Mickey and Willie

by Allen Barra

  ‡ My profile of Simpson ran in the magazine’s February 1984 issue.

  § Mantle, like many celebrities of the time, including Marilyn Monroe, John F. Kennedy, and even the Yankees announcer, Mel Allen, was a victim of the crank physician Max Jacobson, aka Dr. X, aka Dr. Feelgood. After the Series, Mantle told Herb Gluck, “Dr. Max sent me a bill. I never paid it. I wanted to see him, [but] a few years later he stopped practicing” (Mantle and Gluck, The Mick, p. 196).

  ‖ There will always be some debate as to how much Maris and Mantle’s home run race in 1961 had to do with expansion and so-called watered-down pitching. But it should be noted that the AL’s batting average in 1961 was .256, exactly what it had been the previous year, and that the league ERA of 4.03 was up only a fraction from the 3.88 of the season before.

  15

  “Flash, Dash, and … a Nervous Rash”

  The American League and National League Most Valuable Player votes for the 1962 season were among the strangest the game has ever seen. Mickey Mantle, who probably should have won the award for eight straight seasons from 1954 through 1961 if any kind of objective analysis had been used, finished number one, despite having missed thirty-nine games because of injury. Per game and per inning, there was no one in the AL who could begin to challenge him that year. He batted .321, hitting 30 home runs in just 123 games, and led the league in walks with an amazing total of 122—almost exactly one per game. With 96 runs scored, he just missed notching at least 100 runs for a tenth consecutive season.

  He also grounded into only four double plays. As an illustration of how amazing a statistic that is, consider that Willie Mays, who at this point in their careers surely was running faster than Mickey, grounded into nineteen. Mickey led the league with an on-base percentage of .488, second in his career only to the .515 he posted in 1957. He also led the league in slugging percentage at .605. When combined in OPS+ (on-base percentage plus slugging percentage), a favorite stat of twenty-first-century analysts, his average was 1.093, the third highest of his career.

  The only argument against Mantle’s MVP candidacy was that he hadn’t played enough games, but absolutely no one could argue that he wasn’t the best when he did play. In any event, many writers now understood that they had shafted Mickey in previous seasons and that given his history of injury, 1962 was probably going to be his last shot at an MVP Award.

  Mickey was on the golf course when informed of the MVP vote. If he won one more time, one of the sportswriters told him, his four awards would set a major league record. In that case, he said, he was going to win it in 1963. He was deluding himself.

  Over in the National League, Willie Mays’s situation was, from a modern analyst’s perspective, bizarre. Dodgers’ shortstop Maury Wills won the award that year by seven votes, 209–202. Wills’s successful pursuit of Ty Cobb’s single-season stolen base record, 96, was seen by writers in NL cities as, roughly, the 1962 equivalent of the Maris-Mantle assault on Ruth’s home run record the previous year (though, of course, it didn’t capture quite so much of the public’s imagination).

  To understand the logic of many sportswriters of the time, I turned to Inside Baseball (a magazine produced by the editors of Sport) and the cover story of the April 1963 issue, “Is Wills Really More Valuable Than Mays?” In it, Fred Katz, a Sport associate editor, gives weight to “the psychological ways each helped his team.” Here Wills pulls in front: “By inspiring his teammates and intimidating the other team, Maury constantly gave the Dodgers the psychological edge when he was on base.” Such an argument cannot be disputed, since it is based on nothing but speculation.

  Also contributing to psychological impact, Katz continues, is “the nature and effect of slumps. Every power hitter has hit bad days, and Mays was no exception in ’62. And when he wasn’t hitting, his value to the Giants decreased. Other players either played over their heads or the team suffered. A player like Wills has few slumps because he’ll take his hits any way he can get them. And if he can’t get them, a walk to a player like Wills is still as good as a hit.…

  “The battle for the MVP award,” Katz concludes, “was to prove as tight as the pennant race. But when the selectors kept in mind the original concept for the award—giving it to the man who contributed the most to his team’s overall success—the logical choice had to be Wills. Maury’s value to the Dodgers was based on flash, dash and giving opponents a nervous rash, which even Willie didn’t do in ’62.” If this had been a debate, I’d have quickly pointed out that a walk to any player, at least in many situations, is “as good as a hit.” I’d also have pointed out that slumps or no slumps, Mays not only had the higher batting average, .304 to .299, but considerably more walks than Wills, 78 to 51.

