Perfect: Don Larsen's Miraculous World Series Game (25 page)

The Yankee manager knew what he was talking about. Mickey opened the 1956 season with two gigantic home runs in the opening game against the Senators in Washington, DC, and by the end of May he had twenty. The last home run of the month was a blast off Senators’ pitcher Pedro Ramos that came within eighteen inches of clearing the right-field facade in Yankee Stadium (and would have made Mantle the first player to hit a ball out of the House That Ruth Built). “That hit was unbelievable,” said Bob Wolff, who was again providing broadcast commentary for the Senators’ game. “The ball was on an acceleration when it hit the facade—it was on the way up. I thought that ball would have gone another hundred feet higher up before it started its descent.”

Mantle’s performance began to draw national attention—not only because of the magnitude of his blasts but also because he was well ahead of the pace Ruth had set in 1927 when he hit sixty home runs. “Mickey Mantle, the switch-hitter who is electrifying baseball fans everywhere and electrocuting the New York Yankees’ opposition,” explained veteran sportswriter Tom Meany, “is the most talked-about player in baseball today.” And the talk was all in superlatives that had rarely been used. “Baseball has been looking for a long time for the superplayer,” said Baltimore Orioles manager Paul Richards. “Now it can stop looking because Mickey Mantle is that player.” “For the first time in his career,” added
The Sporting News
, “Mantle is the recognized standout player of the majors.”

Mantle’s accomplishments were all the more remarkable because he continued to bear the burden of his numerous leg injuries—from the osteomyelitis to the twisted knee from the 1951 World Series to the numerous pulled muscles suffered afterward. Never could he play without going through a tedious pregame ritual of wrapping bandages around his right leg from ankle to thigh and then putting a brace around his right knee. “The thing too many people overlook about him,” Stengel told Meany at one point, “is that he’s been doing all he has been doing this year as a cripple.” Early Wynn, one of the stalwarts of the Cleveland Indians’ pitching staff, spoke of Mantle’s physical handicap after sharing a locker room with him before the 1956 All-Star game. “I watched him bandage that knee—that whole leg,” Wynn later said, “and I saw what he had to go through every day to play. And now I’ll never be able to praise him enough.”

Never, however, would Mantle let his displays of power on the field embarrass the pitcher who had thrown the home-run ball. He would never stand at the plate to watch the ball sail out of the park, point to the sky in celebration, or show any other emotion that might make the pitcher feel uncomfortable. Instead, he would begin his trot around the bases almost immediately after he hit the ball—no matter how far—with his head down and his arms bent at his side. The gesture did not go unnoticed. “I always respected that about him,” said Jim Kaat, who pitched in the American League for sixteen years.

Mantle’s assault on Babe Ruth’s home run record dwindled in September, but he ultimately succeeded in winning the triple crown by leading the league in homers with fifty-two, being on top with 130 runs batted in, and, in the last few days of the season, taking the batting crown (with a .353. average) from Boston’s Ted Williams (who finished with a .345 average). Williams was gracious in defeat—but he did tell the press, “If I could run like that son of a bitch, I’d hit .400 every year.”

By 1956, Mantle had not only matured as an athlete. He had also begun to enjoy the benefits—and suffer the burdens—of fame in New York City.

Mantle had become the object of desire not only for fans but also for young women who would literally throw themselves at him (leading some of his teammates to say toward the end of the 1956 season that “Mickey might be losing ground on Ruth’s record on the field but was still well ahead of his home-run pace off the field”). That extracurricular activity was possible because Merlyn, with a dread of flying, had remained home in Oklahoma to take care of the couple’s two (soon to be four) sons. Mickey was willing—if not anxious—to exploit that distance from his wife because he was convinced that, like his father and male relatives, he would not make it past his fortieth birthday. “My father died young,” he told Hank Bauer at one point. “I’m not going to be cheated.”

