The Last Boy (54 page)
Authors: Jane Leavy
Physicists define the perfect swing as one that facilitates the most complete transfer of energy from batter to bat. By that standard, Mantle was nearly perfect. Alan Nathan, an experimental nuclear particle physicist, studies high-speed collisions between subatomic particles and, in his spare time, collisions between bats and balls. “The ball is turned around in less than one-thousandth of a second,” he said. “The collision generates a peak force of just under 10,000 pounds. The ball is compressed like a spring, maybe as much as an inch. It comes to a momentary stop and then expands.”
At impact, Mantle’s back leg formed what batting coaches sometimes call a “power L.” Peavy tells his students that their shoelaces should face the pitcher and their heel should point to the sky. Mantle fit that configuration batting both right-handed and left-handed. His thigh and calf met in a perfect right angle. He looked like a supplicant, bowing to the pitcher’s mound. Sometimes, his knee was no more than eight inches off the ground. “The back foot is like a gas gauge for hip rotation,” Peavy said. “If you see the classic power L, then you can guarantee they have pulled the hip through as forcibly and completely as they can.”
Mantle was nothing but forceful; he never compromised on his swing. Nowhere is this more visible than in an iconic photograph taken on October 8, 1961, when he had to leave game 4 of the World Series because of a gaping wound in his hip. The photograph reveals none of the particulars of the moment: not the inning (fourth), not the score (0-0), not the blood oozing through the protective padding on his hip. In the background the diffuse home crowd fills bunting-draped seats. Mantle occupies the foreground, frozen in time at the end of an empty swing. The futility of the effort is implicit in his posture and his facial expression. His chin is raised as if by a grimace. His jersey is creased by exertion, the full rotation of his hips and torso.
To a classicist, his form evokes Discobolos, the discus thrower of ancient Greece, probably the most famous athletic statue in history. Rendered originally in bronze in 460-450 B.C. by the sculptor Myron, the statue captures the fluidity of recent motion, an athlete who has just arrived at his current position. The similarity to the 1961 photograph is telling because it suggests Mantle’s classical form, one reason for his enduring hold on the imagination.
To a batting coach, the picture is evidence of the harnessing of all his potential power. “He wrung every pound of force out of that body,” Peavy said.
To a pitching coach, it is a portrait of balance and depletion. “Whether he was fooled by a changeup and swung and missed or maybe popped one up, it’s obvious that he was in pain,” Osteen said.
But, he said, Mantle still aspired to “the perfect form that the picture shows. Normally when stars have an injury or pain, they change their form to alleviate the discomfort, but this picture shows that he was still trying to swing the way he always did.”
MICKEY CHARLES MANTLE
Born: October 20, 1931, Spavinaw, Oklahoma
Died: August 13, 1995, Dallas, Texas
Buried at Sparkman-Hillcrest Memorial Park, Dallas, Texas (Mausoleum-St. Mark NE-N-C-13-A)
First Game: April 17, 1951; Final Game: September 28, 1968
Bat: Both
Throw: Right
Height: 5’ 11.5”
Weight: 195
Selected to the Hall of Fame in 1974
Named AL Most Valuable Player by Baseball Writers’ Association of America (1956 to 1957 and 1962)
Named Major League Player of the Year by
The Sporting News
(1956)
Named AL Player of the Year by
The Sporting News
(1956 and 1962)
Named outfielder on
The Sporting News
Major League All-Star Team (1952 and 1956 to 1957)
Named outfielder on
The Sporting News
AL All-Star Team (1961 to 1962 and 1964)
Won AL Gold Glove as outfielder (1962)
Ejections as player: 1954 (1), 1957 (1), 1958 (2), 1964 (1), 1965 (1), 1968 (1). Total: 7
CAREER TOTALS: 18 YEARS
When traditionalists compare Mays and Mantle, they use the old math: batting average (.302 vs. 298), RBIs (1,903 in 22 years vs. 1,509 in 18 years), and home runs (660 in 2,992 games vs. 536 in 2,401 games). Both hit .300 or better ten times; both hit more than 50 homers in a season twice; both finished their careers with a .557 slugging percentage; both fared well in Branch Rickey’s measure of Isolated Power, with Mantle slightly higher than Mays (.256 vs..259).
Very few boys on New York City street corners bragged about how many more times The Mick walked. In ten seasons, he walked 100 times or more (Mays did that once). Or the number of times he grounded into double plays (113), half as many as Mays (251). But to the trained eye of a modern stat geek, walks are the key to Mantle’s superior on-base percentage and the reason he fares so well in a preponderance of the new offensive metrics.
Mantle’s lifetime batting average was much higher right-handed than left-handed (.329 compared to .275). But his on-base percentage was almost identical (.432 right-handed, .422 left-handed). His OPS is staggering from both sides of the plate—1.014 right-handed and .964 left-handed. (The major league average in 2008 was around .760.) By this standard, Mantle ranks twelfth in baseball history, ahead of Joe
DiMaggio, Willie Mays, and Hank Aaron. In eighteen years in the major leagues, Mantle put 6,392 balls into play; 536 of them—or 8.4 percent—were home runs.
