Mickey and Willie

by Allen Barra

  Nonetheless, his first experience in what was still “white folks’ ball” was not a bad one. When he stepped off the train in Hagerstown, he was the first black player in the Interstate League, and the man who greeted him, a pitcher from Brooklyn named Ed Monahan, was white. He was the first adult white ballplayer Mays had ever met. At the park he met his manager, Chick Genovese, a gregarious Italian American who greeted him warmly. Practically the first thing he told Willie was that he would be the team’s starting center fielder. Chick had been a prospect in the Red Sox system, but his path to the big leagues was blocked by the brother of Willie’s idol, Dom DiMaggio. Genovese was good-hearted and sympathetic. He understood that the nineteen-year-old was trying too hard. He encouraged him to just relax and enjoy the game and good things would come. Willie did relax, and soon he was enjoying baseball again.

  When the Giants got back to Trenton, Willie went on a tear and finished the year hitting .353, the highest batting average in the league. Because he played in only 81 games and batted just 306 times, he wasn’t eligible for the league’s batting title. But one statistic bowled over the Giants’ scouts who watched him play: in just half a season, he led the league with 17 assists in the outfield. He also boosted attendance at Trenton’s Dunn Field, and whenever a runner took off from first or second on a single, the crowd would rise in unison in expectation of a spectacular gun-down by Mays to third or home.

  There was only one sour note to the whole season. During a day game in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Willie collapsed with stomach pains and had to leave the park in an ambulance. He was given a clean bill of health a few hours later, but his stomach problems were the first signs of anxiety attacks that would plague him for the rest of his career.

  A less serious problem in his first season in the minor leagues was that he couldn’t remember the names of his teammates. They knew his name but usually referred to him as “Popeye” because of his forearms. The nickname might have stuck except that Willie himself invented a catchier one, “Say Hey!,” which was what he said whenever he wanted to get someone’s attention. His teammates chuckled when they heard the expression, and sportswriters soon caught on.

  The 1950 season ended on a definite up note. Genovese shook hands with him and said, “Willie, you’re going to make a lot of money one day. I hope I helped you.”12

  When Mickey Mantle reported to the Joplin Miners for the 1950 season, his teammates noticed a remarkable physical change. Steve Kraly recalled that “the year before he was like 160, 165; then at Joplin he was all filled out, the way everyone knew him later.”13 Not quite, but the eighteen-year-old weighed between 175 and 180, all of it hard-packed. His teammates immediately noticed how the muscle translated into power during batting practice; the previous season Mickey had hit just seven home runs, not a bad figure considering how cavernous most of the minor league ballparks were. (When major league GMs reviewed the power statistics of minor league players, they wanted to be certain that they were legitimate.) Now, instead of merely hitting the ball ten or twelve feet over the fence, he was smashing the drives into the light towers beyond the fences.

  Local legend has it that there was an orphanage approximately one hundred feet beyond the right-field fence of Joplin’s Joe Becker Stadium and the kids would sometimes hold up signs from the windows that read MICK, HIT IT HERE. On at least a couple of occasions, he did.‡ Henry DeBardelaben, a stadium attendant at Joplin, had sold peanuts at Sportsman’s Park in 1928 when the Yankees beat the Cardinals in the World Series. He remembered one of Babe Ruth’s three home runs in that series as the longest ball he had ever seen hit. Mantle, he said, hit them at least as far as the Babe. The difference was that in 1928 the Babe was thirty-three; in the spring of 1950 Mickey Mantle was not yet nineteen.

  The Miners, though Class-C, had several talented players destined for the big leagues and were probably as talented as a good Triple-A team. They tore the league apart, and Mickey terrified opposing pitchers, hovering near .400 for most of the season and finally settling on .383. Mutt, in what was probably the best year of his life, came to many of the Miners games and critiqued his son’s performance. By the end of the year, when Mickey told his dad his batting average, Mutt told him flat-out, “You could have hit .400.” The remark should not be taken the wrong way: it wasn’t that Mickey couldn’t do anything to please his father, but that Mutt was simply trying to exhort his son to always try for perfection—and he was succeeding. He was also there to give his son a stern reprimand when Mickey lost what was sometimes an uncontrollable temper. With Mutt in attendance, Mickey did begin to show some maturity. Water coolers all over the Western League breathed sighs of relief.

