Perfect: Don Larsen's Miraculous World Series Game (23 page)

By the spring, Mickey was able to play baseball without any handicap—and began to attract attention with his power at the plate and his speed on the bases. One of those he impressed most was Barney Barnett, owner of the Baxter Springs Whiz Kids in the Southeastern Kansas Ban Johnson League, a team one step above sandlot ball that often attracted scouts looking for players with major-league potential. That was no small benefit, because there could be little doubt about the potential of this 150-pound shortstop who could blast home runs well beyond the four-hundred-foot marker in center field—regardless of whether he was batting left-handed or right-handed.

Yankee scout Tom Greenwade recognized Mickey’s potential when he watched a Whiz Kids game in Baxter Springs one day. After four innings, Greenwade rose to leave, and Barnett asked what he thought of the team’s shortstop. “I think I’ve seen enough,” said Greenwade. “I want to talk to Mutt.” A sudden rain shower forced people to run for cover, and Mickey soon found himself in the front seat of his father’s LaSalle with the Yankee scout. “How would you like to play for the Yankees?” Greenwade asked. Greenwade explained that he could not sign Mickey to a professional contract until he had graduated from high school but told him not to sign with another team in the interim. “I’ll be back,” the Yankee scout promised.

Greenwade would later say—after his prospect became the talk of the Yankees’ 1951 spring training camp—that “Mick is the kind of player you dream about finding.” But the Yankee scout had a different assessment when he met with Mickey and Mutt in his big Chrysler after a Baxter Springs’ game in May 1949. “Right now,” Greenwade told his captive audience, “I’d have to rate him a lousy shortstop. Sloppy. Erratic arm. And he’s small.” And then a pause. “However,” he added, “I’m willing to take a risk.” He offered Mickey $400 to play for the Class D Yankee farm team in Independence, Kansas, for the remainder of the summer.

Mutt was not happy. “He can make that much playing Sunday ball and working in the mines during the week,” the disappointed father told the Yankee scout. Greenwade agreed to include a bonus of $1,100, and Mickey Mantle became the property of the New York Yankees.

That first season in professional baseball produced mixed results for the seventeen-year-old Commerce native. He was able to bat .313 but his play at shortstop—with forty-seven errors in eighty-nine games—was less than spectacular. Mickey himself remembered that his throwing was so erratic that the team “had to put a chicken-wire screen behind first base as a backstop to prevent somebody in the stands from getting killed.” His manager—Harry Craft, who later became a big-league manager—touted Mantle’s hitting accomplishments to Yankee management but told the front office that he “would like to see him shifted to third or the outfield.”

Somehow the fielding recommendation got lost in the shuffle, because Mickey was promoted to the Joplin farm team in the Western Association league for the 1950 season but still found himself playing shortstop. The errors continued, but the hitting only improved. Mickey finished the season with a .383 batting average while blasting twenty-six home runs and driving in 136 runs in only 137 games.

The reward for that performance was an invitation to join the parent club in St. Louis on September 17 for the final two weeks of the season. Mickey did not play in any games, but he did have an opportunity to get a taste of the big leagues—and the club got a glimpse of this minor-league player’s bountiful potential. He and Moose Skowron—a nineteen-year-old prospect who had played football at Purdue University—would take batting practice with the team and astound everyone with their ability to drive balls into the seats. “They put on a great show of power hitting,” remembered pitcher Whitey Ford, then completing his rookie year with the team.

It was enough to give Mickey hope that he could soon join the Yankees as a player, and he was elated when he received a letter in January 1951 from Yankee farm director Lee MacPhail directing him to join the team’s special instructional camp in Phoenix in February. Expectations were soaring even before Mantle arrived in Phoenix. The sportswriters had already had identified him “as the No. 1 minor league prospect in the nation,” and manager Casey Stengel, for one, was anxious to see whether this country boy could make the grade—but not as a shortstop. (Mantle played shortstop in the first days of spring training, but it soon became clear that his fielding had not improved. “He was a real scatter-arm,” Gil McDougald remembered. “I can picture him throwing to first base. Everybody in the grandstand would scatter.”) The decision was made to move him to the outfield, where throws to first base would present less of a problem. For his part, the nineteen-year-old rookie was delighted with the change. “I like the idea of shifting to the outfield,” he explained to a sportswriter. “It is not as tough as the infield, and out there I get a chance to use my legs.”