Bill James was a security guard at the Stokely Van Camp pork and beans factory in Kansas when he pioneered a formula for runs created (RC = total bases
*
[(hits + walks)/plate appearances]) that assessed credit for each run produced. Thirty years later,
Time
magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world and the Boston Red Sox put him to work in their front office. In 2001, he unveiled a new formula for “win shares,” an extrapolation of runs created that calculates a player’s contribution to every victory. This system compares players at different positions as well as players of different eras, enabling fantasy baseball to expand into uncharted hypothetical territory. According to this calculus, Mantle should have been the Most Valuable Player nine times, not the three times he actually won the award. He led (or tied) the American League in win shares every year from 1954 to 1964, except 1963, when he played only sixty-five games. When Cyril Morong, an economist turned sabermatrician, extrapolated win shares per at-bat, Mantle finished second behind Ruth.
If the Bill James baseball abstracts are the sabermetric equivalent of the Old Testament, then Pete Palmer’s 1984
Hidden Game of Baseball
is the New Testament. Palmer’s work began in the 1960s, when he stayed after work at the Raytheon Company, using the computer to develop a system of linear weights that assigned a value to each of the seven possible outcomes of an at-bat. It was a breakthrough that precipitated an entirely new way of assessing baseball performance. He pioneered total player rankings and, with co-author, John Thorn, devised a metric called on-base-plus slugging (OPS = SLG + OPB), which measured a player’s ability to get on base and hit for power. Topps began putting OPS stats on the back of its baseball cards in 2004. Palmer’s next evolutionary step was “batter-fielder wins” (BFW), a calculus for establishing the number of wins over (or under) what an average player would contribute to his team with his batting, baserunning, and fielding. (Retrosheet now includes BFW among other career totals.) Palmer credits Mantle with a total 71.8 BFW over the course of his career, meaning that he was responsible for nearly 72 additional wins beyond what a league-average performer at his
position would have contributed. In the world of BFWs, two games per season are significant. In 1955 and 1956, Mantle is responsible for 8 BFW or better; in 1961, he is credited with 7.5 BFW. Three other times, he rated over 5 BFW. Mays, on the other hand, has a career total of 84.4 BFW, in part a reflection of his longevity. But he never had a single-season BFW rating over 7, though he was over 5 on eight other occasions.
Clay Davenport, a weather scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and chief statistician for Baseball Prospectus, spent a decade devising an equation for equivalent average, a metric that measures total offensive value per out with corrections for league offensive production, home ballpark, and team pitching. His most radical innovation was to translate his metrics into traditional baseball numbers, making the new math accessible to old fans. Mantle’s translated EqA batting average in Davenport’s system is .316, four points higher than Mays’s.
| MANTLE | MAYS | |
|---|---|---|
| EqA: | .340 | .328 |
| Black Ink: | 65 | 57 |
| OBP: | .421 | .384 |
| OPS: | 12 th all-time | 30 th all-time |
| 0PS+: | 6 th all-time | 19 th all-time |
| RC: | 2039 | 2368 |
| RC/G: | 9.3 | 7.9 |
| RCAA: | 7 th all-time | 11 th all-time |
| RCAP: | 6 th all-time | 10 th all-time |
| TPRf: | 7 th all-time | 9 th all-time |
I
AM INDEBTED TO
the research staff at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York, for providing a copy of its Mantle file, containing newspaper and magazine stories, personal recollections, fan letters, poems, and cartoons. Some of the material was unattributed or undated or incomplete; some stories lacked volume and page numbers. I have used only those whose content I could verify. The list below, containing articles from multiple sources, includes only those I relied on extensively.
The following museums and archives provided invaluable primary source material: the Everett J. Ritchie Tri-State Mining Museum, Joplin, Missouri; the Heritage Center and Museum, Baxter Springs, Kansas; the Historical Society of Washington, Washington, D.C.; L.E.A.D. Agency, Inc., Vinita, Oklahoma; the LeDroit Park Civic Association, Washington, D.C.; the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; the
New England Journal of Medicine
; the New York Times Article Archive; the Oklahoma Geological Survey at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma;
ProQuest; the University of Southern California film archive; the Washington Post Historical Archive.
Thanks to Maybell Bennett, the Howard University Community Association; Nick Dolin, HBO; Brad Garrett, Brad Garrett Investigations; C.C. Livingston, Howard University Hospital; Rhonda Schwartz, ABC News; Ted Spencer, Tim Wiles, and Russell Wolinsky, the National Baseball Hall of Fame; and Jason Zillo, New York Yankees.
Every game and career statistic for Mantle was verified by Dave Smith of Retrosheet.
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------.
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------.
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------.
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------.
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