  And did Katz and others who voted for Wills really think that opposing pitchers didn’t get “a nervous rash” when Willie Mays came up to bat against them? Is that even a valid question to ask when it comes to MVP voting? Such measures are far too subjective to be of any real use. How, in fact, is one to determine how much a player contributes to his team’s success except by objective stats? Of course, no one ever doubted that Willie Mays contributed as much as any player in the game to the “intangibles” that helped his team win, and on that basis there is no doubt that Mays’s overwhelming edge in statistics should have put him not only ahead of Maury Wills for the 1962 season, but way ahead.

  No matter how many bases Maury Wills stole, no matter how much of a “psychological edge” someone may have thought he gave his team, in 1962 Willie Mays was by far a greater and more valuable player. Both men scored 130 runs, but Mays drove in 141 to Wills’s 48. Willie had 49 home runs to Maury’s 6. For all of Wills’s considerable skill at stealing bases, his ability to reach base was not especially impressive—his on-base percentage was .349 to Mays’s .384, and Mays’s slugging percentage of .615 was 222 points higher.

  If Mays hadn’t been able to contribute on the bases or in the field, there might have been some room for a Wills partisan to sneak an argument in the side door, but in fact Willie was acknowledged by many to be one of the best base runners in the game, if not the best (and had in fact stolen 18 bases of his own that year), and was a better fielder in center than Wills was at shortstop, leading NL outfielders with 2.80 chances per nine innings, 0.73 above the league average.

  Total Baseball’s player rankings for the season don’t place Wills in the top ten that year. Its Total Player Rating shows that Frank Robinson, not Wills, was right behind Willie as the best player in the league. According to Bill James’s Win Shares, Wills was not even the most valuable player on his own team; that was Tommy Davis, who hit .346 with 27 home runs.

  Whatever their reasons, the baseball writers of Willie Mays’s time once again found a reason not to name the best player in the National League the Most Valuable Player. And if I sound a little angry about this, it’s because I am. The first year I started to pay attention to baseball in any depth and detail was 1962, and after working through all the numbers with my father, I was shocked—we were both shocked—to pick up the paper a couple of weeks after the season and find out that Willie Mays had been cheated out of the MVP Award he so richly deserved.

  Somewhere it ought to be recorded that Willie Mays should have been the NL MVP that year, so I’m making this the place.*

  Of all the strange baseball facts one could dig up from 1954 through 1964, this may be the strangest: Willie Mays, who was regarded by nearly everyone as the best all-around player in the game and who was undoubtedly one of the most popular players in the game, was in fact the best player in the game for nine and possibly ten of eleven seasons. Yet the baseball writers named him the MVP only once in that span. In contrast, Giants fans in the late 1990s and early 2000s were awed by Barry Bonds’s total of seven MVP Awards. But if those who voted for the award had understood the value of statistics in the 1950s and 1960s as they did half a century later, Willie Mays would have won at least nine.

  Who was the best in 1962? Mays
, no question, if one goes by quantity. He played in every game, battling nervous exhaustion by the end of the season to put the Giants into the World Series, and had a fantastic season. It was probably Mantle, though, if one judged by quality. Willie’s combined OPS+ was .999, and Mickey’s was 1.093. On the bases, I would give Mickey the slight edge. Even with his bad legs, he stole 9 bases without being thrown out, while Willie was thrown out 4 times stealing 18 bases. And again, there are those double plays—Mickey hitting into only 4 to Willie’s 19. But in the field, it was evident that Willie was now covering more ground than Mickey, who was slower than he had been a couple of years before.

  Who was the best in 1962? Adding it all up, I’d say it was too close to call.

  Over the winter of 1963, Mickey Mantle had a brainstorm: why not market a product for black and white baseball fans alike? He mentioned the idea to Frank Scott. Scott, at first, was skeptical. As far as he knew, no one had attempted to cross racial lines to plug sport products—or, really, any kind of products. But when he gave it some thought, it occurred to Scott that sports would be the most likely area for a breakthrough. He soon figured: What the hell? Why not give it a try?