Stengel asked longtime Yankee outfielder Tommy Henrich to tutor Mantle on the fundamentals of the new position. Mantle’s other instruction came from watching DiMaggio. “I study Joe all the while,” Mantle remarked to one sportswriter. “I marvel at his grace and nonchalance.” DiMaggio also gave the prospective outfielder periodic direction on where to play—and Mantle was only too happy to oblige. Not that the two men shared any kind of friendship—indeed, the two players hardly spoke to each other.

Part of the problem was Mickey’s personality. He was still a shy teenager who did not understand the publicity that surrounded his arrival at spring training. Stengel had asked the press to be gentle with the bashful rookie, saying, “The kid has never seen concrete.” But sportswriters had a job to do, and they forged ahead. The results were not always satisfying. (There was the time when a reporter sat down next to Mantle in the clubhouse, his pen at the ready. “I hope you’re not going to ask me a whole lot of questions,” the rookie began. “I’m no good at answering questions.”)

Mickey’s difficulty in conversing with unknown sportswriters was that much greater when it came to Joe DiMaggio. Unlike Billy Martin—who relished the challenge of confronting idols—the Oklahoma native was dumbstruck. “I couldn’t even mumble hello,” Mantle later remembered. “He had this aura. It was as if you needed an appointment just to approach him.” For his part, DiMaggio was not the kind of person to ease the tension that Mickey felt. There was no slap on the back, no invitation to join him for a beer after the game, and no inquiry on how the young rookie was dealing with the pressures of being a top prospect in the Yankees’ spring training camp.

It was an unpleasant experience that Mantle would never forget—and that would guide his relationship with teammates after he had achieved the stardom that the press had envisioned for him in 1951. In later years Yankee rookies and other newcomers to the team would find—to their great surprise—that, unlike the great DiMaggio, the Yankees’ famous switch-hitting center fielder was a man who would take the initiative to make them feel comfortable. It could be an invitation to dinner or a practical joke. (Tony Kubek, a shy twenty-year-old rookie in 1957, was astounded when Mickey approached him after a game in Chicago and asked him to dinner with Whitey Ford and Billy Martin. After dinner, the four Yankees went to a jazz bar, and Kubek excused himself to go to the restroom. When he returned, the other players were gone and the waiter was waiting with the check—which Kubek could not afford to pay. After watching the rookie grope for explanations, the waiter finally disclosed with a smile that the bill had already been paid by Mantle.) Or there could be a small gesture. (When pitcher Bob Turley was traded to the Yankees after the 1954 season, he walked into the clubhouse in spring training in 1955 and found in his locker a bottle of “greenie”—a lime-lemonade drink popular among the players at the time—with a note from Mantle. “Thank God you’re here,” the note read. “I don’t have to face you anymore.”)

Mantle made concerted efforts to endear himself to his teammates in other ways as well. He would invariably be the one cheering his teammates on from the dugout when they came to bat—something DiMaggio would rarely do. And unlike DiMaggio—who would usually leave the stadium by a side door after a game to avoid crowds—Mantle would leave through a route that would take him into the anteroom where the players’ families were waiting, and he would then spend time talking with the wives and children who were there. Then there was Elston Howard, who joined the Yankees in 1955 as the team’s first black player—when the team stopped during spring training at restaurants in the South that did not accept blacks, Mickey would have dinner with Elston on the bus.

Mantle’s effort to gain favor with his teammates bore abundant fruit. “He was the perfect teammate,” Kubek would later say of Mantle. “That’s what he always wanted to be considered. And a good part of that was because he did not want to be like Joe DiMaggio.” Yogi Berra—who played with DiMaggio for five years—agreed, saying that Mantle “was more one of the guys than DiMag” and that “all of us loved Mickey Mantle because he was the best teammate you could have.”