The attention of fans was another matter. Mantle could never understand why people wanted his autograph—largely because, despite his achievements, he saw himself as just another player. Beyond that, for all his growing sophistication, he had not traveled very far from his roots (and never would he let his fame affect relations with his family—as his brother Ray later told me, Mickey “always remained the same”). “I’ve always had a private corner,” Mickey remarked many years later, “an innate shyness that prevents me from feeling comfortable when talking to strangers.” That shyness created considerable discomfort when strangers approached him for autographs and even extended to the young boys who would crowd the door of the players’ locker room after a game at Yankee Stadium, trying to secure autographs from the players as they walked to their cars or, in many cases, the nearby Concourse Plaza Hotel. “Of course, the one who was always most aloof when I was a child,” remembered Jim Cartelli, who grew up in the shadows of Yankee Stadium (and who befriended Mickey at his baseball fantasy camp decades later), “was Mantle. It was very difficult to get near him.”

 

No one is crowding Mickey Mantle in center field when Jackie Robinson steps into the batter’s box to start the fifth inning of the fifth game of the 1956 World Series. After missing the strike zone on the first pitch and then getting Robinson to hit a foul ball that bounces off the railing on the right side of the stands, Larsen throws a slow curve that looks inviting as it approaches the plate, but there is only air when Robinson takes a swing. “A big soft curve sent to Robinson,” Bob Neal explains to his radio audience, “and he went fishing for it.” Larsen knows, however, that he cannot count on the Dodger third baseman to miss all the pitches, and Robinson’s bat squarely meets the ball on the next pitch and sends a high drive to the left side of the stands—but foul—where it hits the top of the facade in the upper deck and then falls back onto the field. “Boy,” says Neal, “Jackie really gave that ball a ride.” But the threat of a hit ends when Robinson swings at the next pitch and lofts a high fly ball into right field, where Bauer corrals it for the first out of the inning.

Gil Hodges follows Robinson to the plate. The Dodger first baseman is a pull hitter, and Mantle shifts a few feet to his right to account for that tendency. At first, there appears to be little likelihood of a ball reaching the outfield. Larsen fires two fastballs by Hodges which Babe Pinelli calls for strikes. The Yankee hurler thinks he has achieved another strikeout on the next pitch, but the umpire believes otherwise, and the count stands at one ball and two strikes. Larsen misses on the next fastball as well and now, with the count at 2-2, he knows that he has to get the pitch over the plate. But the pitch—a slider—is not nearly as good as Larsen would have liked. “The ball was flat when it drifted into Gil’s hitting area,” Larsen later recalled. “His brain must have sounded an alarm that this was the pitch that would end up in a home run to tie the score.”

His head down, his eyes focused, Hodges swings at the ball with his arms extended and his considerable muscles rippling. There is a loud sound as the bat makes a connection and the ball quickly soars toward left center field. Neal is screaming into the microphone that Hodges “drives one deep into left center field.” Sitting in the stands, Joan Hodges, the first baseman’s wife, jumps to her feet with thousands of others, believing that the ball is destined to be a home run into the bleachers beyond the 457-foot sign. For his part, Larsen does not think the ball will reach the bleachers, but he does think it will “drop near the base of the fence” for a double or triple or “even an inside-the-park home run.”

Mickey Mantle has other thoughts. He gets a good jump on the ball, and Yogi Berra, who is watching from home plate, thinks, “With his speed, Mickey has a chance to catch it.” The other person who thinks Mantle can catch up to the ball is Dodger pitcher Clem Labine, who is watching the play from the Dodger bullpen in left center field. “You can tell,” Labine later explained, “by where his eyes are—if he was afraid of going into the wall, then you see his eyes off the ball. But when the head is still up and looking for the ball, then you know he’s not worried about going into the wall.” As the ball dips out of the sky, Mantle, with his head up and his left arm extended, reaches out and snares the ball with his glove at full speed just before it hits the ground. “Sheer robbery,” Neal exclaims. “It was,” Mickey later said, “the best catch I ever made.” And although she is disappointed, Joan Hodges has to agree that it was “a fantastic catch.”

Larsen has dodged one bullet. But he is not yet out of the inning. There are only two outs, and Sandy Amoros steps into the batter’s box. After taking the first pitch for a ball, Amoros swings hard at the next pitch—another slider—and drives the ball toward the right-field stands. Larsen watches, knowing that the ball has “the legs to get out of the park.” But first-base umpire Ed Runge races toward the stands and, as the ball reaches the seats, signals that it is a foul ball. When asked later how close the call was, Runge held up his thumb and index finger—signaling a distance of about four inches. “That shows how valuable it is to have a man down the line in these games,” Pinella says after the game. “If I gotta call that one from the plate, I go the other way.”

