by Allen Barra
The 1960 World Series is inevitably recalled by Yankee fans and former players as one they should have won. In truth, there wasn’t that much difference between the two teams: the Yankees had won 97 games during the regular season, the Pirates 95. It’s true that the Yankees led both leagues, easily, in home runs, with 193, 70 more than the Pirates. (With 170, the Milwaukee Braves, with Henry Aaron and Eddie Mathews leading the way, was the only other team in the big leagues with more than 150.) But New York and Pittsburgh had remarkably similar numbers in other areas. The Yankees led the AL with 746 runs, just 12 more than the Pirates, and posted a 3.52 ERA to the Pirates’ 3.50. The truth is that Pittsburgh had no reason to fear New York: from 1959 through the end of the 1960 regular season, the Pirates had won just three fewer games.
Casey Stengel, after winning seven World Series with the Yankees, would be forever blamed by the New York press and Yankee fans for losing his last one. He had held Whitey Ford back from the first game at Forbes Field to pitch the third game at Yankee Stadium, which gave Ford just two starts in the seven games instead of three—if he had started Game 1, he would also have started Game 7. It is often forgotten that Stengel’s most trusted coaches—Ed Lopat, Frank Crosetti, and Ralph Houk—also thought that starting a left-hander at Yankee Stadium instead of Forbes Field was a sound strategy.
It’s also forgotten that up to then, good as Whitey had been in World Series play, he was just 5–4 in nine World Series decisions and had not won a World Series game in three years. His reputation for invincibility was to come in the 1960 and 1961 Series, in which he pitched thirty-two consecutive scoreless innings to break Babe Ruth’s record of twenty-nine and two-thirds. Casey’s choice of Art Ditmar to start the Series, in the hindsight of history, seems ridiculous. But in 1960 Ditmar had finished 15–9 with an ERA of 3.06 to Ford’s 12–9, 3.08. (Ditmar had also topped Ford the previous year with a 2.90 ERA to Ford’s 3.04.)
The Yankees out-hit Pittsburgh in the seven games by a whopping 82 points and outscored them by a ridiculous 55–27. But as any real baseball fan knows—and New York fans certainly should have known, as they saw the most World Series—how many runs a team wins by means nothing in baseball. The three games the Yankees won—Games 2, 3, and 6—they won by a total of 38 runs. But that was in large part because Pittsburgh manager Danny Murtaugh quickly conceded the contests once the Yankees pulled ahead, refusing to commit his best relief pitchers. Yogi Berra, who had never been known to publicly denigrate an opponent, was the most openly bitter. “We were the better team. That dirty, lousy infield beat us,” he said, referring to a would-be double-play ball that took a terrible hop and struck shortstop Tony Kubek in the throat in the seventh game. Yogi went on: “What an excuse for a major league ballpark. We didn’t lose this one, it was taken away from us.”
But the truth is that the only real point of superiority for the Yankees was Mickey Mantle. Mays, who was at the second game in New York as a spectator, would recall Mickey’s performance with awe eight years later in Esquire: “He didn’t just beat pitchers, he broke their hearts. He hit two home runs off Fred Green in the 1960 World Series”—actually, the second home run was hit off Joe Gibbon—“and somehow Green was never that good a pitcher again.”8 Nor Gibbon.
Both Willie and Mickey went into the 1961 season with new managers. The Giants finally replaced the ineffectual Bill Rigney with Alvin Dark, who had been the shortstop and team captain on the 1951 National League and 1954 World Series—winning Giants teams. (Dark had been born in Comanche, Oklahoma, about 290 miles from Commerce; Mickey played a couple of games there in his teens.) From 1961 through the rest of Willie’s career, his managers would pretty much be defined by one characteristic: their ability to get along with Willie Mays. Good or bad, all of Mays’s managers after Durocher had, as far as Mays was concerned, one drawback—they weren’t Leo.
Mickey, too, caught a break. His relationship with Casey Stengel had never quite lost its abrasive edge. Mantle never complained about it publicly, partly because he knew Stengel, however wrong-headed he was, wanted Mickey to be a winner, and also in large part because Stengel helped Mantle be a winner: their ten-year collaboration had produced seven pennants and five World Series rings. But the new manager, Ralph Houk, had no intention of molding Mickey into anything and saw him, at age twenty-nine, as the de facto team captain.
