A Season in the Sun

by Randy Roberts

  In the sixth inning, Cincinnati’s Ted Kluszewski, built like a tight end, fouled a ball off Berra’s bare right hand. His pinky and ring finger had turned black and blue, but the indispensable Yankee didn’t think much of it. Getting dinged behind the plate was all part of a day’s work. After skipping an appointment with the team physician, Dr. Sidney Gaynor, the catcher told writers, “My hand’s okay. It’s still puffed up, but I can tape it up and I can bat and throw so I’ll be able to play.”38

  Although Berra planned to catch after the break, reporters still doubted his health—and Mantle’s. Mickey may have hit a home run during the All-Star game, but he didn’t look like himself. Writers asked Gaynor, could Mickey continue to pivot on that fragile knee? Could he roam center field with that bulky brace? The doctor had watched Mantle play during the game, noting his agility running down balls in the outfield gaps. With the wry creativity of a Yankees PR man, he eluded the questions with one of his own. “Was he able to run to right field?”39

  THE YANKEES OPENED THE second half of the season 6.5 games ahead of the Cleveland Indians and the Chicago White Sox and had a chance to extend their lead in the standings with six games in five days. First, they played the Indians in a three-game series in New York, drubbing Cleveland in the first two contests 9–5 and 10–0. The third game, on July 14, however, proved far more challenging, with Indians ace Herb Score on the mound. After Don Larsen surrendered three runs in the top of the fourth, with the Yankees still scoreless, Casey Stengel pulled his starting pitcher for reliever Tommy Byrne, who prevented the Indians from scoring with the bases loaded.40

  With his team still trailing Cleveland 3–0, Mantle carried his bat to the right side of the plate, favoring his aching leg. Score, a tall, young lefty, was one of the hardest-throwing pitchers in the American League. A year earlier, he had won the Rookie of the Year award, leading the league in strikeouts. Facing Mantle with one out and nobody on base, he took a big windup, turning his body away from Mickey, uncoiled, and fired the ball toward the plate. Mantle swung hard, grunting through his teeth, smashing the ball more than four hundred feet into the Indians’ bullpen in left field. It was Mantle’s thirtieth home run but only his first since July 1. Two innings later, after he popped up to first base, Elston Howard replaced him in the lineup. For the rest of the day Mickey sat on the bench resting his sore leg.41

  By July 15, after the Yankees beat the White Sox in both games of a doubleheader, sportswriters declared that the Yankees, leading the American League by 10.5 games, had won the pennant. “Barring a miracle,” Robert Creamer wrote, “the pennant race is over, no sudden losing streak or winning splurge from now through that last Sunday in September is going to change the American League entry in the 1956 World Series.”42

  Three days later the Detroit Tigers snapped the Yankees’ eleven-game winning streak. But, as Creamer had suggested, it changed nothing. Since June 25, the Yankees had won eighteen of twenty games. After the Yanks fell to the Tigers, the New York Daily Mirror’s Leonard Lewin yawned. “Ho hum!” he wrote. “How boring can AL baseball get? No fights with fans. No gutless charges. No foot races. Just another routine 450-foot homer by Mickey Mantle, his 31st… and a not so routine defeat for the Yankees.”43

  Although they lost, Mantle thrilled the crowd every time he swung the bat. “Even when he strikes out as he did in the ninth, when a homer would have put the Bombers within one,” Lewin wrote, “the fans get a bang of it.” With every ferocious cut, fans anticipated another prodigious blast. When Mantle missed, he missed like Casey in Mudville, causing the crowd to tremble with a chorus of “oohs,” imagining what might have been had he connected. A year earlier, his failures at the plate brought a shower of boos, but now he had made believers out of those who had once doubted him. This season he gave the fans what they had long desired. Witnessing his past failures and seeing him overcome injuries and disappointment made fans appreciate his greatness as never before. Now they cheered for him even when he faltered at the plate.44

  Since most writers believed that the Yankees had already clinched the pennant, they focused most of their attention on Mantle. Not until the World Series began in October, they reasoned, would the team be relevant again. Starting in mid-July, baseball fans could open the sports section, skip the game summary, and find a box score dedicated solely to Mickey’s plate appearances. Everything a fan wanted to know about his day could be found on page thirty-nine in the July 19th edition of the New York Daily Mirror:

  Mantle At Bat

  1st—Hit 450-foot homer.