However much he wanted to distance himself from DiMaggio’s image in later years, Mantle found himself being compared to the Yankee Clipper at the 1951 spring training camp by players and sportswriters alike. And for good reason. This nineteen-year-old rookie from Oklahoma, it seemed, could do everything—and do it better than anyone else. His home runs were a constant source of discussion—especially the ones he hit in a series of exhibition games in Los Angeles. One of the home runs (at USC’s Bovard Field) sailed over the 439-foot sign in the outfield, passed the width of the football field next to the stadium, and was estimated to have traveled about 650 feet from home plate by the time it landed. Mantle ended spring training with a home run at Ebbets Field—his ninth of the camp (tops for all Yankee players) and a .402 batting average.

Spring training only fueled hopes that the Yankees had now found a replacement for the ailing DiMaggio (who would retire after the 1951 season). “I don’t know that I ever saw a young player who had as much talent as he had,” said Yankee third baseman Bobby Brown. “He had power from both sides of the plate. He could run faster than anybody I ever saw. He could outthrow anybody that you would want to see. He could do everything.” When asked by a sportswriter if Mantle had any weakness, St. Louis Browns’ manager Marty Marion responded, “He can’t throw left-handed.” And so the press began to trumpet Mantle’s coming with stories that he might even surpass the achievements of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.

However understandable, the publicity only heightened the pressures that the Yankees’ new outfielder was already feeling. “Casey kept bragging on me and the newspapers kept writing it,” Mickey later observed. “I don’t mind admitting,” he added, “that there was incredible pressure on me because of what Casey was saying.”

Mantle began the 1951 season playing right field next to DiMaggio in center, and batting third in the lineup—just ahead of DiMaggio. Mickey initially gave the fans what they wanted—hitting long home runs, stealing bases, and occasionally dragging a bunt down the first-base line for a hit. But the honeymoon faded quickly when opposing pitchers learned his weaknesses at the plate.

Frustrated by his inability to deliver what Stengel and the fans expected, Mantle would get especially angry if he struck out (which became more and more frequent as the weeks passed), and he did not restrain himself when he reached the dugout after a whiff. Hitting his foot or a bat against the watercooler became a common reaction. Stengel, the master at reverse psychology, would try to calm the rookie down by giving him a bat and telling him, “if he wanted to end his career, he should hit himself over the head and get it over with.” The psychology did not work, and fans began to express their disappointment with boos from the stands.

The pressures on the young player were compounded by his draft status. Even before he arrived in spring training camp, his local draft board had classified him as 4F—unfit for military service—because of his osteomyelitis. Many fans and sportswriters found the board’s decision incomprehensible when they saw this muscular teenager scampering around the field while the Korean War was raging. “So Mantle has osteomyelitis,” one sportswriter commented. “What’s the big deal? He doesn’t have to
kick
anybody in Korea.”

In the meantime, Mantle continued to live life as well as he could. After his first year of professional baseball, he returned to Commerce to resume the social life, such as it was, that he had in high school. One night he and a friend had a double date with two girls from Picher—but Mickey was more interested in his friend’s date: Merlyn Johnson, a pretty brunette who was one year younger than Mickey. The two soon began dating, going to movies and other social events (but never drinking alcohol), and years later Merlyn would say that October 6, 1949—the day she first saw Mickey Mantle at a local football game— was the day her life “changed forever.” Merlyn soon became consumed with her love for this blond-haired boy with the quick smile. “I loved Mickey Mantle so much,” she would later say, “that I wanted to crawl inside him and live underneath his skin.”

By January 1951, Merlyn’s parents had announced the engagement of their daughter to the Yankee rookie. But all was not what it appeared to be. Mickey Mantle was now finding that there were many temptations—and pitfalls—to life in New York City. As Mantle later explained, “I guess I developed my first taste for the high life then.”

Her name was Holly Brooke, an attractive brunette and a budding showgirl. She met the Yankees’ new right fielder at a party and soon became his constant companion at social events or in quiet evenings at his room in the Concourse Plaza Hotel. Merlyn knew nothing of Holly’s existence. Nor was Merlyn there to counsel her fiancé when Alan Savitt, a short, heavyset man with a razor-thin mustache, talked the young player into signing a contract that would entitle Savitt to be his agent and retain 50 percent of Mickey’s earnings for ten years. Mantle’s suspicions should have been raised when Holly later told him that Savitt had sold her half of his interest in the agency relationship, but Mickey was no doubt blinded by the emotions of his new social life.