Mickey and Willie

by Allen Barra

  But only one Giant improved from 1962 to 1963, Juan Marichal, who blossomed into a superstar, winning twenty-five games. Despite Marichal’s great pitching and another stellar season from Willie, the Giants were never really in the race and finished eleven full games behind the Dodgers.

  Much of the blame fell on their manager, Alvin Dark, an intense, intelligent, and well-intentioned man who just couldn’t seem to overcome the complexities of managing one of the first big league teams to be composed of blocks of black, white, and Latin talent. The press reported all season about divisions in the Giants’ clubhouse, and neither Dark nor Mays, for that matter, quite knew what to do about it. “With things going badly,” Willie would recall nearly a quarter of a century later, “Dark tried a number of tactics, including clubhouse talks. A lot of them left us shaking our heads. He brought in stuff that just didn’t belong in the clubhouse. Who cared if he supported Barry Goldwater? He used to bring religion in, too. One time he said that Jesus was the only man in the history of the world who was perfect. Maybe Dark was searching, reaching out to us, but he didn’t convert anyone to his politics or his religion, and, actually, no one took him seriously when he started that kind of talk.”

  Dark came down particularly hard on one of the team’s most popular stars, Orlando Cepeda. During one game he benched Cepeda for what he perceived as lack of hustle and then, in the late innings, called on him to pinch-hit. Chico, as his teammates called him, had been waiting the whole game to vindicate himself and, overanxious, swung at the first pitch and hit the ball back to the pitcher to start a double play. Disgusted at himself, he flung the bat and loped to first base. “That set off Alvin,” said Mays. “In the clubhouse after the game, he screamed at Cepeda in front of everybody. I was watching Orlando. I knew that with his temper he might just explode and haul off at Dark.” Despite the rivalry that the San Francisco press and fans had constructed between Mays and Cepeda, Willie genuinely liked Orlando and had kept a close watch on him for years. Mays had even headed off a nasty brawl once by tackling Cepeda in a 1958 game against Pittsburgh to prevent him from going after another player. (Onlookers said it was a sensational tackle too, a play in which Mays gave up at least twenty-five pounds to his teammate.)

  The 1963 World Series was the fifth time in twelve seasons that the Yankees and Dodgers had faced each other in October. The result was a shocker, with the Yankees swept in four games. In fact, the Series was closer than a sweep would indicate. Game 1 featured the sensational Sandy Koufax, 25–5 with a 1.88 ERA that year, against Whitey Ford, who had perhaps his greatest season at 24–7 with a 2.74 ERA. The match was, in the words of Dodgers announcer Vin Scully, between “a pitcher who can’t be beaten and a pitcher who won’t be beaten.”

  Ford had just one bad inning, the second, in which he gave up four runs. That was all Koufax needed for a 5–2 win. I was there, my heart pounding with every pitch Koufax threw.† Mickey, after all, had won so many World Series rings that I thought it was okay for him to lose just one, and Sandy had fired my imagination. Plus, getting out of school for the day to see the most publicized baseball game of the year was nearly too much to absorb. Koufax struck out fifteen that day, including the first five Yankees, and was everything he had been built up to be.

  But it took some luck to ensure the sweep. The Dodgers took Game 2 with relative ease; in Game 3, Don Drysdale outpitched Jim Bouton, just barely, winning 1–0. And in Game 4, the gritty Ford rebounded to outpitch Koufax, giving up just two hits but losing 2–1 when Joe Pepitone lost a throw to first base in a sea of white shirts down the left-field line.

  Mickey had a terrible Series, just 2-for-15, though in the seventh inning of the final game he finally caught up to Koufax’s fastball and hit a rocket into the left-field seats for the Yankees’ only run. It was no consolation.

  In 1963 the rules—the size of the strike zone, the height of the mound—all favored pitchers. And Koufax—tall, handsome, and glamorous with a fluid and graceful motion, a Jewish boy from Brooklyn who put movie stars in the premium boxes for Dodgers home games—was the premier figure in baseball, with 11 shutouts, and a no-hitter against the Giants on May 11 (after taking a perfect game into the eighth inning) to add to the one he had thrown the previous season against the Mets. Practically for the first time in ten seasons, Mickey and Willie surrendered headlines and magazine covers to another player.

