Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville

by Stephen Jay Gould

  During my youth nothing so obsessed the minds of New York fans as the great Mantle-Mays-Snider center-field debate. We all love the Duke, but men of good conscience must see the real contest as between Mickey and Willie. Hindsight has usually given the nod to Mays. Mays was a better fielder (Mantle was also damned good), and Mays sustained his greatness longer and more consistently. But Mantle at peak value in his four great seasons, was—by any measure, sabermetric, conventional, or simple subjective memory—clearly superior to Mays or any player since.

  The Yanks of the fifties and sixties were probably the greatest team of all time. Mantle dominated this superlative bunch. He led the team for nine years in a row in runs scored, five in total hits, seven in homers, three in RBIs, nine in walks, six in stolen bases, and six more in a row in slugging average. In 1961 Mantle hit a career-high fifty-four home runs and might have fractured Ruth’s record along with Roger Maris if he hadn’t visited a quack medico to cure a cold and ended up flat on his back during the end of this greatest baseball derby. Mantle won the MVP award for three of his four great seasons (finishing second to Maris in the year of the asterisk).

  Mantle played at the acme of the most one-dimensional style the game has ever known—put men on base and wait around for someone to hit a long ball. We sometimes forget that Mantle, for all his size and power, was also the fastest man in baseball, and a great drag bunter (practically unbeatable when bunting for a hit from the left side). He maintained a career success rate of 80 percent for stolen bases (compared with 77 for Mays), but only once was he allowed to swipe more than twenty in a season. Imagine what Mantle’s speed and bunting ability might produce in our present game, especially with the return of scrappy, one-run baseball.

  But enough already. You can carry abstract analysis so far—and although I may be an academic by trade, I write primarily as a fan, as a man who loved Mickey Mantle and whose childhood was brightened by his glory. To hell with what might have been. No one can reach personal perfection in a complex world filled with distraction. Williams had his best years cut short by World War II and Korea; DiMaggio played in the wrong park; Shoeless Joe Jackson, acquitted by the courts, was executed by major league baseball. What happened is all we have. By this absolute and irrefragable standard, Mantle was the greatest ballplayer of his time.

  Mantle also taught me something very special: the universality of excellence. We intellectuals, in our crass parochialism, often imagine that scholars succeed only by a struggle of long years devoted to study but that athletes triumph by untutored skill—the pain of brain versus the gift of brawn. But if I have learned anything from studying the lives of great ballplayers, Mantle’s in particular, I have come to understand the common denominator of human excellence. The potential must be present (and we do not all possess it), but the universal agents of realization are passion to the point of obsession combined with hard, unrelenting work. All achievers are kinsmen in a tough and crowded world.

  I do not seek moral lessons from my sports heroes. The thrill of witnessing rare excellence will suffice. My relationship with Mickey Mantle was forged by a single image. Probably a quarter of a million people will swear they saw it in the flesh (though Yankee Stadium then held but a quarter that many), but I was really there.

  I took a trip to New York a month before my graduation from college in 1963. On May 22, Mantle, batting lefty, hit a line drive off Kansas City pitcher Bill Fischer. It rose and rose until it struck the facade above the third deck in right field—the closest that anyone has ever come to hitting a fair ball out of Yankee Stadium (“the hardest ball I ever hit,” Mantle told me). It was still rising when it struck the parapet. I remember particularly the stunned silence before the roar of the crowd. Six more feet up, and Mantle would have fused himself to my profession of scientific exploration in more than the abstract character of excellence. Six more feet up, and that ball would have become a moon of Uranus.

  Dusty’s Moment

  Circumstance is the greatest leveler. In a world of too much predictability, where records by season and career belong only to the greatest players, any competent person in uniform may produce one unforgettable feat. A journeyman pitcher, Don Larsen, hurled a perfect game in the World Series of 1956. Does Bill Wambsganss, with his unusual name and strictly average play as an infielder, ever evoke any memory beyond the unassisted triple play that fortuitously fell his way in the fifth inning of the fifth game of the 1920 World Series?

