Mickey and Willie

by Allen Barra

  The story created such an uproar, though, that Gnesdiloff finally gave in, and by February Willie and Marghuerite, emotionally exhausted, moved into their new house. An ABC commentator, Edward P. Morgan, made a concise assessment of their situation: “It seems that some of the citizens of San Francisco, often called the country’s most sophisticated city, dwell behind picture windows which do not conceal their prejudices.”5

  On April 21, the city of San Francisco gave the Giants a welcoming parade, and a week later Willie and the Giants appeared on the cover of Life magazine. The cover photo showed him leaning out of a convertible, talking to fans on Market Street; in the background was a long line of Chinese revelers in full parade costume. The caption read “Willie Mays leads Giants into San Francisco.”

  There was little text on the inside, just six pages of photographs of fans in Los Angeles and San Francisco acting crazier than college football fans at the arrival of the Dodgers and Giants. One photo was captioned “Uncomfortable hero Willie Mays, who ducked out on official welcome, performs first duty in San Francisco airport: walking his wife’s poodle Pepy.” Indeed, Willie was uncomfortable, but nothing Life had to say indicated why.

  The expectations put on Willie in San Francisco were unfair and unrealistic from the start. In February, Parade magazine ran a story supposedly written by Rigney—ghosted by Charlie Einstein—that quoted the Giants manager as saying, “Mays will hit 61 homers.” He went on to reason that the Polo Grounds power alleys were 450 feet in left-center field and 480 in dead center; in 1957 alone, Willie had hit at least ten balls that traveled more than 460 feet—take that, Mickey Mantle!—and went for outs.

  This was a continuation of a myth that followed Willie around his entire big league career: that he was burdened by his own home park. In fact, he had hit 94 home runs in his time at the Polo Grounds, one more than he had hit in road games. It’s true that it had taken some adjustment for Willie to hit those home runs—he had to pull the ball sharply down the left-field corner or, on outside pitches, hit it to the opposite field—but there were adjustments to make in other league parks as well, and Mays was ultimately the same hitter at home and on the road.

  In contrast, it was always assumed that Mantle had a big home run advantage playing his home games in Yankee Stadium, with its short right-field porch. (After all, most pitchers were right-handed, and Mickey would be batting left-handed most of the time.) In fact, Yankee Stadium had some pretty deep power alleys as well in those years, and from 1951 to 1957, Mickey actually lost a few home runs there, hitting 100 at home and 107 on the road.

  “Willie,” Rigney said in the Parade article, “stands 5’11”, weighs 185 pounds, and there isn’t an ounce of fat on him. He has tremendous stamina, and he’s not injury-prone.” In addition to the 61 home runs, Rigney thought Seals Stadium “will also help him hit .380 and drive in 150 runs.”6

  Bill Rigney probably thought he was doing his star player a good turn by telling everyone how spectacular Mays was going to be, but by those standards—and only by those standards—1958 was a big disappointment for Willie. Mays batted .347 and led the league in stolen bases and runs scored, but lost the batting title to the Phillies’ Richie Ashburn, by just three points. Nevertheless, his batting average was still a good thirty points lower than Rigney had predicted, and he drove in 50 fewer RBIs than his manager had expected. His home run total, 29, was less than half of Rigney’s anticipated 61.

  It wasn’t just Seals Stadium that let him down. Willie hit 16 home runs there, but only 13 in all other parks. Clearly, as he had done in the second half of 1954, Mays was trying to stir things up by getting on base and hitting the ball in the gaps. By any reasonable yardstick, it was an outstanding season. San Francisco fans did not always think so. For the first time in his professional baseball career, Willie Mays was booed. New York sportswriters were outraged. Their anger fueled their San Francisco counterparts to write rejoinders, and the fans picked it up from there.

