mantle had learned the rules of the celebrity game watching Joe DiMaggio and Rocky Marciano—not Frank Sinatra—and neither paid any restaurateur’s rent. Both were cheap on a heroic scale, but in a head-to-head contest the ballplayer would probably have edged out the boxer. Throughout his illustrious career DiMaggio dined regularly at Rao’s, an exclusive southern Italian restaurant on East 114th Street. For years, while the tiny place was run by Vincent and Anna Rao, there was always a table for DiMaggio and never a bill at the end of
the dinner. After they died, their relatives Ron Straci and Frank Pellegrino followed the same policy. Even in old age, DiMaggio always ate on the house. That is, until the day Pellegrino requested a small favor. He waited until Joe had finished his coffee and then asked him for an autograph for a young boy at another table.20

  “You know, Frankie, I get paid for signing autographs,” DiMaggio said.

  As he left the restaurant Pellegrino told him, “Joe, you are not welcome here anymore.”

  It was a sentence he never heard at Toots Shor’s. Newspapermen, writers, movie and stage stars, and athletes went to Toot’s primarily to drink, though the food served there was more than acceptable. Located at 51 West 51st Street, close to the St. Moritz, Toots Shor’s was designed for people to see each other and be seen. Walking past the American colonial facade, a visitor entered the lobby and immediately noticed a large circular bar, fifty-four feet in circumference, which after a ballgame in Yankee Stadium or a fight in Madison Square Garden was normally packed, often three or four deep. “That’s my roulette wheel,” Toots explained. Journalist John Bainbridge said that the place was “as devoid of subtlety and fussy trimming as a boxing ring.” Unlike the Stork or the 21 Club, it oozed a masculine comfort—plank oak floors, redbrick and knotty-pine walls, red-leather upholstered bar stools. The main dining room was open and well lit with a high vaulted ceiling and an enormous brick fireplace. Beyond the showcase territory, there were other rooms and bars where the noncelebrities were seated and served.21

  Toots, a big, loud, backslapping man, seemed to live in his establishment. The restaurant opened at noon every day but Sunday, when the doors were unlocked at four. It closed at four in the morning, except on Saturday, when it closed at three. When it was open, Toots worked the main rooms, a drink in one of his large fists, a wisecrack or an insult on his lips, and an eye always out for a more famous celebrity. He judged celebrities like a jockey appraises horseflesh; he had an unerring sense of who was up and who was down, who was hot and who was at the absolute top. He entertained fixtures of the stage and screen, sportswriters and columnists, and television actors and literary figures, but he favored athletes above anyone else. They were the gods of Toots Shor’s. And the saloon was the recognized center of New York sports.