  It might also have been the happiest year of Mickey’s life. He was still playing against older players, but now he was dominating them, excelling not only at bat but on the bases as well. And Joplin, with a population of more than 40,000, was the closest thing to a big city Mickey had ever known. The nights after home games were a dizzying flurry of beer and burgers, pool and pinball, and free movies. (The local movie houses liked to give tickets to the Joplin players and watch the patrons squeal when they recognized them, as if they were in the presence of movie stars.) All that and free steaks too: one of the city’s best steakhouses gave a free dinner to every Miner who hit a home run, and Mickey became popular by taking a couple of teammates with him, splitting the cost among them. It was a veritable taste of what was to come in the big leagues.

  And if all this wasn’t enough, Mickey and his teammates would load up ice chests with beer and go “frogging.” While one “frogger” transfixed an amphibian in a flashlight beam, another would sneak up from behind and grab it. Sadly, Mickey had to give up this pastime when he went to New York.

  Shortly before the end of the season, Harry Craft brought Mickey news that stunned him. While Mickey sat in the team bus, Craft walked over and quietly informed him that next season he would be managing in Beaumont, Texas, and he certainly would love to have Mickey play for him there. But, Craft added, he did not think he would have the privilege: the New York Yankees wanted Mickey to report to the parent team.§ It took Mickey a full minute to comprehend what he had just heard.

  The swiftness with which the next events unfolded seemed unreal. Since Mickey had started high school, it had seemed as if his baseball dream was moving at a snail’s pace. Now things were happening so quickly that his head was spinning. At the end of the season, Mickey was on a train bound for St. Louis, where he would be joining the Yankees as a nonroster player. Two days later, on September 17, 1950, he was in St. Louis, where a friendly but distant Yankee representative met him, helped him with his bags, and settled him into the team hotel—so this was what it was like to be part of a major league team. The two then caught a cab for Sportsman’s Park. Mickey had been to the ballpark many times with his dad and brothers to see the Cardinals play. Now he was seeing it from the inside. Alone in the locker room—the team was out on the field practicing—Mantle quietly put on his first Yankee uniform (the road gray, not the famous pinstripes) and was comforted by the fact that it fit so well. In fact, it was the first uniform he had ever worn that seemed to have been made just for him. The number 6 was on the back.

  As he walked through the concrete passageway out onto the field, he could not imagine that any ballplayer could ever be more frightened and awed than he was. This was the home field that Dizzy Dean, Ducky Medwick, Enos “Country” Slaughter, and Stan Musial had played on. He instantly recognized the first player he saw, the diminutive shortstop Phil Rizzuto. Rizzuto glanced at him but said nothing, knowing that the Yankees had thoughts of replacing him at shortstop with the teenage phenom. Phil had had his best season in 1950, and in a few months would earn the league’s Most Valuable Player Award. But he knew that in the big leagues no job was ever secure for long. Mickey watched Rizzuto’s breathtaking dexterity in the field, though, and knew in his heart that whomever he replaced, it wouldn’t be Rizzuto. He stood, silent and alone, by
the batting cage. All the Yankees were to remember of Mantle from that St. Louis trip was that he and another rookie, a former college football star turned power-hitting first baseman named Bill Skowron, put on a terrific display during batting practice. The veterans, trying to be nonchalant, pretended not to notice. But they noticed.

  A reporter approached Rizzuto as he walked off the field and asked him what he thought of the Yankees’ new shortstop. “I dunno,” Rizzuto said with a smile on his face. “He looks a little big for a shortstop, doesn’t he?”14

  The first thing Mantle noticed was how efficiently the Yankees went about their business. No one spoke to him at all except for one man whose greeting jarred him back to reality. “How ya doin’?” Mickey heard behind him. He turned to find a short, stocky, jovial, broad-faced man whom he recognized from the newsreels and newspapers. Yogi Berra, a native of St. Louis who would be playing in front of friends and family that day, shook his hand, and Mickey Mantle began to feel like a real Yankee.