Larsen has been given another reprieve. After another ball, he throws yet another slider. Amoros swings and sends a routine ground ball to Billy Martin, who pulls it in and makes the throw to first baseman Joe Collins for the out. And so Larsen can now retreat to the security of the Yankee dugout—and as he does so, the fans give him a rousing ovation.

10

T
o the nine-year-old boy, it looked to be like many other trees in the spacious fields of Brandenburg, Kentucky, near the Ohio River. But his father, then a struggling tobacco farmer in the nearby town of Ekron, explained on that long-ago day in the 1920s that this tree—with its strong, low-hanging branches—had a special significance. It was the hanging tree, he said, the one used to lynch blacks who had committed some infraction that the white populace found unacceptable. It was not clear to the young boy whether his father had ever participated in those lynchings. But that was almost secondary. The tree symbolized a violent part of life that contrasted sharply with the boy’s otherwise tranquil existence in which blacks lived separate and apart from the white community.

The boy would grow up, move to urban centers where blacks mixed with whites, and learn to respect the contribution of African-Americans to the nation’s growth. But he never forgot that tree. “That’s something that always haunted my father,” the boy’s son, Mark, told me decades later. “And I think it’s something that dogged my father—to use his expression—his entire life.”

As he fields practice ground balls from first baseman Gil Hodges in Yankee Stadium, Dodger shortstop Pee Wee Reese, now thirty-eight years old, is surely focused on other matters as the Yankees come to bat in the bottom of the fifth inning of the fifth game of the 1956 World Series. There is, of course, tension on the field and in the stands. “Well,” says radio announcer Bob Neal, “with such a great thriller, everybody here is going to stay closely glued to their seats.” But the pressure of a World Series is nothing new for Reese. Having joined the club in 1940, he has played every inning of every World Series game that pitted the Dodgers against the Yankees. He is now a seasoned professional, and he is not one to be distracted by the huge crowds in the stadium or unnerved by the importance of the game.

It is a life that Harold Henry Reese could not have imagined when he was growing up on that farm near Ekron, Kentucky. Not that he was there long. It was difficult to eke out a living on a tobacco farm in those Depression days, and by the time his son was seven, Carl Reese gave up the farm and moved his family, which included his wife, Emma, and five children, about fifty miles up the Ohio River to Louisville. There Carl took a job as a detective with the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, but the income was hardly enough to support a family of seven. “We were very poor,” Reese later recalled. But it was really of no moment. “Everyone was poor where we lived,” he said. Still, all the children worked as soon as they were able and, as Reese remembered, everybody brought in whatever they could earn and “threw it in the pot.”

For his part, young Harold would sell box lunches, deliver papers, and take whatever odd jobs he could handle while he went to school. He had an interest in baseball, but, as he remembered years later, “I developed faster at marbles.” Before long he was a master at shooting marbles, especially with his smallest marble—the peewee. (“You guys don’t stand a chance,” he would invariably tell his friends when he approached a game in the neighborhood park. “I’ve got my favorite peewee with me today.”) By the time he was eleven, he had won the city championship and his friends were calling him “Pee Wee.”

Although it had nothing to do with his physical size, the nickname provided an apt description of young Pee Wee through his high school years. His growth was slow, and even as a seventeen-year-old high school senior he stood only five feet, four inches tall and weighed only 120 pounds. Sometimes he would tag along with his older brother Carl Jr. to neighborhood baseball games, and on occasion the other boys would enlist the younger brother’s services if they came up short on players.

Pee Wee enjoyed the game and had a quickness in the field that distinguished him from most of his peers. He soon began playing with an American Legion team and then joined the New Covenant Presbyterian Church team as a shortstop after he graduated from high school. Having grown a few inches and gained some weight, Pee Wee was that much better a player, and he caught the eye of William “Cap” Neal when the church team won an interleague championship in 1937. That was no small matter, because Neal managed the Louisville Colonels, the local minor-league baseball team.