Impact Player

by Bobby Richardson

  The name Whitey was a nickname—his real name was Edward Charles. But he also acquired two more nicknames: Chairman of the Board (because of his quiet confidence under pressure) and Slick. In a team meeting, Stengel once referred to players who were getting “whiskey slick.” We weren’t sure what Casey meant by that expression, but there was no doubt that he was talking about Whitey, Mickey, and Billy Martin. After that meeting Whitey and Mickey began calling each other Slick.

  Whitey and Mickey knew how to have fun—at least their brand of fun—and they certainly made playing for the Yankees fun for the rest of us. They were always coming up with one outlandish scheme after another.

  Whitey liked to complain that Yogi Berra’s short, stubby fingers made it difficult to see the signals he flashed to the mound. Yogi put white paint on his fingers to try to help, but Whitey still had trouble reading his signs.

  One day when Whitey was complaining, Mantle said, “You don’t need Yogi! Why don’t you call your own game?”

  Whitey did, using wipes of his glove and other signals with his hand and body movements to let Yogi and us infielders know what he was throwing. Whitey won that game.

  Then Whitey decided to take pitch selection one more step.

  “Why don’t you call a game?” Whitey asked Mickey.

  So Mickey did—from center field. He would give a signal to Yogi for the pitch he thought Whitey should throw, then Yogi relayed Mickey’s selection to Whitey. Whitey won that game too.

  Whitey and Mickey used to boast about how good they were at basketball. Whitey even claimed that basketball, not baseball, was his best sport. One year Whitey and Mickey decided to organize a basketball game. Whitey put together a team of pitchers and catchers, and Mickey assembled a team from among the outfielders and infielders. They set a date to play at West Point when we were there for an exhibition game.

  “Somebody’s gonna get hurt,” Yogi said. “I don’t think we should do that.” But Whitey and Mickey were not to be deterred. After all the regulars had been replaced during the exhibition, we left the ballpark for the gym. It was only about a two-block walk, but as we started our trek, Mickey whistled. A limousine pulled up.

  “All right,” Mickey said, “my guys in here!” We piled in, but Whitey’s team had to walk.

  Mickey also had arranged for Rawlings to outfit his team with uniforms and basketball shoes. Whitey’s team had only regular tennis shoes and the baseball clothes they had been wearing under their uniforms.

  Sure enough, it was a humdinger of a game, going down to the very end. Tommy Tresh scored the game-winning basket to give the outfielders/infielders a one-point win, earning him the coveted Most Valuable Player award.

  As Yogi had feared, however, there was an injury. Pitcher Steve Hamilton turned an ankle and missed several days. He was the only player who got hurt in that game—and also the only one who had played in the NBA.

  I sometimes wondered how Whitey, Mickey, and Yogi were able to dream up the stunts they came up with. I also wondered how many of them they got away with—all of them, probably—only because of what good ballplayers they were.

  Yogi Berra: “Those Ducks Don’t Really Talk”

  In addition to being one of the best catchers ever, Yogi was the best clutch hitter I ever played with. People assume that Mantle would be the teammate I’d want at the plate in a clutch situation, but Yogi would have to be my choice. Mickey was a great hitter and a great pressure player, but Yogi struck out less than Mickey. Yogi was like DiMaggio with his ability to make contact and keep his strikeouts down.

  Yogi was a noted bad-pitch hitter—although, as he once said, if he could hit it, it wasn’t a bad pitch. It didn’t matter where the pitch was in relation to the strike zone. If Yogi’s bat could reach it, he could hit it with authority. Looking back, it might have been best for opposing teams late in close games if they had pitched Yogi right down the middle of the plate.

  I don’t understand how anyone could be around Yogi and not like him. He endeared himself to Yankees fans with his hard-nosed style of play and the air of simplicity he carried about him. I don’t mean “simplicity” in a negative sense. Yogi left school after eighth grade so he could work to help his family financially, but he was a very, very smart man—and that’s something for which Yogi has not received enough credit. Yogi was simple in the manner that he wasn’t showy or full of pretense. Yogi was just Yogi. What you saw was what he was, and I know fans appreciated that about him.