  Mantle, not on the roster, did not play that day, nor in any of the season’s remaining games. (The Yankees would win the AL pennant and sweep the NL champ Philadelphia Phillies in four games in the World Series.) The trip was intended to orient Mickey to the team, to give him a chance to meet his teammates and to show him the routine. But he scarcely spoke to anyone. A slim, young left-handed pitcher, a native New Yorker named Edward Ford, remembered seeing him sitting in front of a locker but didn’t talk to him. Whitey, as he would soon be called, was all brass on the outside, but inside he was as full of butterflies as Mickey. Ford would recall to Joe Durso that he met Mickey in the company of a pitcher, Bob Weisler (who would go on to pitch in seventy games over six seasons for the Yankees and Senators), but Whitey could remember practically nothing else. “He stayed with us a week, and I don’t think I spoke to him once during that time. Except to say hello. And I know he didn’t speak to me once during that time. Except to grunt. He was very shy.”15

  Back in the locker room, Mantle watched some of the veteran players joking with reporters, terrified at the thought that he might have to say something to a newspaperman. Then he saw Joe DiMaggio, who had come in early from practice and was already showered and dressed really well—to Mantle, he looked like he had stepped out of a magazine ad. No one spoke to Joe. Teammates, reporters, and clubhouse attendants seemed to part in front of him as he walked through. Mantle was even more terrified at the thought of talking to the Yankee Clipper than to a reporter. He needn’t have worried; Joe DiMaggio scarcely knew that Mickey Mantle existed.

  It all passed quickly, as if in a short dream. A few days later, the season was over and he was back in Commerce. As if to underline the grim reality of what Mickey faced if he did not succeed, Mutt once again had gotten him a job in the Blue Goose mine. Mickey could not help but notice that his father was moving more slowly than usual and taking longer breaks. But every time he got into a conversation with one of his friends. Mutt would mention that Mickey was “a personal friend” of Joe DiMaggio.

  Before Mickey returned home, the Yankees flew him not to Florida but to Phoenix, Arizona. (The Yankees had agreed to trade spring training sites with the New York Giants; co-owner Del Webb, who lived in Phoenix, wanted to show off his world champion baseball team to friends in California.) It was Mickey’s first plane ride; he was not the least apprehensive and found the experience exhilarating, particularly the dinner he was served during the flight. Mickey would be attending a special instructional camp for the Yankees’ top prospects that accelerated young players’ maturity by having them work out with seasoned veterans. No one would say it in so many words, but though Mickey was only nineteen, Lee MacPhail wanted him ready for the 1951 season. Mickey did not know this, and he wished he knew whether he would be spending the next season in Texas with Harry Craft or in Binghamton, New York, instead of in the Bronx with the New York Yankees.

  Back in Commerce, Mickey followed the sports pages and waited to hear from the parent team. He couldn’t help noticing that the war in Korea was heating up and wondering if it still might affect him in some way. He took Merlyn Johnson to the movies; Mutt, though not Lovell, was hinting that she might be the right girl for Mickey to settle down with.

  Early in 1951 Mickey heard from the team: he was to report to Phoenix—immediately. Baffled as to how they expected him to do so, he did nothing. A couple of days later, he received an indignant call from the Yankees’ front office—why was he not in Phoenix? Was he holding out on them? Because, Mickey stammered, he couldn’t afford a train ticket. They quickly wired him expense money. The next day Mutt cranked up the LaSalle, Lovell, as Willie’s aunt had done, packed a paper bag full of sandwiches, and the family began a long, almost silent drive to Oklahoma City, where Mickey would catch the Heartland Express to Phoenix. In the station, “I kept swallowing hard and drinking more water than I ever needed before. I turned to the steps to the train, took my suitcase in my hand, and tried to say goodbye to my mother and father. I was just about able to speak. I got on the train, looked for a seat by the window where I could see my parents, and tried forlornly to wave at them as they waved to me. The train began to roll at last, and then the sobs rose up and choked me.” For an hour, as the Heartland sped through the Oklahoma countryside, Mickey sat with his fist in his mouth, trying to hold back tears. “What a jerk I felt like!” This time there would be no support group to help him, no friends to visit and hang out with him. Mutt would not be in the stands to watch him play.