  3rd—Took third strike.

  5th—Hit 450-foot sacrifice fly.

  7th—Beat out two-strike drag bunt.

  9th—Fanned to end the game.

  The Yankees’ loss to the Tigers offered little comfort to the team’s critics. Anyone who despised them—and the list was long—grumbled, as usual, that the Bronx Bombers simply had far better players than every other club in the American League and probably the National League too. Why were the Yankees so dominant? “Talent!” an American League manager barked. The Yankees’ roster was filled with All-Stars. “Stengel’s got players on his bench who’d make a better team than some of the teams we have in the majors right now,” the manager complained. It all seemed so unfair.45

  To make matters worse, the Yankees had a hitter who could single-handedly change the outcome of a game. So why were the Yankees so dominant? The team’s executive office secretary believed she had the answer. Smiling, she replied, “We’ve got Mickey Mantle.”46

  MICKEY DIDN’T KNOW what to say. Throughout July writers asked him why he was having the best season of his career. When Dan Daniel inquired, Mantle searched for an adequate answer but could only offer a question of his own. “Let me ask you that question,” he said to the columnist from the New York World-Telegram and Sun. “What’s your explanation of my improvement?” Mantle preferred to let his performance on the field do the talking. In his mind, baseball was a simple game. Pitchers threw the ball, and he hit it. What else could he say?47

  Daniel believed his hitting strategy was more sophisticated than that, even if Mickey could not communicate it. “The chief reason is that you have eliminated your blind spot in batting,” he said. “Right up to this season pitchers of the American League knew that when you were hitting left-handed, a tight pitch letter high was your weak point.” Daniel observed that Mantle began moving away from the plate during spring training, which helped him avoid getting tied up with high fastballs. “You now see the pitch better,” Daniel recognized. Mantle could not explain his batting adjustment nearly as well as the columnist. “You’ve got something there,” Mickey said, adding little to the conversation. “I tried stepping back from the plate during the training season, and it felt good. I decided to stay with it.”48

  Even though Mantle was more forthcoming in 1956 than in seasons past, reporters still complained that his overall reticence made their jobs more difficult. “He’s not witty,” the Boston Globe’s Harold Kaese complained, “not quick on the trigger. He’s not fancy, smart, or clever. He has a positive distaste for interviews and photograph sessions.” Stengel defended Mickey. “Sure,” he said, “I’ve heard about Mantle’s being called dumber than Ned-in-the-Third-Reader.” In “Stengelese” that meant he’d heard people call Mantle naive. “If that’s so, I could use a few more like him around.”49

  Although interviews with Mantle frequently left writers with blank notebooks, they were grateful that his loquacious manager could talk for a couple hours about him. Seeking their admiration, Stengel courted writers like a politician running for reelection. Those he trusted most—“my writers,” he called them—benefitted from private conversations in the clubhouse or dugout. He took the time to learn their names, which paper they wrote for, and whether they had an afternoon deadline or a morning one. The afternoon writers, he understood, needed good material—stories that could fill columns—before the games were played.50

  Yet Stengel’
s speech patterns often dumbfounded reporters. He used all sorts of odd phrases that made sense only to him. If he was going to take a nap, he would say, “If anyone wants me, tell them I’m being embalmed.” Scouting talent, he called inferior players “road apples,” a good fielder was a “plumber,” and a rookie was a “green pea.” Praising his guys, Casey would say, “He done splendid.” He admired tough players, the kind who “could squeeze your earbrows off.” He also warned Mantle, Martin, Ford, and the other playboys on the team—the guys who were “whiskey slick”—not to stay out too late chasing women. In fact, he was less concerned about the conquests than the pursuit. “It ain’t getting it that hurts them,” he said. “It’s staying up all night looking for it. They gotta learn that if you don’t get it by midnight, you ain’t gonna get it, and if you do, it ain’t worth it.”51

  At any moment he could launch into a monologue without “subjects or predicates or conjunctions or coherence.” He spoke in constant animation, contorting his leathery “gargoyle face” into twisted winks, waving his arms like an orchestra conductor. Stengel took wide detours when he told stories, bringing his hand over his mouth “long enough to wipe out an entire sentence.” One time when a reporter asked him a question, Casey offered a forty-minute reply. Exasperated, the writer said, “Casey, you haven’t answered my question.” Stengel replied, “Don’t rush me.”52