  And so from a modest beginning, a great tradition was born. In the spring of 1963, a plastic Wiffle ball with both Mantle’s and Mays’s faces on the package made its appearance in toy stores. It sold so briskly that the manufacturers, Zippee, quickly issued two more related products: a set that included a plastic bat and a Mickey Mantle—Willie Mays “home run trainer,” which consisted of a ball, a bat, and an ingenious device that sent the ball up into striking range. I honed my own deadly long-ball stroke through fantasy competitions between Willie (me batting right-handed) and Mickey (me batting from the other side).

  Who was the ultimate victor? Too close to call.

  Over the winter, the New York Yankees finally made Mickey Mantle the highest-paid player in baseball. The man who had been the league’s best player since 1954 got a salary that put him on a scale with the game’s elder statesmen, Ted Williams and Stan Musial: $100,000. But Mickey stayed the highest-paid player in baseball about as long as it took for him to complete a home run trot. Almost before the ink on his contract had dried, Horace Stoneham saw the Yankees’ $100,000 and raised it $5,000, making Willie Mays the new highest-paid player in baseball.

  Willie would be needing every bit of that raise, and a lot more. Before the season ended, Marghuerite and Willie had told friends they were divorcing. Who initiated the proceedings is unknown and probably irrelevant, since both were in agreement to end the marriage. The proceedings, however, proved to be prolonged, bitter, and costly. “I was lonely too,” he would recall, “during those long dreary winter months.” For one of the few times in any of his memoirs, he mentioned his adopted son. “Michael was now living in New York with his mother. I could see him only a few times a year. I wanted to have someone with me all the time. I had the sense I was peaking as a player, and now it was time to look for something more out of life. This was the thought always lurking in the back of my mind—the back, but hardly ever in the front.” Maybe, he thought, he should have listened to friends who had told him not to marry an older woman.

  All these thoughts came to him while he was recuperating in Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco from nerve and stomach trouble. “I realized I had wasted a lot in the course of my career. I had given away time—maybe by not always being with people I should have been with. And I had also given away too much money. Everything had come quick and easy for me. I had spent money foolishly. I had lent it to people I thought were friends. I had spent too much money on trivial things and never thought about the future.”1

  In Dallas, where Mickey and Merlyn had finally settled their family, Mickey was far from lonely, but in his own way he was as depressed and desperate as Willie. For years now he had been tortured by thoughts of how bad a father and husband he was; he was caught in a spiral of drinking and debauchery that was building a wall between him and his family.

  He had come to hate the traveling and regretted the time away from his four boys.

  “I missed them,” he would recall nearly twenty years after his retirement, “and I’d remember certain days, like the time I took them to the Stadium. They had good seats behind first base and really seemed to be enjoying themselves. Between innings I came back to the clubhouse for one reason or another, just to see how they were doing. During one of the visits, big Pete Sheehy, the equipment manager, drew me aside. He put a finger to his lips. ‘Shhh … you gotta see this.’ We went into the players’ lounge. The kids were curled up on a divan, sound asleep. Mickey, Jr., with a ring of strawberry soda pop around his mouth, David holding a half-eaten hot dog, little Danny nestled against Billy’s shoulder—just the four of them, sleeping, mustard smeared all over their faces. I’d give anything to have a picture of that day.

  “I found it hard to keep such moments in focus.”2

  By 1963, his drinking and nightlife had made it difficult for him to keep almost anything in focus. Early in June, against the Orioles in Baltimore, he leapt up a chain-link fence trying to catch a ball that he probably should have given up on. He fractured his left foot, and at the time it appeared as if he might be finished for the remainder of the season. It can’t be proven that Mick’s consumption of alcohol or lack of sleep had caused the injury, but at the very least both could have affected his judgment in trying to make the play in the first place. At any rate, the doctors thought he was making progress by late summer and gave him the okay to play.