In 1961 Mays mastered the capricious winds of Candlestick Park, wowing the fans with terrific catches on bloop flies that would have been routine in other ballparks but were adventures in San Francisco. He also hit 21 of his 40 home runs there. According to Total Baseball, he was the second-best all-around player in the National League, slightly behind Henry Aaron; Bill James’s Win Shares also has Aaron as the best by a slight margin.
Nineteen days into the 1961 season, on April 30, Mays did something that Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, and Mickey Mantle never did. Not only did he hit four home runs in one game—two off the Braves’ ace right-hander Lew Burdette—but he hit four home runs, all of which traveled more than 400 feet.
All season long, Willie would be locked in a home run race with his teammate Orlando Cepeda, who would end up leading the league in both home runs (46) and RBIs (142). But in 1961 they were not the home run hitters the country was fixated on.
Orlando Cepeda and Roger Maris took some of the spotlight off Mays and Mantle. In both cases, it’s difficult for a fan looking back in time to understand how this was possible, since clearly Mickey and Willie were the superior ballplayers. For Mays, the feeling was particularly strange, as he had never in his professional career, beginning with the Birmingham Black Barons, been the subject of anything but the whole spotlight and total adoration. Nor, in truth, had he ever been worthy of anything less. His performance hadn’t slacked off when the Giants moved west; on the contrary, he had averaged over .325 for the three seasons he had played in San Francisco, slightly better than he had averaged over his four full seasons in New York. There was no answer as to why he was booed except that the fans resented him, either because New York still clung to him or because, as he said, he wasn’t Joe DiMaggio. Or maybe it was both.
For Willie, 1961 seemed to mark a turning point. The Giants still were not pennant contenders—finishing third, eight games in back of the Cincinnati Reds—but the boos slackened considerably after his four-home-run game against Milwaukee. Many even began to cheer him as loudly as they cheered Cepeda.
Roger Maris’s impact on Mantle’s image was different. At first Maris was seen as a savior, which, in a way, he was, having appeared at precisely the right time, 1960, when it looked as if the Yankees were falling from power. Things quickly changed. Though Maris had a reputation for being polite and cooperative with writers in Cleveland and Kansas City, he became sullen and uncommunicative as he and Mantle began their race for Ruth’s home run record. Like many players before and after him who were thrust into the spotlight, he did not enjoy the experience and failed to express joy at the adulation Yankee fans were heaping on him. The sports press in New York tried to manufacture first a rivalry, then animosity between Maris and Mantle, when in fact Mickey not only liked and admired Roger but was grateful that someone had stepped up and taken some of the attention off him. They even shared an apartment, along with reserve outfielder Bob Cerv, in Queens, close to Kennedy Airport. “Between games,” Mickey told Herb Gluck, “we’d hang around and read, relax, listen to country music. Sometimes we’d go out to eat in a nearby restaurant, and we talked about the home run duel quite often.”9
Outside of the record’s symbolic value as a measure of excellence, Mantle had no particular ambition to surpass the Babe, and Maris even less so. But as the season went on and the pair appeared together in Life magazine and on every TV variety show from Ed Sullivan to Perry Como, the record was all anyone wanted to talk about. Many Yankee fans who had booed Mickey for years forgot why and wanted a longtime Yankee to break the record; they redirected their hostility toward Maris.
By no means, though, did all of them forget to boo Mantle. Twenty-one years later, a tired, haggard Mickey sat in the Echelon Mall in southern New Jersey and told me, “I can still remember some of them sons-of-bitches—please don’t repeat that when you write this—who booed me. I can still remember where they sat and what they looked like. I swear to God, it was ten or eleven years since that draft board thing and some of them were still screaming ‘Draft dodger!’ at me.”10
Willie’s memories of this time are a little less reliable. He told this story to Bob Costas in 2010:
“Before the first game of the 1962 World Series, Mickey [Mantle] and Whitey [Ford] came out early to San Francisco to play some golf. They played at the Tony Olympic Country Club and ran up a tab of about $5,000. They didn’t have the cash, so they signed Horace Stoneham’s name. When Mr. Stoneham found out, he told Whitey he’d forgive the debt if Ford could strike me out just once. You have to remember, I did pretty good off Whitey. I hit a home run off him in the 1956 All-Star Game. I used to kill Whitey all the time.