  In a 1985 dual profile of Mantle and Mays in Sports Illustrated, Ron Frimrite wrote that “in ’58, the team moved to San Francisco and Mays lost his adoring New York press as well. Much had been made, most of it nonsense, about San Francisco’s rejection of Mays, the myth, largely of New York contrivance, having it that the fans there were so locked into the memory of Joe DiMaggio, a local boy, that they could not accept this newcomer from the East. So prejudiced were the fans against the transplanted New Yorker, the story goes, that they adopted a near rookie, Orlando Cepeda, as their own favorite. After Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to San Francisco in 1959, Frank Conniff, then the national editor of the Hearst newspapers, was moved to comment, ‘What a city. They cheer Khrushchev and boo Willie Mays.’ The reality of the situation was much simpler. His new fans in the West simply required that Mays prove to them he was as good as people in the East said he was. He did, and they gave him his due.”7

  Frimrite could not have been more wrong. He shouldn’t have found it so far-fetched that Giants fans rejected Mays because he wasn’t DiMaggio; such a thing had already happened in the case of DiMaggio and Mantle. Second, the notion that San Francisco fans adopted Orlando Cepeda as their favorite was not a concoction of East Coast sportswriters; at the end of the season, the fans voted him the Giants MVP, ahead of Willie even though Mays out-hit Cepeda by thirty-five points, had four more home runs and twelve more stolen bases, scored thirty-three more runs, and had an on-base percentage seventy-seven points higher and a slugging percentage seventy-one points higher. Not to mention playing a far more demanding defensive position than Cepeda did at first base.

  Finally, the idea that Willie Mays had to prove to San Francisco fans that “he was as good as people in the East said he was” is lunacy. Willie Mays had been the best player in the National League and possibly in all of baseball for four years, and even those who hadn’t seen him play on national TV were capable of reading statistics. He had averaged over .320 with better than 40 home runs for the previous four years, led the National League in stolen bases for three consecutive seasons, and was the best outfielder in baseball. What exactly was it that Willie Mays had to prove to San Francisco?

  Whatever the reasons, in 1958 and for much of the next three seasons San Francisco fans went out of their way to show Willie Mays how little he was appreciated. And they wouldn’t completely warm up to him until he helped San Francisco humble hated Los Angeles in the most exciting pennant race major league baseball had seen since Willie Mays was a rookie.

  In 1956 some fans had booed Mickey Mantle as a draft dodger, or for not being Joe DiMaggio, or for not being Babe Ruth, or for coming so close to being Babe Ruth. In 1957 many had booed him for not having been the Mickey Mantle of 1956. In 1958 they booed him for not being the Mickey Mantle of 1956 and 1957.

  Out-of-town fans may have booed him for being a Yankee, but what excuse was there for the fans in New York? The Yankees won eight pennants and six World Series during the decade, and Mickey constantly played in pain. There were some injuries the fans weren’t even aware of. For instance, in 1958 Mickey played through the season on a bad shoulder that had been injured in Game 3 of the ’57 Series by Red Schoendienst. When Milwaukee’s pitcher, Bob Buhl, tried a pickoff throw with Mantle at second, the ball sailed into center field. Red went up in the air for the ball and came down on a diving Mickey’s right shoulder “like a sack of cement.”

  “I got through the game okay,” Mickey recalled to Mickey Herskowitz years later, “and played in the next two, but I couldn’t swing the bat freely and the shoulder nagged at me for years. I hit my homer batting left-handed [in the fourth inning] into the right-center field bull pen against Gene Conley, but I would never again hit with that same power from that side.”8

  Mantle spent his winter as usual—undergoing surgery, but this time on his shoulder instead of his knee. Literally adding insult to injury, George Weiss tried to cut the salary of America’s home run king by $5,000. By the time he reached spring training in 1958, Mic
key’s shoulder was a little better, but the ache in his right knee had grown worse: he had developed shin splits. The Yankees compounded the problem by playing Mantle in nearly every spring training game when a little rest might have helped his shoulder and knee mend more completely. After all, there was plenty to be made in the Grapefruit League as well, and fans who heard that Mickey Mantle wasn’t playing sometimes asked for their money back or didn’t come out at all.