  Yogi, of course, is known for his malapropisms. I would be curious to learn who is quoted more: Yogi or Shakespeare. I’m not sure Shakespeare would want to know, though.

  Yogi provided us with such classic pronouncements as:

  “It ain’t over ’til it’s over.”

  “You can observe a lot by watching.”

  “It’s déjà vu all over again.”

  “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” (In Yogi’s defense, he was giving directions to a place where the road split into a circle, and both directions led to the destination.)

  “The future ain’t what it used to be.”

  And fittingly, considering how many Yogi-isms have been falsely attributed to him: “I really didn’t say everything I said.”

  I do have a couple of my own personal Yogi-isms to share, and I promise you they’re authentic. Once he and I were seated together on a plane trip. We happened to be in an exit row. As we began our descent to the airport, Yogi told me with a completely serious look on his face that he had figured out what he would do if our plane was going to crash: “Just before the plane hits the ground, I’m gonna open this door, and I’m gonna jump out, and I’ll land on my feet and be able to walk away.”

  Years later, Yogi appeared in one of the popular Aflac commercials that featured talking ducks. “You know,” Yogi told me, “those ducks don’t really talk.” What he meant was that the sounds the ducks made in the commercials were dubbed in. But Yogi had a knack for giving his words a completely different spin from what they would ordinarily mean.

  Yogi carried a lot of cash on our road trips. We received meal money for each of our trips, and Mantle typically ran through his before the trips ended. He knew Yogi never spent all his money, so he would go to Yogi and say, “Lend me two thousand dollars, and I’ll pay you back when I get home.” Yogi would say, “Okay, but you’ll have to pay me back three thousand.” Mickey would begrudgingly agree to the terms.

  “That’s a lot of interest, isn’t it?” I would ask Yogi, but as long as Mickey kept going to the First Yogi Bank, he had no reason to reduce interest on his loans.

  We drew a lot of laughs from Yogi. Now whenever Betsy and I return to New York for a Yankee-related event, we almost always end up going to dinner with Whitey and Yogi—and we spend most of those dinners laughing.

  Chapter 19

  Mickey

  Mickey Mantle was a special teammate, the one fans associate me with the most. On my first visit to Yankee Stadium in 1953, when Mickey came over to me at the batting cage, placed his arm over my shoulder, and told me to step into the batter’s box for the first time, I had no idea we were beginning a friendship like no other I would ever have.

  As accepted as I felt that day, I learned in my years with Mickey that he’d treated me no differently than he did any other rookie who came up with the Yankees. I think Mickey reached out to rookies because he was always for the underdog, and every rookie is an underdog in the sense of trying to make it among the pros. Mickey never forgot what it was like to be a rookie, since he came up under the enormous pressure of being hailed as the next Joe DiMaggio—while DiMaggio was still in the lineup.

  In 1951, after playing one season in Class D and one in Class C, Mickey started up with the Yankees but was sent down to the Triple-A Kansas City Blues midseason. When he went into a slump in the minors, the nineteen-year-old Mickey called his father, Mutt, and told him he wanted to quit baseball. Mutt, a coal miner, drove up from Oklahoma to Kansas City and
began packing his son’s clothes. “I thought I raised a man,” Mickey’s dad said. “I see I raised a coward instead. You can come back to Oklahoma and work the mines with me.”

  Mickey stayed in baseball, started ripping the cover off the ball for the Blues, and returned to the Yankees in late August. Seventeen years later, he retired as one of the greatest ever to play the game. But he never forgot how lonely and discouraged he’d felt in those early years. And he never neglected an opportunity to befriend a rookie and help him feel accepted in the clubhouse.

  That didn’t mean, however, that rookies were exempt from Mickey’s pranks.

  One of his favorite stunts was to arrange for everyone in the starting lineup to charge out of the dugout to begin the first inning. After about ten steps, Mickey and the other veterans would stop and retreat to the dugout, while the rookie continued on toward his position, unaware he suddenly was sprinting by himself.