“I got three more hits off Whitey in my first three times at-bat. The fourth time, I got behind on the count. Ford threw a nasty spitter that dropped like a stone, and I struck out. I looked out to center field and saw Mickey jumping up and down and clapping. I turned to Elston Howard behind the plate and asked, ‘Elston, what is wrong with that fool out there?’ Elston just shrugged and said, ‘I can’t tell you now, but I’ll tell you later.’ ”11
Something very much like this did happen, but it wasn’t 1962, it was 1961, and it was the All-Star Game, not the World Series. It was also during Willie’s first at-bat, not the fourth. It also didn’t involve a sum anywhere near $5,000.
In Mantle and Ford’s 1977 book with Joe Durso, Mickey and Whitey: An Autobiography of the Yankee Years, Whitey Ford recalled the real story. “They played the [All-Star] game on Tuesdays,” Ford told Durso, “and we got there on Monday, so Mickey and I headed right for the golf course. It was the place where the owner of the San Francisco Giants, Horace Stoneham, was a member, and we played with his son, Peter. But we didn’t have any equipment with us, no golf shoes or sweaters or anything. So Pete Stoneham said: ‘Just sign my father’s name …’ and so we signed.”
At a party that night given by Toots Shor, Ford went over to Horace Stoneham to pay back the $200 tab that he and Mantle had run up. Stoneham had another idea. According to Ford, he said, “ ‘Look, I’ll make a deal with you. If you happen to get into the game tomorrow and you get to pitch to Willie Mays, and you get him out, we’ll call it even. But if he gets a hit off you, we’ll double it. You owe me $400—okay?’
“So I went over to Mickey and told him what Horace said, but Mickey wouldn’t go for it. No way. He knew that Mays was like 9 for 12 off me lifetime, and he didn’t have any reason to think I was going to start getting Willie out now, especially in his own ball park. But I talked Mickey into it, since we had a chance to get out of it without paying Horace anything. Now all I had to do was get Willie out.”
As it turned out, Ford was scheduled to start for the American League. Ford got the first two hitters and then Roberto Clemente doubled. Mays, in the cleanup spot, came to bat.
“Well, I got two strikes on him somehow, and now the money’s on the line because I might not get to throw to him again.
“So I did the only smart thing possible under the circumstances: I loaded up the ball real good. I threw Willie the biggest spitball you ever saw … so I struck out Willie Mays. It was a money pitch, and we just saved ourselves four hundred dollars.”
Mays was quoted in Ford’s book: “At the time, I didn’t know what was happening out there. I knew about Whitey’s curve ball and his slider, but I didn’t know he had a drop, too. I saw Mantle come in clapping his hands and acting sort of strange, and I couldn’t believe it was only because they got me out in an All-Star Game.
“Later, Mickey and Whitey told me about it and why they loaded one up on me. Did they apologize for it? You must be kidding.”12
It didn’t occur to Mickey until he got back to the dugout that he might have offended Willie. “It didn’t dawn on me right away,” he recalled in one of his several memoirs, All My Octobers, “how it must have looked to Willie and the crowd. It looked as if I was all tickled about Mays striking out because of our big rivalry, and in the dugout, when Whitey mentioned my reaction, I slapped my forehead and sputtered, ‘Aw, no … I didn’t. How could I …’ What a dumb thing. Anyway, we kept our money and later Whitey told Mays why I was acting like an idiot and he just laughed.”13
As every Yankee fan knows, Mickey Mantle finished the 1961 season in a hospital bed, cheering for Roger Maris when he finally hit the monumental 61st home run in the last game of the season. Mickey made it to the World Series, but just barely.§
Jim Murray, the great Los Angeles—based sportswriter, would write a couple of years later, “I remember Mantle clearest in the World Series of 1961. He could barely stand. A strange infection in his hip had not responded to penicillin and had been cut out. He had a silver dollar hole in his hip. In batting practice he hit five balls out of the lot, two off the scoreboard and one off the left fielder’s belt buckle, and the man, presumably a National League rooter, climbed up the Crosley Field tower and got ready to jump.”14
The next day, wrote Murray, “he hit one off the centerfield fence but barely made first base, like a guy crawling with an arrow in his back. ‘Look at his pants!’ someone cried. They were covered with blood. He was hemorrhaging.”15
Mickey enjoyed the season, especially the change in attitude from Stengel to Houk. “I was the designated team leader,” he would later tell Mickey Herskowitz, “and he showed his confidence in me by telling not only the players, but the writers. He wanted people to know that this wasn’t some kind of symbolic role, where I would take the lineup card to the umpires … he made me a better player and perhaps a better person. When I was bothered by an injury or playing poorly, I tended to be withdrawn. Some of this was just self-protection. But you can’t lead a team by sulking.”16 He led his team in the World Series with simple inspiration. The Yanks crushed the NL champion Cincinnati Reds (with their MVP Frank Robinson) in five games, even though Mickey was able to bat just six times and got just one hit.
