Perfect: Don Larsen's Miraculous World Series Game (24 page)

However much he treasured the trappings of life in the big city in that 1951 season, nothing, it seemed, could help Mantle’s deteriorating performance at the plate. The inevitable occurred when the Yankees arrived in Detroit for a series with the Tigers in July. One of the clubhouse managers told the rookie that Casey wanted to see him, and Mickey understood the consequences as soon as he saw the Yankee manager. There were tears in his eyes, and Stengel began by saying, “This is gonna hurt me more than you.” The team had decided to send the struggling player to its farm team in Kansas City in the hope that he could regain the form that had astonished so many during spring training.

It may have seemed logical to the Yankee management, but Mickey was devastated. Holly remembered that Mantle called her immediately afterward “and bawled like a baby.” His mood did not improve after he started playing for the minor-league team. After getting a drag bunt hit in his first game, Mickey had twenty-one additional plate appearances without getting a hit. Mickey Mantle, the extraordinary prospect from Commerce, had hit rock bottom.

After waiting a few days, he made the call to his father. “I’m not hitting, Dad,” he explained. “I just can’t play anymore.” Mickey was hoping, maybe expecting, that his father would provide some comfort that would enable his son to weather the storm. But Mickey miscalculated. Mutt did contact Merlyn, and the two of them immediately made the five-hour drive to the Aladdin Hotel in Kansas City, where Mickey was staying. But the elder Mantle had no sympathy for his son’s plight. As soon as Mutt and Merlyn entered the hotel room, Mickey tried to review his frustration at the plate. Mutt was not prepared to listen. “I don’t want to hear that whining!” he said with clenched jaws. “I thought I raised a man, not a coward!” And with that, Mutt grabbed his son’s suitcase and began throwing his son’s clothes into it, telling Mickey that he was going to take him back to Commerce, where he could work with him in the mines.

It took some time before Mickey could convince his father to let him stay in Kansas City and give it another shot. Mutt finally relented (or appeared to relent), and when he returned to the ball field the next day, Mantle was a different player. He began getting hits (ultimately driving up his average to .361), blasting home runs (eleven), and driving in runs at a pace (fifty in forty games) that no doubt pleased the Yankee management. By the end of the August, Mickey Mantle was wearing Yankee pinstripes once again.

The new uniform was not the only change. Instead of returning to the Concourse Plaza Hotel, Mickey accepted an invitation to join Hank Bauer and Johnny Hopp, two veteran players, in an apartment over the Stage Delicatessen in Midtown Manhattan. Thus began a steady diet of matzo-ball soup and corned-beef sandwiches, all of which helped push his weight up to about 190 pounds.

Other benefits ensued from the new apartment. Bauer tried to tutor Mantle on the ways of city life and, as part of that instruction, helped the rookie secure a lawyer to terminate the oppressive agency contract that Savitt had foisted on the young player. But the Yankee veteran did not extricate Mantle from the relationship with Holly. And, so, when Mutt came to New York in October for the World Series against the New York Giants, Mickey was able to introduce his new girlfriend to his father. Mutt was not pleased. “Mickey,” he later admonished his son, “you do the right thing and marry your own kind.” And that was the end of Holly.

However disappointed he might have been with the termination of that relationship, it was eclipsed by the excitement that enveloped Mickey as the World Series approached. He had played with confidence in that last month of the season (finishing with thirteen home runs and sixty-five runs driven in), and Stengel had him start the first series game (which the Yankees won) in right field next to DiMaggio. Shortly before the second game, the Yankee manager pulled the rookie aside to ask him to help out DiMaggio, who would be playing center field despite the discomfort of an injured heel that had plagued him all season. “Take everything you can get over in center,” Stengel told Mantle. “The Dago’s heel is hurting pretty bad.”

Anxious to please, Mantle had not forgotten that directive when Willie Mays, the Giants’ rookie center fielder, lofted a ball into right center field in the sixth inning. Mantle, expecting that he would have to field it, turned on the speed and raced toward the descending ball and then, just as he was about to catch it, heard DiMaggio call out to him, saying, “I got it.” Mantle stopped abruptly and, as he did, his cleats got caught in a hidden drainpipe. His knee twisted on impact, and he immediately dropped to the ground with a bone sticking out of the side of his leg. DiMaggio leaned over the stricken player and said, “Don’t move. They’re bringing a stretcher.” Mantle, overcome with excruciating pain, said nothing in response, but in later years he would say “that was about as close as Joe and I had come to a conversation.”