  Yes, Mickey got me with that one. It’s a lonely feeling to realize you are the only player on the field, then look back toward the dugout and see your new teammates laughing at you—not to mention the sixty thousand or so people enjoying your embarrassment from the stands. Mickey also once left a message in my locker with instructions to call a certain phone number and ask for Mr. Lion. I followed the instructions, only to learn I had been given the number of the Bronx Zoo.

  Mickey could outrun anyone in the majors. A switch-hitter, he hit for power from both sides of the plate. Yet an opponent never knew when the feared slugger would decide to lay one down and beat out the bunt for a single. Excellent defensively with his speed and a strong, accurate throwing arm, Mickey drew the assignment of covering the cavernous center field of Yankee Stadium. Mickey could beat a pitcher and score a run with his power or with his baserunning, and then he could go out into the field and save his pitcher a run or two with a diving catch in one of the deep power alleys.

  Even with his first-ballot Hall of Fame statistics, however, Mickey’s career can’t be discussed without the sad speculation of what might have been.

  Like Roger Maris, Mickey played football in high school, received a football scholarship offer from the University of Oklahoma, and opted instead for baseball. In Mickey’s case, however, football almost ended his athletic future—and his life. Kicked in the shin while playing during high school, he subsequently came down with a bone infection called osteomyelitis. Only a newly developed treatment with penicillin prevented Mickey from having his leg amputated, but chronic pain from the osteomyelitis would plague him throughout his career. He would have to wrap his legs with ACE bandages before games, yet he could still outrun everyone else.

  To make matters worse, during the 1951 World Series, Mickey caught a spike on a drainage cover in the outfield and tore up his right knee. That injury would also cause him trouble for the rest of his playing life. Sports medicine back then was nowhere near what it is now, of course. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mickey played essentially all his career with a torn anterior cruciate ligament that today could be repaired by surgery and rehabilitation.

  Many people have speculated about how Mickey’s career might have been negatively affected by his love of the nightlife. I think that if Mickey had taken better care of himself, his statistics might have been a little better, but not much.

  For one thing, I don’t think it would be possible for them to be much better. They were just too good. Second, tales of Mickey’s partying have become exaggerated over time. His greatest excesses came after his retirement from baseball. (Like many others who spend their lives playing baseball, Mickey had a difficult time making the transition away from the game after retiring.) When Mickey was playing, he wasn’t out getting drunk every night. He and Whitey were drinking partners, and Whitey not only curtailed his own drinking before games, but also kept Mickey—his center fielder and cleanup hitter—in with him. So I usually find speculation over how much better Mickey would have played without the drinking to be overstated.

  Other than the constant battles with injuries, what I believe most limited Mickey’s statistics—particularly his power numbers—was Yankee Stadium. When we played, straightaway center field measured 461 feet from home plate. (The monuments honoring Lou Gehrig, Babe Ruth, and former manager Miller Huggins, plus a flagpole, stood in deep center field. When Yankee Stadium was renovated in 1976, the center field fence was brought in to 417 feet, in front of the monuments.) I can’t guess how many balls I saw Mickey hit at Yankee Stadium that would have been home runs in other ballparks.

  I played one time—the 1962 All-Star Game—at the much more homer-friendly Wrigley Field in Chicago. The wind was blowing out from home plate during batting practice, and I hit a pitch just above my fists that stung my hands. I looked up from checking my hands to see the ball exit the park. As a power hitter, of course, I never came close to Mickey. So I can only assume that Mickey’s playing his home games at Wrigley Field would have been downright frightening. On the days the wind blew out, with that powerful swing, all he’d have to do was get the ball up in the air, and it would have carried out.

  I’m convinced that if Mickey had played his home games at Wrigley Field instead of Yankee Stadium, he would have hit 800 home runs. Think about it. Mickey hit 536 homers over his eighteen seasons as a pro. To reach 800, he would have needed to average almost fifteen more home runs per season. I think he could have done that playing half of his games at Wrigley.