The 1961 season was Mickey Mantle’s third best in the major leagues, behind 1956 and 1957. He hit a career-high 54 home runs in just 514 at-bats, 30 of them on the road. He batted .317, drove in 128 runs, and led the major leagues in slugging percentage at .687. His secondary statistics were also amazing. He stole 12 of 13 bases and hit into just two double plays all season. Maris was again named MVP, but for the second straight season there was no doubt even in the minds of many who voted for Roger that Mickey was by far the superior ballplayer. As Dick Schaap later said, “When a guy breaks a major record like that, as Maris did in 1961, it’s a major snub if you don’t give him the MVP award. It just wasn’t done back then.” Mays would find that out the next season when he lost the MVP vote to Maury Wills. But in 1961 Mickey Mantle was better than Roger Maris, Willie Mays, or any other player in baseball by a wide margin.‖
Charlie Einstein would later recall that in the winter of 1962, “we were all waiting for the bad news about Willie’s marriage.”17 Mays had left Marghuerite in San Francisco and was temporarily unavailable to the press; back in the Bay Area, she guardedly told reporters that there were “frictions” between them. She would not say if they were planning to legally separate. She also claimed, “I don’t know where Willie is.”
Though the press didn’t know it, Willie was home with friends and family in Birmingham, which was where Willie went over the winter to wait for spring training. He did not bother to inform Cat, who was living alone back in the Bay Area, and in fact Willie was out of touch with nearly everyone but a few old friends in Alabama. In 1962 the mainstream press still had a great deal of difficulty tracking down a black celebrity, who could easily withdraw into his own culture and almost disappear f
rom public view. At least for a while.
Sometime before he reported to the Giants camp in Phoenix, Willie was back in touch with Marghuerite, who traveled to Arizona to meet him, bringing their adopted son Michael with her. Before he left Birmingham, Willie gave an interview to The Sporting News and was asked if he thought the “frictions” Marghuerite spoke of might have been caused by her extravagant spending. Willie replied that all wives overspent, “but in my case it’s been my own fault. I would say I’m just growing up.
“I’ve always been the type of guy who would say fine whenever she said she wanted something, I was making money. It would come easy and go easy.” On arriving in Phoenix, Willie uncharacteristically lambasted the press for fostering rumors of an impending divorce and insisted he had left San Francisco only because members of Marghuerite’s family were living at his house. (There may have been some truth to this, as Marghuerite’s sister had been living with them for a while.)
Little more was said about the matter until July 10, when Marghuerite filed suit for a separation in Superior Court in San Francisco. She wanted a hefty $3,500 a month to support herself—which did include support for their adopted son—and nearly $19,000 in lawyer’s fees and other expenses. The suit specified that Mays “ignored her presence in the home and has spent almost all his evenings away from home.” In that, at least, Marghuerite Mays and Merlyn Mantle had similar complaints.
From the early 1950s through the early 1970s, Sport magazine set a new standard for sports journalism that hasn’t been approached since. My father started buying me the monthly magazine when I was ten, and for the next six or seven years Sport and Norman Mailer formed the bulk of my serious reading. Sports Illustrated was great, but SI, in an era when you couldn’t see all the highlights every night, was read for news; Sport was for reflection. The writers and editors included Dick Schaap, Roger Kahn, W. C. Heinz, Ed Linn, Charles Einstein, Dick Young, Ed Fitzgerald, Frank Graham Jr., Arnold Hano, Ray Robinson, Al Silverman, Paul Hemphill, and even, in the early ’70s, a dynamic young writer named James Toback, who would make his mark within a few years as a screenwriter and film director. Sport was more than just great writing: the color covers and portraits by the great Ozzie Sweet were the most beautiful ever to appear in a national magazine.