  But it wasn’t just another ballplayer that Mickey and Willie were losing headlines to. For the first time another sport was challenging baseball’s hegemony as America’s national pastime. In 1961, Roger Kahn had prophetically written about the growing popularity of professional football: “There’s still plenty of cheering coming from baseball parks all across America, but the big noise is now coming from pro football stadiums. It may be the noise of the future.”5

  In a way, Kahn’s point was exaggerated: big league baseball and professional football were never really rivals, as their seasons scarcely overlapped. Compared to baseball, few fans ever went out to the stadium to see their favorite team play in person; enthusiasm for pro football was almost exclusively a relationship between the fans and their TV sets. There was little cultural significance attached to, say, the pursuit of specific records or to the game’s history, the way there was with baseball. And in any event, there was no clear division between fans of one sport and the other. In most of the northeastern and midwestern cities, where the NFL first took hold, fans followed the fortunes of their local major league baseball or pro football team seamlessly without bothering to make distinctions about which one they liked best.

  But as the fifties came to a close, it became obvious that the names of some pro football stars were becoming common currency in American households the way only baseball players had been before. The most prominent was Baltimore Colts quarterback Johnny Unitas, who led his team to a sudden-death victory over the New York Giants on December 28, 1958, in the first game that captured a massive national TV audience. By 1963, most casual sports fans across the country also recognized Cleveland running back Jim Brown, Green Bay Packers runners Paul Hornung and Jim Taylor, and linebacker Ray Nitschke. Head coach Vince Lombardi had become a more familiar face to most Americans than any major league baseball manager.

  There was something else too, something more difficult to pin down. Beginning with the shock of JFK’s assassination in November 1963, events in the outside world began to intrude into the lives of Americans in a way that simply could not be assuaged by sports and recreation. In particular, the civil rights movement, which had been smoldering throughout the South during the previous decade and receiving a relative modicum of press coverage, now began to dominate the media. In May 1963, Jackie Robinson and former heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson traveled to Birmingham, Alabama, to support the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent protest. Willie Mays, who was in a better position to know Birmingham’s history of segregation than any other black athlete, was nowhere to be seen. Of course, the baseball season had begun and Mays was playing every day, but there wasn’t even a public statement of solidarity from Willie for what was happening in his own hometown. It would later be argued by his apologists that Mays, who had not had much formal education, felt inadequate beside Robinson, but Mays had considerably more education than former heavyweight boxing champion Floyd Patterson, who had been in and out of reform schools as a boy.

  Birmingham commissioner of public safety Eugene “Bull” Connor, who had once called Barons and Black Barons games on the radio when Willie was growing up, turned fire hoses on those who were marching against segregation, and Willie Mays, by now a hero in relatively liberal San Francisco, still had nothing to say. And I, still well into an intense phase of hero worship, had nothing to say about his silence.

  Though it wasn’t obvious at the time, the process by which Willie Mays would become marginalized, first in black culture and then in American culture as a whole, was now beginning. Mays was still the most famous black athlete in America
, the most famous since Joe Louis was at his peak, and Mays was the first great black team sports star. But within a couple of short years, that would come to be seen by many as not enough, as stars like the Boston Celtics’ Bill Russell and the Cleveland Browns’ Jim Brown began speaking out openly against injustices within their own sports. Then, like a cultural hurricane, Cassius Clay won the heavyweight championship, became Muhammad Ali, and captured the imagination of a whole new generation.

  Just how different Willie was from the new breed of black sports hero and how insulated he was from the events that produced them became obvious in 1962, when a young St. Louis Cardinals outfielder named Curt Flood, born in Houston but raised in Oakland, took a deep breath and joined Martin Luther King and Jackie Robinson at the tenth annual meeting of the NAACP in Jackson, Mississippi. Flood had no idea what he was getting himself into, but he had a very good idea of what he wanted to get himself and his children out of. And he refused to live in a world of segregation without protest.