  First published as “Dusty Rhodes” in Cult Baseball Players: The Greats, the Flakes, the Weird, and the Wonderful, ed. Danny Peary (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990).

  All ship’s carpenters are named “Chips,” all radio engineers “Sparks.” By a similar custom, anyone named Rhodes will end up with the nickname “Dusty.” James Lamar “Dusty” Rhodes, an alcoholic utility outfielder from Mathews, Alabama, made me the happiest boy in New York when he won the 1954 World Series for the New York Giants, all by himself. (I will admit that a few other events of note occurred during these four short days—Mays’s legendary catch off Vic Wertz among others—but no man, and certainly not a perpetually inebriated pinch hitter, has ever so dominated our favorite days of October.)

  The 1954 Cleveland Indians were probably the greatest team of modern baseball (although we might also argue for the 1998 Yankees and a few others). They compiled the best record of the modern era, 111–43 for an incredible winning percentage of .721. People forget the ironic fact that the Yankees, who won the American League pennant in every other year from 1949 to 1958, actually compiled their best record of the decade by coming in second to the Indians at 103–51 in 1954. With a pitching staff of Bob Lemon, Early Wynn, and Mike Garcia (not to mention an aging, but still able, Bob Feller), Cleveland was an overwhelming favorite to slaughter my beloved Giants with dispatch.

  The Giants won that World Series in the greatest surprise of modern history, matched only, perhaps, by the 1969 Mets, whose victory, or so George Burns tells us, was the only undeniable miracle since the parting of the Red Sea. Those two Series, 1954 and 1969, share two other interesting elements, but in each case the 1954 Giants provide the cleaner and more memorable case. First, both the Giants and the Mets were overwhelming underdogs, yet both won commandingly with four straight victories. But the 1969 Series lasted five games, because Baltimore beat Tom Seaver in the first contest; the Giants put the Indians away in four—clean, simple, and minimal. Second, both victories were sparked by the most unlikely utility ballplayer. Al Weis (remember Big Al?) won the Mets’ first game with a two-out single in the ninth, then tied the last game with an improbable homer. Dusty Rhodes fared even better. He won, tied, or assured victory in each of the first three games. By then, the Indians were so discouraged that they pretty much lay down and died for the finale.

  If Leo Durocher, the Giants’ manager, had been able to call the shots, Rhodes wouldn’t have been on the team at all. In fact, Durocher told Giants’ boss Horace Stoneham that he would quit as manager unless Rhodes were traded. Durocher had two objections to Rhodes: he couldn’t field, and he couldn’t stay sober. Stoneham agreed and put Rhodes on the block, but no other team even nibbled. As Durocher said, “Everybody else had heard about Mr. Rhodes, too. Any club could have claimed him for a dollar bill. Thank the Lord none did.” Durocher was appeased by Stoneham’s honest effort, and even more by Rhodes’s stellar performance as a pinch hitter in 1954, when he batted .333 in that role at 15 for 45.

  The New York Giants greet Dusty Rhodes after his pinch-hit, tenth-inning home run wins the first game of the 1954 World Series. Credit: AP/Wide World Photos

  Rhodes won the first game of the 1954 Series with a three-run homer in the tenth after Willie Mays had saved the game with his legendary catch off Vic Wertz. Rhodes’s dinger wasn’t the most commanding home run in the history of baseball, but they all have the same effect, whether Carlton Fisk grazes the left-field foul pole in Fenway Park or Mantle hits one nearly into orbit. I loved the old Polo Grounds, but t
he ballpark had a bizarre shape, with a cavernous center field and short fences down the lines to compensate. The right-field corner sat at a major league minimal distance of 258 feet from home plate. Dusty just managed to nudge one over the right fielder’s outstretched glove—an out anywhere else.