The injury Mantle sustained on that October afternoon would haunt him for the rest of his career. (“I wouldn’t play another game the rest of my career,” he later remarked, “without hurting.”) But it was nothing compared to the heartbreak he felt when he learned of his father’s condition shortly afterward. Mutt—who had lost considerable weight since the visit to Kansas City in July—had gone with Mickey to the Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, but when the younger Mantle leaned on his thirty-nine-year-old father in getting out of the cab, Mutt collapsed on the pavement no less quickly than Mickey had fallen on the field earlier that afternoon. Tests were conducted, and Mickey soon heard the doctor’s diagnosis of his father: Hodgkin’s disease, a form of cancer for which there was no cure.

Mickey was all too familiar with the disease and its destructive impact—his grandfather as well as other male relatives had succumbed to Hodgkin’s disease either before or shortly after they turned forty. The attending physician explained to the Yankee right fielder that there was no hope and that the best course of action was to take Mutt home “and let him enjoy the time he has left.”

Mickey did take Mutt home and in December fulfilled his father’s request by marrying Merlyn. (“Next to me,” Merlyn later said, “the groom’s father was the happiest person in the room.”) But Mutt Mantle never got to see the grandchildren he had envisioned when he advised his oldest son to marry the girl from Picher. Eager to spare his family the trauma of watching him waste away, Mutt checked himself into a hospital in Denver and died there—alone—on May 6, 1952.

Stengel was the one to break the news to Mickey over the phone while the team was in New York for a series with the Cleveland Indians. At that point, the Yankee manager was playing Mantle only sporadically because his hitting was anemic (with only two home runs). That all changed when Mickey returned from his father’s funeral. On May 20, Stengel started him in center field, and Mantle responded with four straight hits—two batting right-handed and two batting left-handed. From that point on, Mantle became the team’s regular center fielder—and began to show the power that he had first displayed in the 1951 spring training camp. (There was the time in July when first baseman Joe Collins, who batted second in the lineup ahead of Mantle, slammed a gigantic home run into the upper deck of Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium. As he crossed home plate, Collins said to Mantle, who was about to step into the batter’s box, “Go chase that.” On the next pitch, Mantle blasted a home run into the upper deck that landed in a spot higher and farther away from the plate than Collins’ shot. When Mantle came back into the dugout, he casually walked past Collins on the way to the watercooler and said with a grin, “What’d you say?” To which Collins good-naturedly responded, “Go shit in your hat.”)

Although he hit only twenty-three home runs (well behind Cleveland’s Larry Doby, the league leader with thirty-two), Mantle’s overall batting performance in his first full season placed him among the league’s most productive batters—with a .311 batting average (third in the league), thirty-seven doubles (second in the league), and 291 total bases from all his hits (second in the league). Those achievements were complemented by Mickey’s critical contribution to the team’s defeat of the Dodgers in the seven-game World Series, batting .345 with ten hits (including two home runs). It was, said
The Sporting News
, “a spectacular World Series in which Mantle played a spectacular role.”

That performance in the fall classic—coupled with his season record—catapulted Mantle into a national sports figure. Stories of Mickey’s background and exploits filled the sports pages, and the public was understandably anxious to learn more about this twenty-one-year-old prodigy. But it was not easy. When a sportswriter for the
Chicago Tribune
traveled to Oklahoma to interview Mickey in conjunction with a book on “The Mickey Mantle Story,” the Yankee center fielder was incredulous. “You mean,” he said to the reporter, “the
Tribune
actually paid your expenses down here to Commerce, Oklahoma, just to see me?”

Mickey’s performance in the exhibition season the following spring did nothing to quell the enthusiasm for this emerging star. He batted .421, causing
The Sporting News
to identify him as the “Yankee candidate for the American League batting championship.” And then there was his home run in an exhibition game against the Pittsburgh Pirates in Forbes Field that sailed over the right-field roof—which was more than ninety feet high—thus matching a feat that had been previously accomplished only by Babe Ruth. Shortly after the season began, Mantle hit another four-bagger that inspired awe among sportswriters and led
The Sporting News
to talk about “the saga of the truly titanic home run.”