  After the Trenton Giants ended their season, Willie went home and got a workout in baseball fundamentals at least as rigorous as anything the Yankees put Mickey Mantle through. He joined a team of professionals Piper Davis had put together for a barnstorming tour, and two of the best players, Hank Thompson and Monte Irvin, would soon be Willie’s teammates on the New York Giants. They played several games against integrated teams whose rosters included the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Pee Wee Reese, Gil Hodges, and Jackie Robinson, who also acted as manager. Willie had several opportunities to talk to Jackie but shied away nearly every time.

  They played around Florida and in New Orleans, though not in Birmingham, where section 597 of the 1944 Code of Alabama (first passed in 1944 and reaffirmed in 1951) strictly prohibited whites and blacks from participating together in any game or sporting event, up to and including “dice and cards.”

  In the fall, confident and brimming with optimism for the following year, Willie and Cat sat together at Bob’s Little Savoy Café while Cat’s pals listened with rapt attention to Willie’s stories about playing professional ball in the North. Occasionally he would take a Fairfield girl to a football game at the old high school, where students and teachers had gotten past the resentment of the year before when it looked as if he might have to give up high school football for the Black Barons. Like Mickey in Commerce, Willie was a small-town celebrity; in fact, his name had spread outside the black community, and sometimes he was mentioned in the white papers, such as the Birmingham News. The only question seemed to be how soon he would be playing for the New York Giants. Horace Stoneham and his front office wanted Willie to jump just one more hurdle: their Triple-A affiliate in the American Association, the Minneapolis Millers. While waiting for Minneapolis to thaw, Willie boarded a train heading south to Florida.

  In Sanford, Florida, at nine in the morning, he walked out onto the field to prepare for a game between the Millers and another Giants minor league team based in Ottawa, Canada. The first words he heard were from the bellowing voice of a middle-aged white man in a Giants uniform: “Hey, kid, what are you gonna show me today?” It was Willie’s introduction to Leo Durocher—“Mr. Leo,” as Willie would call him for the rest of his life. The Giants were to play the St. Louis Cardinals that day at their Lakeland training camp, but their manager (Durocher) and owner (Stoneham) had driven over for the express purpose of watching Willie play. Leo cheerfully informed Willie that Chick had given him a glowing report: “He thinks you’re the greatest
he ever saw.” Willie asked him what the report said. “It said,” Durocher told him with a loud laugh, “that your hat keeps flying off.” That was strange, Mays remembered thinking. “I had never noticed that it did.”16

  Mays blistered Triple-A pitching in the spring, and sharp from his barnstorming the previous fall, he also stunned some veteran Giants pitchers, such as Larry Jansen and Sal Maglie, in exhibition games. (Maglie, known as “The Barber” for not being afraid to put the ball under a batter’s chin, on more than one occasion considered setting the Giants’ prize prospect on the seat of his pants, but thought better of it when he remembered that his boss, Horace Stoneham, was in the stands.) At the end of spring, the Millers’ manager, Tommy Heath, called Willie into his office and told him pretty much what he already knew—namely, that Willie would be going back with the Millers. He also told Willie, as Harry Craft had told Mickey the previous summer, that he didn’t think his stay in the minors would be long. “Boy, that raised my spirits and kept them that way all the way from Florida to Minneapolis.”

  There was some question about Mays’s power. Everyone was impressed by the thwack! sound when Willie made contact with the ball, but so far, at every level from the Black Barons to the Millers’ spring camp, he had not put many over the fence. But Durocher wasn’t in doubt—given the frequency with which Mays hit the ball, he told Horace Stoneham, and the power he packed into that swing, the balls would soon be leaving the field. In Willie’s last spring training game, he lunged at a low curveball—the kind that dismissive scouts kept saying he couldn’t hit—and sent it far over the left-field fence. In fact, said some observers, the ball cleared some railroad tracks outside the ballpark. It was later estimated that the ball traveled 450 feet before hitting dirt. Durocher, having personally investigated the length of the blast, went back to report to Stoneham in the stands. In the seventh inning, to Willie’s dismay, the Giants owner and manager got up to leave. Mays was at the point of tears: What had he done wrong? Should he have tried to impress them by taking an extra base? Or perhaps he should have hit the cutoff man instead of gunning a runner down at the plate? After the game, he sat in front of his locker, “so tired I couldn’t even shake my head. I felt like a raw rookie who had just flunked his only chance.”17