  I once asked Mickey, “Do you ever go to bat trying to hit a home run?”

  He answered, “Every time.”

  The hardest I ever saw Mickey hit a ball was in 1956, when he just missed becoming the only person to ever hit a fair ball out of Yankee Stadium. A home run off the bat makes a distinctive sound. Then there are the rare homers when that sound goes to a whole other level. I heard that sound that day and jumped off my seat on the bench to watch the ball. As it took off like a rocket toward the roof in right field, I just knew that would be a special home run. The ball hit up on the facade, about a foot and a half from leaving the Stadium.

  Pedro Ramos of the Washington Senators threw the pitch, and he would later say, “I threw the ball fast; he hit it faster.”

  When Mickey returned to the dugout after circling the bases, he shrugged and said, “I didn’t get it all.”

  Mickey was famous as a power hitter, of course. Less well known is that fact that he threw an almost uncatchable knuckleball. Position players like to think they could be pitchers. Mickey probably could have pitched in the majors if he’d had better control of that knuckleball. But he couldn’t do that because it moved too much.

  Mickey kept begging Casey Stengel to put him on the mound late in a blowout game, but Casey wouldn’t let him pitch. Managers usually keep a position player from pitching for fear he might hurt his arm. In Mickey’s case, considering how unpredictable his knuckler was, Casey might have been more concerned about the safety of his catcher, the batter, or perhaps even the umpire.

  Mickey didn’t throw one of those fluttering knuckleballs that meanders its way to the plate; he threw a hard knuckler that broke in all kinds of directions. I had a difficult enough time catching his knuckleball with a glove; I sure wouldn’t have wanted to try to hit it with a bat.

  We used to tell rookies we would give them one hundred dollars if they could catch three of Mickey’s knuckleballs in a row. Jake Gibbs was a catcher who had been both an All-American third baseman and a quarterback at the University of Mississippi, and he is an inductee of the College Football Hall of Fame. Jake came up to the big leagues in 1962 and took us up on our hundred-dollar proposal. He caught Mickey’s first knuckler, but the second danced right around his mitt and hit him in the nose. Jake’s broken nose forced an end to our hundred-dollar offers to rookies.

  Mickey kept me, Tony Kubek, and Clete Boyer supplied in gloves. He’d signed a contract with Rawlings and arranged for the three of us to receive two or three gloves per year. I had a contract too, with MacGregor, for a Bobby Richa
rdson signature model. MacGregor paid me a nickel for every glove sold, up to a limit of three hundred dollars. I made the maximum, but MacGregor sold far more gloves than needed to reach my limit. Truthfully, though, I preferred Rawlings gloves. My whole career, I played with gloves Mickey gave me.

  Leader and Encourager

  Mickey was a quiet leader, not a rah-rah guy. He led by example, and if someone wasn’t hustling, he’d make sure that player knew he needed to. He always did it in a tactful way, though, without making the other player feel put down.

  His style was to pull someone aside and say something like, “Hey, you know what? You can run faster. You need to really put out 100 percent. We want to win this. Some of these guys need that World Series bonus check. You need to give a good effort.” And the player would want to give 100 percent, not only because Mickey told him he should, but because he knew Mickey was giving 100 percent himself—often despite being injured.

  To me, Mickey was an encourager. If I was going through a tough time at the plate, Mickey would be the first to come over to me on the bench, give me a small pat on the back, and say something to pick me up. He wouldn’t do that in a showy way, either, to let the rest of the team know what he was doing. Mickey simply motivated others in his quiet way, and everyone on the team recognized him as our leader.

  Mickey had a way, without trying, of drawing people to him—my kids included. Mickey was like an uncle to my sons. Like Roger, he was separated from his own sons during the season, so Robby and Ronnie served as stand-in sons for Mickey, too.

  I remember one time when Mickey and I were signed up for a golf tournament and I brought Robby and Ron with me. When Mickey saw my boys, he motioned them over to his cart. “Come on. You boys ride with me,” he said. “You can see your dad anytime!”