A Season in the Sun

by Randy Roberts

  Ruth’s record was not the only mark in Mantle’s sights. The Triple Crown was also within reach, forcing him to be more disciplined at the plate. Consistent excellence at the plate won the batting title and, in conjunction with teammates who got into scoring position, the crown for RBIs. Altogether Mickey faced an unprecedented September of opportunities, challenges, and pressures. Before that month baseball fans and reporters only demanded that he play great. But now they wanted him to accomplish what Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, and even Babe Ruth had not. To satisfy their lofty ambitions, Mickey would have to be the best who had ever lived.

  THE TOWERING HOME RUN that thrilled President Eisenhower was Mantle’s only hit of the day in Washington. In his other four trips to the plate, he walked, grounded out, and struck out twice. His homer accounted for his only RBI. In Briggs Stadium later that night, Al Kaline led the Tigers to a comfortable 6–1 victory over the Athletics. The sensational young batter collected three hits and five RBIs. A month earlier it appeared as if Mickey would stroll to the Triple Crown. His .371 batting average and thirty-five home runs put him far ahead of his competitors. He even had a comfortable lead in RBIs, owning eighty-nine to Kaline’s seventy-two. But by the end of August his advantage had shrunk to 118–107—still impressive, but with Kaline driving pitches to every field, far from safe.13

  Al Kaline was something close to Mantle’s doppelgänger. Not that he looked like Mickey. Physically he was lean and bandy-legged, a Walter Mitty compared to Mantle’s heavily muscled Adonis. The resemblance went deeper. Both had suffered through the pain and uncertainty of osteomyelitis; Kaline’s illness had led a surgeon to cut two inches of bone out of his left foot. And both were sons of struggling blue-collar men who believed that their sons’ mastery of hitting a ball offered the only path out of poverty. Mickey’s dad worked in a lead mine, Kaline’s in a Baltimore broom factory. And both fathers suffered from illnesses. Like Mantle, Kaline’s dad and uncles played semiprofessional baseball and tutored their boy in the finer points of the sport. And partially as a result, both boys excelled almost immediately. Before Kaline was ten he was playing in pickup games with grown men in a vacant lot in Baltimore. At eleven he threw a softball 173 feet, 6 inches. In four varsity years at Southern High, he hit .333, .418, .469, and .488, earning a berth on the All-Maryland team each year and winning the Lou Gehrig Trophy at the annual Hearst All-Star Game in New York.14

  Al was a phenom. Detroit’s legendary scout Al Katalinas watched him play at fifteen and recalled, “He was one of the golden boys.” Baseball was his ticket out of the working-class east side of Baltimore and to a better life. In the summer he played in multiple leagues, across multiple age groups. Relatives drove him from one game to the next while he changed uniforms in the back seat of the car. There was no time to be a kid, no freedom to go swimming with the neighborhood gang or to the beach with a girl. “You’re gonna have to work hard and you’re gonna have to suffer if you’re gonna be a ballplayer,” his dad told him. “You’re gonna have to play and play all the time.” And he did. Sweating in the heat and humidity of Baltimore summers, grinding at the plate against pitchers years older than him, practicing hitting until his hands were blistered and bleeding, Al Kaline made the most of his immense talents.15

  Baltimore was not like remote Commerce and scouts soon learned of Kaline’s skills. The rules of the day mandated that a team could not sign a player until he graduated from high school, so Katalinas requested a meeting with him at one minute after midnight on the day after graduation. Kaline was on a date, but the scout met with the boy and his father in the morning and sealed the deal. Kaline signed a $30,000 “bonus-baby” contract with Detroit that required him to jump directly into the major leagues. Only eighteen, he was playing with and against the best. In 1954, his first full season with the Tigers, he hit .276. The next year he accounted for two hundred hits and raised his average to .340. At the age of twenty! He was the youngest player ever to win an American League batting title. That year he outhit Mantle by thirty-four points and Willie Mays by twenty-one.16