  During another road trip to Baltimore, Mickey and Whitey Ford went on a tear the night before a game. The next day, out at the ballpark, Hank Bauer, retired as a player but coaching for the Orioles, came over to say hello. A moment later, he rushed into the clubhouse and ran back to Mickey on the field. He shoved a bottle of mouthwash into his friend’s pocket and told him to use it quickly or it would be obvious to everyone what he had been doing the previous night. Mantle and Ford, who was not scheduled to start that day, sat on the extreme left of the visitors’ dugout and tried to sleep it off. In the seventh inning, though, Ralph Houk needed a pinch-hitter and told Mickey to get a bat. Mantle protested that he was still on the DL; Houk informed him that he had been activated that morning. Wearily, Mickey hobbled up to the plate. Ford had some good advice for him: swing at the first pitch. Mantle later said he saw three balls coming at him and decided to swing at the one in the middle. He hit it long and far into the left-field seats. As he rounded third, he saw the Orioles’ All-Star third baseman, Brooks Robinson, standing near the bag, hands on his hips, shaking his head and grinning.

  Increasingly, though, Mantle’s misadventures could not be dismissed with a smile. Soon after Mickey came off the DL, he and Merlyn were having dinner with Yogi Berra and his wife, Carmen. Berra drank, always vodka and always with a built-in limit of three; for Mickey, three was just a warm-up. After dinner, when the Mantles were climbing into their car, Yogi hollered to Merlyn that Mickey should not be driving. Mickey either did not hear what Yogi said or was perhaps a bit indignant at Yogi’s paternalism. At any rate, he began to drive faster and faster until Merlyn started screaming for her husband to slow down. Distracted, Mickey took his eyes off the road and then suddenly looked back “to see a telephone pole coming straight at us. We hit it head on; Merlyn went through the windshield; the rear view mirror just creased the top of her skull.”3 They were taken to a nearby hospital, where Merlyn received multiple stitches across her scalp. The Yankees managed to keep news of the incident from reaching the local media.

  Mickey and Merlyn’s marriage at this point had become like the couple played by Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick in Days of Wine and Roses, the Oscar-nominated film released the year before. Both were alcoholics. As one of Mickey’s biographers, David Falkner, put it, “The most serious injury Mantle played through during his career was the one he inflicted on himself and others by consuming prodigious amounts of alcohol. No single injury by itself
did more to compromise the people he loved, his overall health, his physical condition, and his ability to play the game he cared so much about at the level he expected of himself than his chronic drinking.”4

  So strong was the Yankees’ 1963 roster—which included Elston Howard at catcher, a brash, young, high-kicking right-hander, Jim Bouton (who finished 21–7), and an even brasher first baseman from Brooklyn, Joe Pepitone (who hit 27 home runs)—that they survived the loss of Roger Maris for more than 70 games and Mantle for nearly 100 and still walked off with the AL pennant, winning 104 games. Maris hit 23 home runs despite his injuries, while Mickey was probably, judging from the numbers he posted up until his injury at Baltimore, headed for a sensational season before being relegated to the DL.

  It might have been an MVP-worthy season. In the 65 games he played, he batted .314 and his on-base percentage of .443 and slugging percentage of .622 gave him an OPS of 1.065, higher than all but 1961, when he hit 54 home runs, and his MVP season of 1957. He had 15 home runs, one for every 11.2 at-bats. Projected over, say, 500 to 540 at-bats, he would have had around 45 home runs, at the least tying Harmon Killebrew for the AL home run title.

  In the NL, Willie Mays had exactly the same batting average as Mickey, .314, and played the season without injury or a recurrence of his stomach problems. He finished with 38 home runs, 103 RBIs, a .384 on-base percentage, and a slugging percentage of .582. The last two marks were considerably lower than Mantle’s, but Mays was able to post them over a season in which he played 157 games. Willie, though, was also slowing down a little. He stole just 8 bases that year, his lowest total since 1954. He was still the game’s best player, which would be confirmed many years later when Total Baseball ranked him ahead of Henry Aaron by a solid margin. And according to Bill James’s Win Shares, Willie was once again the most valuable player in his league, well ahead of the eventual winner in the MVP voting, the Dodgers’ Sandy Koufax.