With Washington Senators’ southpaw Chuck Stobbs pitching to him on April 17 in the capital’s Griffith Stadium, Mickey, batting right-handed, slammed a ball that, according to the Senators’ broadcaster Bob Wolff, “just zoomed” off Mantle’s bat and made Wolff ask himself, “Did that really happen?” The ball cleared the left-field fence on the rise at the 391-foot mark, hit the scoreboard that stood sixty feet above the last row of bleachers, flew past Fifth Street behind the stadium, and landed on a side street well beyond the stadium’s walls. “Everybody was screaming in the press box,” remembered Yankee publicity director Red Patterson. So he decided something had to be done to memorialize the event. He was, after all, in charge of Yankee publicity.

Patterson left the press box, bought a hot dog and a beer, and some minutes later returned to the press box to tell his colleagues that he had determined that the ball had traveled 565 feet. No one challenged Patterson’s measuring techniques. They had all seen the blast, and it was indeed incredible. The next day’s headlines repeated the figure and said that Mantle’s “565-foot drive” compared well with the feats of Babe Ruth and earlier power hitters. The measurement may have rested on faulty methodology, but no matter. The era of the tape-measure home run was born.

There was thus hope that Mantle could surpass the achievements of the 1952 season. But that hope was soon compromised by repeated injuries to his legs that forced Mickey to miss almost thirty games and limited his home run production to twenty-one (although he did drive in ninety-two runs, five more than he had in 1952). Whatever disappointment he may have felt about his season’s record was soon erased by another memorable home run in the World Series against the Dodgers.

In the top of the third inning of the fifth game at Ebbets Field, Brooklyn manager Charlie Dressen called in Russ Meyer, a six-foot-one-inch right-hander, to pitch to Mantle with the bases loaded. Dressen warned his new pitcher not to give Mantle any fastballs, and Meyer obliged by throwing the Yankee center fielder a curve. Batting left-handed, Mantle swung at the pitch and drove the ball high into the left-field bleachers for a grand-slam home run (making him only the fourth player to hit one in a World Series). Sportswriter Roger Kahn, who was covering the game for
The New York Herald Tribune
, remembered the ball “landing with such force that some said they heard the sound of furniture breaking.” For his part, Meyer, who pitched in the major leagues for thirteen seasons, later said that Mantle’s home run “was the longest and hardest ball ever hit off me.”

It should have been a good omen for the 1954 season. But obstacles remained. Another operation on Mantle’s knee was required during the winter and, not one to worry about postoperative rehabilitation, he showed up at spring training unable to run, let alone play. (“When you’re young,” Mantle later said, “you think you’re indestructible. I didn’t even do the exercises they gave me to do.”) Still, the press continued to inflate his reputation, with one sportswriter repeating Stengel’s preseason prediction that Mantle was “capable of taking the batting title held by Mickey Vernon and the runs driven in and the home run leadership held by Al Rosen.”

None of those predictions materialized, but there should have been no complaints. The twenty-two-year-old center fielder hit twenty-seven home runs—finishing third in the league—and continued to establish himself as one of the league’s better hitters with a .300 batting average and 102 runs driven in.

However satisfied they should have been with his batting performance, fans continued to boo Mickey when he did not fulfill their inflated expectations. A particular source of frustration was the growing number of strikeouts that Mantle had during the 1952 season (107). Stengel never tired of using psychological maneuvers to correct Mantle’s tendency to reach for bad pitches. (A favorite target of Mantle’s frustration with strikeouts continued to be the watercooler in the dugout, and Stengel would repeatedly tell his center fielder, “It ain’t the watercooler that’s striking you out, son.”) But the Yankee manager’s observations and advice seemed to have little impact. “Telling Mantle something is like telling him nothing,” a frustrated Stengel explained to a reporter.

Still, Stengel had to be pleased with the Oklahoma native’s performance in 1955. He had hit thirty-seven home runs by early September—thus generating expectations that he would become the first Yankee to hit forty or more home runs since Joe DiMaggio hit forty-six in 1937. But leg injuries once again foreclosed Mantle from achieving the anticipated home-run milestone. On September 16, he pulled a thigh muscle while trying to drag a bunt down the first-base line, and he never made it past thirty-seven (although he did wind up leading the league in that department, tied teammate Andy Carey for the league lead in triples with eleven, batted .306, and led the league with a .611 slugging percentage). For Stengel, it was a sign of better things to come, and he told sportswriters after the season that Mantle “has not yet reached his peak.”