  His fabulous season had unintended, if predicable, consequences. Like Mantle’s sudden appearance in a Yankees uniform, Kaline’s early batting crown brought with it impossibly high expectations. The praise was immediate and staggering, though not quite on the same level as the response to Mantle, in part owing to the fact that Kaline did not play in New York. “There’s a hitter,” said Ted Williams. “In my book he’s the greatest right-handed hitter in the league.” Paul Richards, Baltimore’s field manager and general manager, agreed, predicting, “That kid in Detroit, Al Kaline, won’t fall short of Joe DiMaggio.” Another experienced manager concurred. “The fellow is amazing. You ask yourself four questions. Can he throw? And the answer is yes. Can he field the ball. And you answer yes. Is he active on the bases? Yes, you’d have to say yes. And then, can he drive in runs? The real test. And again you say yes. So he is an amazing fellow.”17

  In just his third full season, Detroit Tigers outfielder Al Kaline was already a sensation. He had won the American League batting title in 1955 and, after a slow start in 1956, went on an RBI-producing tear comparable only to Mickey Mantle’s. His hitting prowess kept pressure on Mantle’s hold as the RBI leader until the final game of the regular season. Courtesy of the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

  Now, in September 1956, Kaline, as shy and reticent as Mickey but just as determined to excel, was tracking the Yankee slugger. Although his batting average was far below Mantle’s, he was gaining ground in RBIs. All he needed was a great September and perhaps a slight stumble by Mickey. And why couldn’t he catch him? In 1956 there was still no reason to question Williams’s judgment that Kaline was the game’s premier right-handed hitter.

  Williams, of course, was not about to confer the title of the game’s greatest overall hitter on Kaline. Nor was he inclined to concede the batting crown to Mantle. For Ted, Mickey and Al were kids, talented certainly, but they had not been through the fire. He had fought in two foreign wars, and at home he had battled Boston scribes and fans. He had come up to the big leagues in 1939, when Mantle was eight and Kaline five. And he believed he knew more about hitting—and was better at it—than any man alive. Most players agreed. “He’s the best hitter I ever saw,” Mantle confessed.

  Entering September with his team out of contention, Williams sought to salvage his own season. On August 31, while Mickey was entertaining the president, the Red Sox were getting mauled by the Orioles. But Williams went 3–5, raising his batting average to .346, eighteen points behind Mickey. Teddy Ballgame was ready for another run at the batting title.18

  WITHIN EARSHOT OF columnist Red Smith, the guys were talking about sports. The tight National League race between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Milwaukee Braves, the upcoming welterweight title rematch in Syracuse between Carmen Basilio and Johnny Saxton, Johnny Sullivan breaking Willie Troy’s jaw in St. Nick’s Arena—they touched on all the topics of the day. Then one of them “brought out a sleeper.” “What ever became of Mickey Mantle?”19

  “Maybe it was a trick question but it was a live one,” Smith observed. “Ten days ago Mr. Muscles was making bigger headlines than Nasser,” the Egyptian president locked in an international crisis with Great Britain, France, and Israel. “As of now… he is a strapping young man who also plays with the Yankees, same as Yogi Berra and Hank Bauer and that implausible old gentleman, Mr. Enos Slaughter.” No longer, it seemed, was he the toast of the town, the darling of Toots Shor’s, and the savior of baseball. Now he appeared sadly mortal, struggling to stay in front of Ted Williams and Al Kaline. It seemed, at least to Smith, that there was no room on Mount Olympus for anyone but Ruth.

  Maybe, thought the Boston Globe’s Harold Kaese, Mickey was another victim of the September curse. “A few days ago,” he wrote on September 10, “it was the National League’s pennant race against the American League’s Mickey Mantle. Now it is no longer a contest. All that’s left is the National League
pennant race.” At the moment he needed it most, when his name seemed to be on everyone’s lips and his every movement was being scrutinized, Mickey had lost his power. In the first twelve days of September he failed to hit a home run, and now with seventeen games remaining, he needed to hit thirteen just to tie the Babe—a 1,000-to-1 shot, Kaese believed.20

  For the Boston columnist, the real question was whether Mantle could still capture the Triple Crown. Williams had moved within eleven points of him in the batting contest, and Kaline was only four behind in the RBI race. But Mickey shouldn’t feel ashamed. “He has had a fine season,” wrote Kaese, pointing out that “better batters than Mantle”—including Ted Williams—had stumbled in September. In the last weeks of the 1949 season, “when pitchers are sharp and strong, the ball is colder and deader, and shadows fall darkly over home plate,” Williams had lost the batting title to George Kell by .0002 points (.3427 to .3429)—just one more hit and Ted would have secured the batting title and the Triple Crown.21

  A fine season? Better batters than Mantle? What had happened? How had Mantle become mortal? And how had he done so in such a beguilingly quick fashion?