  In 1964, after Flood’s team had won the World Series and six years after Mays had discovered racism when he tested the Bay Area housing market, Flood tried to buy a house for his family—which included four children and one on the way—in the small town of Alamo, about twenty-eight miles east of San Francisco. When the owner, after accepting Flood’s offer, gave in to pressure and tried to back out of the deal, Flood faced a situation almost precisely the same as the one Mays had encountered. But Flood stood his ground, took the man to court, and won. Though he received anonymous death threats, Flood also found unexpectedly strong support from white residents of his new town. He did not receive support from Willie Mays, who knew exactly what Flood had been going through.

  By 1964, Stan Musial was retired and Ted Williams had been gone for four years, and so Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle found themselves the elder statesmen of baseball. Mays had been settling into the role for a couple of years. For Mickey, who had always tried to avoid responsibility, it was a new experience.

  Young players from every team in the league were fond of passing on stories to reporters about how Mantle would pat them on the shoulder after a game or wander over to the cage during batting practice to offer some words of advice or encouragement. Phil Linz recalled being a rookie with the Yankees in 1962. He hadn’t dared to speak a word to his idol, much the way Mickey had been terrified of approaching Joe DiMaggio in 1951. One day after a Yankees victory, he was astonished to turn around and find both Mantle and Whitey Ford asking him out to dinner. “I didn’t yet have the courage to even fantasize about something like that,” Linz told Sport.6

  In a story that echoed Elston Howard’s from nearly a decade before, Jim Bouton recalled breaking in with the Yankees in 1962: “The game I started in the Stadium, I shut out the Senators. After the game, I went on Red Barber’s TV show. It lasted about 15 minutes, and then I walked to the clubhouse, opened the door, and there was a row of towels—a white carpet, you know, stretching from the door to my locker. Later I heard the idea was Mickey’s. It really made me feel like part of the ball club.”7 For every story like that, though, there was one about Mantle giving a sportswriter the cold shoulder or ignoring a fan’s request for an autograph.

  The Yankees began spring training with a burning desire to avenge their humiliating sweep at the hands of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and the players were confident that they’d have the opportunity. Though many did not say so outright, privately, as Clete Boyer would later admit, “we figured we had a better chance to make it back to the Series than the Dodgers did.”8 Still, there was no denying that the team was getting old—or at least, with Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris constantly hobbled from injuries, the team was looking old.

  Other Yankees were getting creaky too. Elston Howard had won the MVP Award the year before, but was now thirty-five years old. He had given up what was almost certainly a Hall of Fame career by sticking with the Yankees when he might have demanded a trade to another team, and he lost years of his prime playing backup to Yogi Berra. An exception would seem to have been the team’s ace, Whitey Ford, who had flourished under the managing of Ralph Houk. While Stengel had restricted Ford’s starts, often using him as a spot starter and occasional reliever, Houk had made him a regular part of the rotation, and Ford had responded by posting a remarkable 66–19 record from 1961 through 1963 and finishing 17–6 in 1964. What wasn’t apparent was the strain the regular work had put on Ford’s slender frame at that relatively late point in his career.

  There was one thing the Yankees definitely did not have going for them in 1964: for the first time since 1947, they would not have Yogi Berra on the roster. To everyone’s surprise—including Berra’s—the Yankees’ owners had bumped Houk up to the front office and given Yogi a shot at managing the team he had helped win fourteen pennants. When asked if he wanted to manage, Yogi’s reply was classic: “Manage who?” But Berra had his own unique way of being serious, and if he could get someone to listen, he had an incredible store of baseball knowledge to draw on. Not for nothing had Casey Stengel called him “Mister Berra, my assistant manager.”