  Casey was completely comfortable talking to anyone, anywhere, anytime. Dining cars, bars, locker rooms, and hotel lobbies all served as his stage. Without a hint of self-consciousness, he would undress after games in front of reporters. As he unbuttoned his uniform and took off his pants, he would stop to make a point, flipping his hand. “He had a lot of gestures,” Robert Creamer recalled. Casey had “a curious way of raising his chin high, his mouth closed in a grim, serious line, his eyes half closed, as he listened to someone else.” Then he would finish stripping, removing his underwear and the jockstrap that he had worn as if he might have to take the field in a pinch. Wearing nothing but slippers, the gray-haired sexagenarian marched through the locker room with a towel draped over his forearm “like a toga, looking for all the world like a Roman senator on his way to the baths.” As he headed for the showers, the writers trailed behind, listening to him pontificate. Watching him, Creamer thought it was “a bizarre spectacle, this naked old man parading through a room full of hard-muscled young athletes, but Stengel never gave a sign that he recognized the incongruity.” And, of course, the conversation didn’t end when Casey began scrubbing himself. If a reporter missed something he had said, Stengel poked his head out of the shower to make sure that the writer heard him clearly.53

  In 1956, it was easy to get him to talk about his favorite subject: Mickey Mantle. He had so much to say about him that Tom Meany wrote an article for Collier’s titled “As Casey Stengel Sees Mickey Mantle.” Stengel raved about Mickey. Mantle, he said, could blaze down the first base line faster than any other player: “The boy can fly!” He had more natural power than any hitter Casey had ever seen: “He hit one into those upper right-field stands in Detroit. Seats were flyin’ round for five minutes.” Mickey was far and away the best switch hitter in the game: “You don’t find many fellas with tremendous power from both sides of the plate, which he has shown he has.”54

  Mantle’s switch-hitting fascinated Meany. Mickey told him a story about how during a game against Baltimore, Bill Wight, a left-handed pitcher, had run up a full count against him. It was the ninth inning, with a runner on first, nobody out, and the Orioles leading by five runs, manager Paul Richards called for a right-handed reliever during Mantle’s at bat. When Mickey noticed George Zuverink trotting out to the mound, he went back to the dugout and pulled another bat from the rack. “I use a 36-ounce bat right-handed and a 32-ounce bat left-handed,” he said. Now batting left-handed, he smashed Zuverink’s pitch into center field for a double.55

  Sportswriters and fans debated whether Mantle could hit the ball harder from the right side of the plate or the left. By July, he had hit about two-thirds of his homers from the left side—though because of the prominence of right-handed pitchers, he had had far more at bats on that side—but he hit for a higher average from the right side. “Tell ya how it is,” Casey said with an exaggerated wink. “There’s some say he hits with more power right-handed and others say, ‘No, he does it left-handed.’” The Ole Professor admitted that he didn’t really know if Mantle hit the ball harder from one side or the other. “Now, he’s a natural right-hander, except at the plate. He throws, shaves, eats, and writes right-handed. Now you’d think a fella’d be bound to have more power one way than another, wouldn’t you? But with this kid, I dunno.”

  Mantle’s ambidexterity impressed Stengel less than his “physical courage.” By the third week of July, Mickey had stopped wearing the brace on his right knee, but he was still an injury risk. Ever since he first twisted his right knee on a drain cover in the 1951 World Series, Mantle had been one false step away from a career-ending sprain or tear. Stunned that Mantle could play at such a high level, Casey said, “Thing too many people overlook about him is that he’s been doing all he has been doing this year as a cripple.” Mickey still had to have his right leg wrapped from the top of the right ankle all the way to the top of his thigh. Gus Mauch wrapped the bandage so tight that it nearly cut off Mickey’s circulation, numbing his leg. It took the trainer so long to mummify him that Mantle would get taped before the first game of a doubleheader and wear the same wrappings for the second game too.56

  Casey Stengel wanted hard-nosed winners, not choirboys, on his team. Mantle, Yogi Berra, and Hank Bauer suited him perfectly. They helped continue the Yankee dynasty.Courtesy of the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