  The pressure to produce like he had all season, the burden to outduel baseball’s greatest legend, proved stultifying. After entertaining President Eisenhower so royally on August 31, Mantle experienced a “September jinx,” a term for an unexplainable slump. He later said that in early September he “couldn’t get a homer if the pitcher told me what was coming.” “Where was President Eisenhower when I really needed him?” he quipped.22

  He started September badly, going 0–5 in two games against Washington and 3–8 in a doubleheader versus Baltimore. At the end of the second contest, the Baltimore-born George Herman Ruth Jr. had caught Mantle. That is, Mickey had lost his lead against the Babe. In 133 games both men had hit forty-seven homers, and to make matters even more dire for Mantle, Ruth hit two in his 134th contest. As if he needed any more pressure, he now knew he had to clout his forty-eighth and forty-ninth against Boston on September 5 or fall behind Ruth. It was a “phantom race,” Red Smith declared, but a race nonetheless—and increasingly, he believed, one that Mickey had little chance of winning. Ruth’s late September surge was simply unique. In the last ten games of the season he swatted eleven homers, a feat that Mickey was not likely to duplicate. “However,” Smith speculated, Mantle “is already almost dead sure of winning the batsman’s triple crown, a three-ply title which always escaped Ruth.”23

  Mickey did not hit two against the Red Sox. Nor did he hit one. Instead, he began to press, swinging hard at pitches just off the edge of the plate. It was the classic vicious cycle: the more he slumped, the more he pressed, and the more he pressed, the more he slumped. He had become a favorite of American League pitchers who rarely gave him anything to hit and watched him swing anyway.24

  Mantle looked completely lost at the plate. “Some said that the pressure about Ruth’s record was wearing me down,” he said later. “But I didn’t even think about hitting a homer. All I wanted was a single—anything. That batting average was dropping every day and I couldn’t even bunt. I would jab it back at the pitcher or pop to the third baseman.” He didn’t know what to do.25

  The days passed in a funk of broken bats and dented water coolers. In a string of six games he managed just two hits in twenty at bats. No home runs, no RBIs, and a batting average dropping like the Dow Jones during a recession. Ruth’s record seemed a mere mirage in the distance. And suddenly the race for the batting and RBI crowns was on.

  At the end of the Yankees’ September 12 game against the Athletics, Mickey was batting .352 with 47 homers and 118 RBIs. Ted Williams had increased his average to .349. Al Kaline, leading the streaking Tigers to nine wins in eleven games, had upped his RBI count to 116. Once again, after so many spectacular months, it seemed that Mickey’s season would end in disappointment and frustration. September, Harold Kaese thought, “may be the month when Mantle loses several things, including the Triple Crown, the batting championship, the home run record and a 1957 salary of $100,000.”26

  THE BREEZE AT Kansas City’s Municipal Stadium was blowing strongly toward center field on September 13 when Mantle came to the plate with no men on. He had doubled in the first inning and was reading right-hander Tom Gorman well. Now in the third, with the Yankees holding a two-run lead, he hit a ball toward the left-center wall. It was not a blast that rocketed out of the park but the sort that climbs high and rides the wind long enough to get over the fence. The dwindling group of sportswriters who were still following the Mantle-Ruth story noted that Mickey needed thirteen homers in the Yankees’ last fourteen games to break the record, and they all agreed that the mark was out of reach. Still, a double, a homer, and a victory made for a good day. Perhaps the slump was over. Even more than to break Ruth’s record, Mickey wanted to win the Triple Crown.27

  But the slump continued. The next day, after a train ride from Kansas City to Detroit, the Yankees played the Tigers in a doubleheader. Mickey went 1–5 and 0–4. “Key to Mantle’s Woes: He Just Can’t Buy a Hit,” headlined the Detroit Free Press. “It’s just one of those tough streaks that come to every hitter, no matter how great,” explained Yankees coach Bill Dickey. “Nobody knows what causes a slump, or how to cure it.” It just proved to Dickey that Mickey was human, subject to the same boom-and-bust cycles as any ballplayer.28