  For Mickey’s part, “I was happy for Yogi, if you think managing a baseball team is a good thing to have happen to you. I don’t think you heard the word ‘communication’ so much in 1963, but some people wondered if Yogi could give orders, if he would be taken seriously. I wasn’t worried about his doing the job. He knew the game. He had been calling pitches all his life.”9

  The season would prove to be full of rough patches for both the Yankees and the Giants. Things started promisingly when Dark made Willie Mays the team captain—the first black team captain in baseball. Willie tried hard to cooperate with his manager. Despite the many clumsy remarks Dark had made on the subject of integration, Mays felt a personal loyalty to him for the way Dark had helped him as a fellow player when Mays was a rookie in 1951. Although they had subsequently clashed over the years, Willie felt that “it took a lot of guts on Dark’s part to name me captain. I admired his courage for doing it.”10

  Actually, the Giants didn’t play all that poorly except near the end, but they just couldn’t seem to catch the young and powerful Philadelphia Phillies, who had a sensational rookie, Dick Allen. They had their best chance in the last couple of weeks when the Phillies collapsed, but the Giants faded too, and it was the Cardinals who took over the league lead. The Giants not only didn’t finish second, they didn’t even finish third—that was the Cincinnati Reds, who, like Philadelphia, won 92 games, just one fewer than St. Louis. The Giants finished a frustrating fourth, the more so because a solid surge at almost any point in the season could have given them the pennant. Incredibly, despite the presence of five future Hall of Famers—Mays, Cepeda, McCovey, Marichal (21–8 that season), and Gaylord Perry (who was only 12–11 but had an ERA of 2.73)—the Giants never seemed to be clicking on all cylinders.

  When the Giants stumbled near midseason, Dark’s treatment of Mays baffled not only sportswriters but Willie himself. During a series against the Mets, he benched Willie for two games. Perhaps Dark had Willie’s collapse from exhaustion the previous season in mind and felt that, after all, the Mets were the one team the Giants could beat without him. Willie, thinking about the easy pickings he always got against Mets pitching, was incensed. Nonetheless, he went out of his way to make Dark understand that he was still with him.

  In late July, Dark gave a hugely controversial interview to Stan Isaacs of Newsday. He would later claim his comments were not reported accurately, but what appeared in print was toxic: “We [the Giants] have trouble because we have so many Spanish-speaking and Negro players on the team. They are just not able to perform up to the white ballplayer when it comes to mental alertness. You can’t make most Negro and Spanish players have the pride in their team that you can get from white players. And they just aren’t as sharp mentally.”11

  No matter what Dark actually said—though Isaacs was adamant that he had quoted the manager accurately—there was simply no w
ay the comments as they appeared in print could have done anything but anger and divide his players.

  After surgery on both knees over the winter, Mantle had one goal for 1964: “I wanted to be healthy for him.” That is, for Yogi. “I wanted to have a good year for him. We had been friends and teammates since the first day I met him, in spring training in 1951.‡ I had a fear that the season might be a rough one and that managing might change him, so I tried not to dwell on such things. What I didn’t expect was what a terrific year it would turn out to be, how he would pull the club together and lead us into the World Series, and then get fired.”12

  There was something else Mickey didn’t expect: that this would be his and the Yankees’ last hurrah. The Yankees started the season slowly, and injuries did not help. At one point in late spring, the whole starting outfield was on the bench. Roger Maris helped out by playing center field when Mantle could not, which turned out to be frequently. For the first time since his rookie season, Mickey spent extensive time in right field.

  No matter how Yogi shuffled the lineup, nothing quite worked. By June, the mayors of Baltimore and Chicago, whose teams were battling for the AL lead, were making public bets of dinners: Baltimore’s Theodore McKeldin would get a steak dinner if the Orioles won, and Richard Daley would get a plate of softshell crabs if the White Sox took the flag.

  What Mickey did not mention in his memoirs, and possibly did not know, was that in the Yankees’ front office Ralph Houk was undermining Berra’s authority by letting players come directly to him and air their grievances, no matter how petty. Many of the players thought Yogi had been set up for failure. As Jim Bouton put it, “Why the hell did Ralph Houk leave his door open for people who wanted to complain about Yogi? What kind of GM encourages complaints about his own manager?” Yogi, said Bouton, was a good manager, “but Houk was a bad GM. He made bad baseball decisions, and then he undermined Yogi.” Bouton thought Houk’s behavior was “indefensible.”13