  In game two, Durocher called upon Rhodes earlier. Wynn held a 1–0 lead in the fifth, but the Giants had two on and nobody out. Rhodes, pinch-hitting for Monte Irvin, dumped a single to center, tying the score. In the seventh, he added an insurance run and silenced the grousing about his “cheapie” of the day before by blasting a massive homer that was still rising when it hit the Polo Grounds’ upper facade, 350 feet from home.

  Durocher, on a roll, inserted Rhodes as an even-earlier pinch hitter in game three. He came in with the bases loaded in the third inning and knocked in two more runs, including the ultimate game-winner, with a single.

  All this happened long ago, but my memories of joy and vindication could not be more clear or immediate. I had taken all manner of abuse, mostly from Dodger fans, for my optimism about the Giants. I had also bet every cent I owned (about four bucks) at very favorable odds. I ended up with about fifteen dollars and felt like the richest kid in New York. I’d have bought Dusty a double bourbon, but we never met, and I was underage.

  Dusty Rhodes, a great and colorful character, was a strictly average ballplayer who had a moment of glory. You will find him in record books for a few other items—he once hit three homers in a single game, two pinch-hit homers in a single inning, and has the most extra-base hits in a doubleheader. But he was no star during his seven-year career, all with the Giants. People tend to focus on great moments and forget averages. They then falsely extrapolate the moment to the totality. Thus, many fans think that Dusty was a great pinch hitter throughout his career. Not so. As Bill James points out, Dusty’s career pinch-hitting average is .186. He could do no wrong in 1954, but his pinch-hitting averages in his other six years were .111, .172, .250, .179, .152, and .188.

  Who cares? Our joys and our heroes come in many modes and on many time scales. We treasure the consistency of a Ted Williams, the resiliency of a Cal Ripken, but we hold special affection for the journeymen fortunate enough to taste greatness in an indelible moment of legitimate glory. We love DiMaggio because he was a paragon. We love Dusty Rhodes because he was a man like us. And his few days of majesty nurture a special hope that no ordinary person can deny. Any of us might get one chance for an act of transcendence—an opportunity to bake the greatest cake ever, to offer just the right advice or support, even to save a life. And when that opportunity comes, we do not want to succeed because we bought the lucky ticket in a lottery. Whatever the humdrum quality of our daily life, we yearn to know that, at some crucial moment, our special skills may render our presence exactly right and specially suited for the task required. Dusty Rhodes stands as a symbol of that hope, that ever-present possibility.

  This Was a Man

  When Mel Allen, the Voice of the Yankees, died last week at eighty-three, I lost the man who ranked second only to my father for sheer volume of attention paid during my childhood. (My dad, by the way, was a Dodger fan and Red Barber devotee.)

  As I considered the surprising depth of my sadness, I realized I was mourning the extinction of a philosophy as much as the loss of a dear man. And I felt that most of the warm press commentary had missed the essence of Allen’s strength. The eulogies focused on his signature phrases: his invariable opening line, “Hello there, everybody” his perennial exclamation of astonishment, “How about that!” and his home run mantra, “It’s going…going…gone!”

  But I would characterize his immense appeal by two statements I heard him make during a distant childhood. They have stayed with me, one for its integrity, the other for its antic humor. One exemplifies the high road, the other an abyss, however charming.

  First published as “A Voice With Heart” in the New York Times, June 26, 1996. Reprinted with permission of the New York Times.

  The comments could not be more different, but they embody, when taken together, something precious, something fragile and invariably lost when institutions become so large that the generic blandness of commercial immensity chokes off spontaneity and originality.

  The phenomenon is not confined to broadcasting. In my academic world, textbooks have become longer, duller, and entirely interchangeable for the same reason. Idiosyncratic works cannot sell sufficiently, for curricula have been standardized (partly by conventional textbooks), and originality guarantees oblivion. The great texts of the past defined fields for generations because they promulgated the views of brilliant authors—Charles Lyell’s geology, Alfred Marshall’s economics—but modern writers are faceless servants of a commercial machine that shuns anything unique.