  Dickey had to do all the talking because Mickey wasn’t answering reporters’ questions. When asked about his hitting woes, he shrugged, took a swig of beer, and headed over for a private conversation about winning another pennant with teammates Joe Collins and Hank Bauer. Distant from reporters, the Mantle of 1955, it seemed, had returned to the locker room. Later on, after the season was over, he would open up about the pressures he had faced. Now he just wanted a cold beer and the company of teammates.29

  No wonder he was not talking. That day he had learned that his batting average had slipped behind Williams’s league-leading .352. But Ted had problems of his own. Because he had missed so many games with a foot injury at the beginning of the season, there was some doubt that he would get the requisite four hundred official at bats needed to qualify for the batting title. It was going to be tight, a fact not lost on the pitchers who had to face the Red Sox. Normally the most judicious of batters, a hitter whose eye was so precise that umpires hesitated to call a strike if he let a pitch pass without swinging, Williams had to go after marginal pitches if he was going to reach four hundred. In short, he expanded his own carefully guarded strike zone. Pitchers rejoiced, celebrating by presenting him with a steady diet of low, high, inside, and outside balls. With so little to hit, he struggled.30

  On Sunday, September 16, the Yankees played a twin bill in Cleveland, home of several of the best pitchers in the American League. They faced Bob Lemon in the first game and Early Wynn in the second. Both would later be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, and in the past each had given Mickey fits. But not on this day. Breaking out of his slump in a solid if unspectacular fashion, he collected three hits in seven at bats, including an eighth-inning home run off Wynn in the second game.

  Mickey attributed the homer to advice from Stengel and Dickey. “I never knew what was wrong until [they] took me aside and proved it to me that I was lunging at the ball and striding too long in the box,” Mantle said. Ted Williams preached that a batter’s lead foot should stride eight inches toward the mound. Any longer, the batter loses balance and gets in front of the pitch, resulting in a swing and miss, a foul ball, or a weakly hit ground ball. A ten-inch stride moved Mickey’s arms away from his body’s core and robbed him of his power. He didn’t need the longer stride; in fact, he generated more power and made better contact with a shorter step.31

  Success in Cleveland made the next day’s train ride west to Chicago more enjoyable. The victory against the Indians eliminated them from the pennant race and brought the Yankees within one game of clinching another World Series appearance. Instead of
fretting about his slump, Mickey relaxed, even finding time to read the sports pages. He noticed that the day before at Ebbets Field Sal Maglie had pitched the Dodgers to a 3–2 victory over the Cincinnati Reds. For the first time since late April, the Bums had moved into a half-game lead in the National League. Maybe, just possibly, the Yankees would play in another Subway Series and get an opportunity to avenge the previous season’s defeat.32

  Confident again, Mickey looked even better against Chicago than he had in Cleveland. A well-attended Tuesday-afternoon game quickly became a pitcher’s duel between Whitey Ford and twenty-game-winner Billy Pierce. After nine innings the contest was tied 2–2, and neither pitcher gave up a run in the tenth. Bauer opened the eleventh with a deep fly out to left field, and Martin followed with a strikeout. That brought Mantle to the plate. Earlier that day he had singled, grounded into a double play, and struck out twice, but he remained committed to the shorter stride. Now, batting right-handed at dusk, he struck. He pounded the first pitch into the upper left-field stands, not as far as the 550-foot monster he hit off Pierce the year before, but it was enough to give the Yankees a 3–2 lead. The score held in the bottom of the inning, and the franchise won its twenty-second pennant. Mantle also became the only Yankee other than Ruth to hit fifty home runs in a season.33

  After the contest, he reminded reporters that the win was more important to him than his home run. “It’s something I’ll always remember,” he said of number fifty. “I was glad I got it because it helped Whitey win his nineteenth game. You know, he’s trying to get twenty this year.” Mantle’s comment demonstrated what made him so likeable among his teammates: here he was with a chance to win a Triple Crown, and yet he never acted like he was more than just one of the guys. He was the consummate teammate, selfless and enthusiastic about winning above all else.34