  In 1958, for the first time in their careers, Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays were just about exactly the same ballplayer. Despite his injured shoulder, Mantle hit .304, led the AL in home runs (42), total bases (307), walks (129), and strikeouts (120). He stole 18 of 23 bases. He was the best player in his league by a wide margin, though many baseball writers thought he had slipped considerably from his MVP years of 1956 and 1957. They gave him no support at all in the MVP voting, in which he finished a distant fifth behind former Yankee Jackie Jensen, now with the Boston Red Sox. Jensen probably wasn’t even one of the five or six best players in the AL that season. Mantle out-hit Jensen that year by eighteen points, had a .443 on-base percentage and a .592 slugging percentage to Jensen’s .396/.535, and hit seven more home runs. Jackie, though, led the league in RBIs with 122, while Mickey, who played on a team where most of the batting order contributed to driving in runs, had “only” 97.

  The Yankees once again won the AL pennant and, for the second time in four years, avenged a World Series loss to an NL team, this time coming back to beat the Milwaukee Braves after being down three games to one.

  In the National League, the Chicago Cubs’ fine shortstop Ernie Banks was voted MVP, but Willie Mays, who finished second in the voting, was the better player.

  Who was better that season? When Bill James added it all up for his 2002 book Win Shares, he rated them in almost a dead heat—Mays with 40 shares for the season and Mantle with 39. But they accomplished their feats in home ballparks 3,000 miles apart.

  Mantle’s aching body was beginning to make baseball unpleasant for him—the grind of day-to-day play with night games, doubleheaders, and constant traveling was wearing him out. The traveling, in particular, was tough. Willie Mays enjoyed traveling—there were new sights to see and the possibility of an adventure in every city. To Mickey, “there were too many nights on the road, too many lonely hotels and bars.”9 By the end of the decade, he would have four sons, whom he scarcely knew.

  Having won consecutive Most Valuable Player Awards and earned four World Series rings did nothing to improve Mickey’s relationship with reporters. “It was getting harder and harder for me to deal with the press,” he admitted years later. “Especially the New York writers. They’d come in and there’d always be somebody trying for the jugular. Leonard Schecter of the New York Post was one of them. He’d ask his questions and the next day I’d read things that didn’t sound like me. If I told him he had twisted my words around, Schecter would say, ‘Oh, no, you really said that.’ It was a no win situation.”10 Mickey finally decided to stop talking to Schecter and confined nearly all his remarks to sportswriters he trusted, especially Dick Young of the New York Daily News and Shirley Povich of the Washington Post. In the 1960s, as Mantle’s career began to wind down, he became very friendly with a rising young sportswriter named Dick Schaap, who, in 1961, would write the lively little paperback in the Sport magazine biography series, Mickey Mantle: The Indispensable Yankee, which was one of this author’s inspirations. I’ve always wondered how different Mickey’s career might have been if, like Willie, he had had a friendly press—or at least a couple of supportive writers like Arnold Hano and Charlie Einstein—from his first season as a Yankee.

  Fans, who could not begin to understand Mickey’s shyness, were a plague. In the twenty-first century, the bane of the professional athlete is paparazzi and bloggers; in the 1950s, an unspoken agreement kept the press at a comfortable distance from athletes, but fans felt no such compunction. “I was a walking billboard,” Mickey said. “I make no bones of the fact that I’ve always had a private corner, an innate shyness that prevents me from feeling comfortable when talking to strangers. As for my kids, I didn’t want them subjected to the kind of attention I was getting, so they were shielded.”

  After the 1958 World Series, the Yankees’ front office gave the players tickets to the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey circus. The Mantles—Mickey, Merlyn, Mickey Jr., and David—drove from their rented home in River Edge, New Jersey, to Madison Square Garden for the show. For a while, everyone had a great time. “We got to see almost the whole show, the clowns, the lions and tigers, and the ringmaster cracking his whip. But finally the fans spotted us.” Swarms of autograph seekers disrupted the crowd and threatened to interrupt the show. A sullen Mantle moved his family out of their seats; Mickey Jr. and David cried, and clusters of fans, bitter that they were denied autographs, hissed, booed, and cursed.