  One day in 1952, as Mickey Mantle struggled in center field the year after Joe DiMaggio’s retirement, fans started booing after Mickey struck out for the second time in a row. In the midst of his play-by-play, an infuriated Allen shouted at a particularly raucous fan, “Why are you booing him?” When the fan shot back that Mickey wasn’t as good as DiMaggio, Allen gave him a ferocious dressing-down for his indecency in razzing an enormously talented but unformed twenty-year-old just because he couldn’t replace the greatest player of the age.

  The Yankees were sponsored by Ballantine beer and White Owl cigars. Mel never lost an opportunity for supplementary endorsements. Home runs became “Ballantine Blasts” or “White Owl Wallops” depending on the sponsor of the inning. When a potential home run passed just to the wrong side of the foul pole, Allen would exclaim, “Why, that ball was just foul by a bottle of Ballantine beer.”

  One day, Mickey hit one that seemed destined for success, and Allen began his mantra, “It’s going…going…” He stopped as the ball went foul by no more than an inch or two. “Folks, that ball was foul by no more than a bottle of Bal—” Then he stopped, thought for a fraction of a moment and exclaimed, “No, I’ve never seen one so close. That ball was foul by no more than the ash on a White Owl cigar!”

  Mel Allen in 1951. Allen died on June 16, 1996. Credit: AP/Wide World Photos

  A man of grace and integrity, a shameless huckster of charming originality. But above all a man who could only be his wonderful cornball self—Mel Allen, the inimitable human Voice of the Yankees. So join my two stories, and let us share Shakespeare’s judgment in Julius Caesar: “The elements so mixed in him that Nature might stand up and say to the world, ‘This was a man!’”

  The Greatest Athlete of the Century

  The fin de siècle, an arbitrary phenomenon created by calendars of our own construction, elicits some mighty peculiar behavior in that biological oddball known as Homo sapiens—from mass suicides designed to free souls for union with spaceships behind cometary tails to trips to Fiji for a first view of the new millennium. Among the more benign manifestations, we might list our own propensity for making lists of the best and the worst where calendrical cycles end by our own fiat.

  First published as “The Athlete of the Century” in American Heritage, October 1998.

  Among the various impediments to fair and honorable listing, no factor could be more distorting—or of more immediate concern to devotees of this magazine—than the virtual erasure of historical knowledge among so many people who grew up with a television in each room, not a book in the house, and a convction that last year’s models must be antiquated, and last decade’s versions both extinct and erased from memory. In this context the greatest American athlete of the century must stand directly before us, either in the full flower of current performance or in constantly reiterated images of various media. Therefore the title could go only to Michael Jordan or Muhammad Ali, and why should anyone want to look elsewhere when directly confronted with such magnificence? (I make this last statement in full belief and without a trace of sarcasm, for these two men continue to awe and thrill me.)

  Any great cycle also deserves recognition at the halfway point. In 1
950 the Associated Press conducted an extensive poll of American sportswriters and broadcasters to determine the best football player of the half-century. Jim Thorpe beat Red Grange by 170 votes to 138, with Bronko Nagurski a distant third at 38. Three weeks later the same professional group voted for the greatest male athlete of the preceding fifty years, with the same winner, but by a larger margin: Jim Thorpe received 252 of 393 first-place votes, with Babe Ruth second at 86, Jack Dempsey third at 19, Ty Cobb fourth at 11, and at a distance surely recording the realities of racism, Joe Louis sixth at 5.

  I was then, at age eight, a nascent sports nut and statistics maven. I well remember both these polls and the consensus among sports fans of all generations that Jim Thorpe was the world’s greatest living athlete—an impression heightened in 1951, when the popular film Jim Thorpe—All American, starring Burt Lancaster, told his story in the conventional hagiographic mode for youngsters like me who had never seen Thorpe in action.