  Given Mickey’s pain, it’s remarkable that he didn’t ask Stengel for more days off. But that wasn’t his way. He was a product of a mining culture. If a man didn’t go down into the mine, he didn’t get paid. The laborers who toiled in the Blue Goose mine prized stoicism as much as they valued strength. Complaining was a sign of weakness. Who didn’t work when sick or hurt? His father never complained about the aches he suffered toiling in the ground, so Mickey never considered grousing about his own discomfort. Besides, he was paid to play a game. Dwelling on injuries and allowing them to keep him out of the lineup just wasn’t an option for a man who grew up in Commerce.

  FOR SEVEN CONSECUTIVE GAMES, from July 22 to July 29, Mantle failed to hit a homer. He had scorched so many pitchers that none wanted to test him anymore. When he batted, pitchers nibbled around the corners of the strike zone; some bounced the ball at the plate; others hoped to get him to swing at junk a mile outside. A year earlier, he would have become frustrated and chased bad pitches, but now he was more focused. He remained patient at the plate, maintaining his batting average at .370, seventeen points ahead of Ted Williams.57

  Reporters quizzed Mantle about his home run drought. Did it bother him that his lead over Ruth’s 1927 pace was slipping? “I don’t hope to beat Ruth’s record or even give it a close battle, especially now that the pitchers won’t give me a chance,” he said. He admitted that he would have preferred to win the Triple Crown because it would prove that he had become a better all-around hitter. Besides, no switch-hitter had ever led the American League in batting average.58

  On Monday night, July 30, Mantle broke his power slump and made sure that Casey Stengel would never forget his sixty-sixth birthday. At Cleveland Stadium, in the top of the second inning, Mantle faced Bob Lemon with the bases loaded. Lemon tossed a ball right over the plate, and Mantle crushed it more than four hundred feet into the right-field bleachers for his first grand slam of the season. A year earlier, he had hit .203 against the Indians’ rotation, the best staff in the American League; this season he was batting .371. Later that evening, he hit a two-run home run—his thirty-fourth—off Bob Feller. For the sixth time of the year, he had hit two home runs in one game. The second kept him well ahead of Ruth’s record pace.59

 
; Still, Ruth had hit an incredible number of home runs in the last month of the season, so even with Mickey out ahead of him at a corresponding point in July, it was far from certain that he’d be able to match or break the Bambino’s record. As for the Triple Crown, however, that seemed all but wrapped up, which was perhaps the more impressive feat, especially so soon after the season’s midpoint. By the end of July he owned a commanding lead in all three hitting categories. Although he had only hit seven home runs that month, he still led all hitters by nine. And not only did he lead Williams by a wide margin in the batting-title competition, but he had eighty-nine RBIs, eleven more than the American League’s next best run producer, Cleveland’s Vic Wertz.

  It seemed that nobody was going to challenge Mantle’s hold on the RBI lead—except there was a stir in Detroit. The Tigers’ twenty-one-year-old right fielder, Albert William Kaline, had started driving the ball all over the field. The defending batting champion, a handsome young hitter who modeled his swing after Ted Williams’s, had started the season nursing a shoulder injury that hindered his hitting through April. It was just the beginning of a season of ailments. The following month he hurt his foot, and in early July he caught the flu and lost seven pounds in three days. His popularity among fans earned him a starting spot on the All-Star team, but he looked nothing like the promising hitter from 1955.60

  Once Kaline regained his strength after the mid-season break, Detroit’s manager Bucky Harris moved him back one spot in the batting order, penciling him in at cleanup. With two All-Stars, shortstop Harvey Kuehn and left fielder Charlie Maxwell, hitting in front of him—each was batting well over .320—Kaline had frequent opportunities to drive home runners. Starting on July 30, he went on a tear comparable, that season, only to one of Mantle’s. In seven games he raised his average from .290 to .307 and drove home sixteen runs, eleven of which came against the Yankees during the Tigers’ three-game sweep at Briggs Stadium. In just one week, Kaline had cut Mantle’s RBI lead from twenty to only eight. “Maybe Kaline can’t repeat as the league batting champion,” Harris said, “but it looks like he’ll give somebody a chase.”61