  “The autograph problem,” he said in 1985, “is still with me. Ever since the mid-’50s I haven’t been able to take my family to attend a circus or ball games or any other big public events.”11 Even some old off-season pleasures were souring for him. Mickey, along with Billy Martin and sometimes Whitey Ford, enjoyed bird hunting—mostly ducks and quail—in Oklahoma and Texas. In 1959, though, at Billy’s insistence, they went deer hunting. Mickey shot his first and last deer. When they tracked the animal down, it was still alive and, Mantle recalled, “looking at me with those big brown eyes, as if he was saying ‘Why in hell did you shoot me?’ And I was trying to figure out the same thing.”12 He never went deer hunting again.

  By the end of the 1958 season, Mickey was happy that the Yankees’ prestige had been restored in the World Series. He was also hurting from shoulder to knee and badly in need of some off-season relaxation, but he had more pressing concerns. His third son, Billy, named for the now-departed Martin, had been born the previous year, and despite the hefty World Series check, Mickey was desperately in need of some off-season income to support his growing family. When he asked Frank Scott if he had any ideas, Scott replied that he could think of only one: barnstorming.

  The term was almost as old as baseball itself. According to Thomas Barthel in his 2007 book Baseball Barnstorming and Exhibition Games, 1901—1962, “The ‘barn’ part of the word was used to emphasize the rural aspect of the games. The ‘storm’ was used to describe the speed of the movement from city to city.… The Negro Leagues barnstormed all the time; the majority of those games were played during the regular season, though some were played afterwards.”13 For the most part, the owners “hated barnstorming and tried repeatedly to have the touring delayed, or banned, or restricted. Battles between commissioner and player would go on and on over the matter of barnstorming.”14 By 1963, this conflict had become irrelevant: barnstorming had died a natural death from a combination of major league expansion and televised baseball, which made Willie Mays the last great attraction of the barnstorming era.§

  Mantle had played in a few off-season exhibition games, but barnstorming wasn’t a way of life for him as it was for Willie Mays and other black players of his time. For them, the money from barnstorming made up in large part for the money they didn’t get for endorsements. White players, at least some of them, could afford to be more selective. But in the fall of 1958, the greatest of them, Mickey Mantle, who had three children and numerous family members back in Oklahoma, including his mother, depending on him, couldn’t afford to be picky. Willie Mays needed the cash too. He had a swarm of dependents in Alabama, his father Cat, whom he was moving into an apartment in Oakland, and, perhaps more pressing, an extravagant wife who had run up enormous bills for personal expenses and home furnishings on both coasts.

  Neither player much wanted to spend the off-season playing. Mickey was hurting; Willie finished the season physically drained and suffering from nervous exhaustion. But the best way they could supplement their income, as Frank Scott pointed out, was to play baseball against each other.

  Years later, basebal
l writers would claim either the 1960 American League–National League All-Star Game at Yankee Stadium or the 1961 exhibition game between the Giants and Yankees at Yankee Stadium as Willie Mays’s return to New York. Actually, it was a now almost forgotten barnstorming game on October 12, 1958. “Both of them got a huge kick out of the game,” recalled Scott. “They both selected the players they wanted”—actually, Frank Scott did most of the selection, as he represented all of them in endorsement deals. Mickey’s All-Stars included his teammates Whitey Ford and Elston Howard; White Sox second baseman Nellie Fox, who would win the league’s MVP Award the following year; Detroit outfielder Harvey Kuenn and Cleveland outfielder Rocky Colavito‖ and though he scarcely qualified as an All-Star by any definition, Mickey’s best friend, Billy Martin, then with the Detroit Tigers. At the very bottom of the roster was the Yankees’ third-string catcher, Ralph Houk, who was enormously grateful for the chance to earn a few extra dollars.