A Season in the Sun

by Randy Roberts

  When Mickey reported for spring training, he was still recovering from a second surgery performed three weeks earlier. On February 3, 1954, Dr. Yancey had removed a cyst behind his swollen right knee. By the time the Yankees started drills on March 2, Mickey could hardly straighten his leg. Exasperated, Stengel scolded him. “If he did what he was told after the first operation he would be able to play now,” he told a reporter. “This kid—you can’t ever teach him nothing in the spring because he’s always hurt.”38

  Mickey’s season began poorly. By the end of April, he was only hitting .175. His frustration at the plate turned into fits of rage. When he returned to the dugout, he unleashed his anger on bat racks. His tantrums infuriated Stengel. One time the skipper lost his temper and grabbed Mickey by the back of the neck, squeezing hard as he yelled, “Don’t let me see you do that again, you little bastard!”39

  Mantle’s troubles consumed him. Brooding after a miserable day at the ballpark, he ignored reporters who crowded around his locker. In dark moods, he didn’t hesitate to tell writers to scram. “Get the hell away from me,” he barked. “What the fuck are you bothering me for?” He had no use for the men who followed him every day, the writers who had built him up only to tear him down. Sometimes Mickey answered questions with silence. A cold glare was enough to end an interview before it even started.40

  In May Mantle broke out of his slump. He finished the 1954 season hitting .300 with 27 home runs, 102 RBIs, and a league-best 129 runs. But in New York it didn’t seem to matter, since the Yankees had failed to win the pennant for the first time in six seasons. Although the team won 103 games, its best regular season total under Stengel, the Cleveland Indians won 111—the most ever by an American League club at that time. Perhaps even more troubling for Yankees fans, it appeared that the best hitter in the city—and the best center fielder in all of baseball—wore a Giants uniform. If New Yorkers wanted to see the man who was arguably the premier player in the league, they had to visit the Polo Grounds to watch Willie Mays.41

  In New York, everyone had an opinion. Like most writers, New York Times columnist Arthur Daley rated Mickey as the third-best center fielder, behind Mays and Brooklyn’s Duke Snider. On the eve of the 1955 season, Daley wrote, “Thus far Mantle has displayed only the physical requisites of greatness. He has shown none of DiMaggio’s fierce inner pride.” Shirley Povich agreed. “Mickey Mantle, the lad who appeared destined to make it, has been a disappointment, which is the greater because he has the native talent to be a tremendous ball player. He hits the ball farther, runs faster, bunts better than anyone in baseball, but apparently lacks the high resolution to make the most of his skills.”42

  The press wrote off Mickey as a lost cause, a player who had entered the big leagues with too much fanfare, failed to perform in the clutch, and proved incapable of getting through the season without debilitating injuries. Writers complained that he was a dull country bumpkin, moody and colorless. He lacked Babe Ruth’s charisma, Lou Gehrig’s fierce resolve, and DiMaggio’s impeccable style. He had tried to live up to the hype, to be the star that New York desired, but the “poor kid from the slag hills of Oklahoma” seemed out of place in the Big Apple. “The bright lights,” a New York Daily News writer concluded, “are not for Mantle.”43

  NOTHING MICKEY DID SATISFIED Yankees fans. He “should be the popular hero of the standard baseball success story,” Milton Gross wrote. “He is the walking realization of the childhood dreams of untold numbers of our country’s youth. He has never had a truly bad season with the Yankees. He is one of the most feared hitters in the American League.” And yet, Gross noted, he was “also the most booed.”44

  Late in the 1955 season, on a balmy August day, Mantle entered the batter’s box, preparing to face Red Sox pitcher Willard Nixon. Sitting in a cramped booth next to the Yankee Stadium press box, public address announcer Bob Sheppard introduced Mantle in his deep, resonant voice. “Batting third and playing centerfield, No. 7, Mickey Mantle.” A chorus of boos “rolled across the huge ball park,” as if the Yankees were playing at Fenway. Mantle had done nothing that day to draw the crowd’s ire. It was only the bottom of the first inning. In fact, he was having a great season, the best of his career. The next inning, after popping out to the shortstop, Mantle jogged to center field, while the boo birds sang. It had become a regular scene at the stadium, one that confused Mantle as much as his teammates.45

  As he stepped into the batter’s box or trotted onto the field, Yankees fans—his hometown crowd—booed, jeered, and cursed his name, a cruel reminder that while he might play for the Yankees, New Yorkers had not yet embraced him as one of their own. Interviewing “bleacher bums,” those blue-collar fans who regularly watched games from the cheap seats, Gross heard them grumble that Mickey was lazy, thoughtless, and overrated. The common man resented that he had not earned his place in the game, complaining that his work ethic didn’t match his talent. Worse, he didn’t seem to care about the people who paid to see him play. “He never waves out here or smiles or anything,” one man complained. Why, the fan wondered, couldn’t Mantle “show his appreciation?” Ignoring Mickey’s history of injuries, the man groused, “He got all the breaks and what did he do with them? Nothing.”46

  Some New Yorkers wondered whether Mantle lacked the intelligence required to be a great ballplayer. In their view, Mickey was no brighter than Lil’ Abner. “It’s too bad that Mantle is a bit of a rockhead,” a writer lamented in the Yankee Stadium press box. Ever since Mantle joined the club, New York writers mocked his country dialect. Fans laughed at him standing in center field with his hands on his hips, blowing bubbles with his gum, like a bored schoolboy mindlessly staring out a classroom window. When asked about his intelligence, Mickey just shrugged. “Well, I never did claim to be smart and never was much, I guess. I’m sorry some of ’em call me a dummy. But to tell you the truth, it doesn’t bother me anymore and I’m not going to holler.”47

  He remained underappreciated until the 1955 World Series, when Yankees fans were forced to confront the reality of competing for a championship without him at full strength. When his team needed him the most, when everything was on the line, a hamstring injury effectively crippled him. Since late September, when he pulled a leg muscle running out a bunt against the Red Sox, Mantle had limped around the clubhouse, hoping that he would be ready for the series. But when Stengel asked if he could play through the pain, Mantle admitted that he would be a liability in the lineup. Stengel had grown impatient with his star’s frequent injuries. It was always something: a hamstring, an ankle, a knee. It seemed that Mickey could never live up to his manager’s standards.48

  The problem with Mickey, Stengel concluded, was that he had never fulfilled his promise. In some ways, his disappointment in Mantle derived from his frustrations with his own career, managing in the shadow of Yankee legend Joe McCarthy. When Mickey arrived in 1951, the Ole Professor determined that “the boy” would become the greatest player in history, and consequently he would be remembered as the greatest manager of all time. In order for Stengel to realize his ambitions, he needed Mantle to be as consistently great as DiMaggio had been. Every pulled hamstring, every game missed threatened Stengel’s legacy.

  After missing the first two games of the series against the Dodgers, Mantle started in center field for Game Three. In the second inning, he hit a solo home run off Johnny Podres. However, when Junior Gilliam hit a routine fly ball into right-center field, Mantle gingerly chased the ball, barely snagging it. Everyone in Ebbets Field knew that he was in no condition to play center, so Stengel moved him to right for the rest of the day and for Game Four.49

  It was impossible to boo Mickey Mantle during the World Series. He gave everything he had to Stengel, his teammates, and the fans. During Game Four, he faced pitcher Clem Labine from the left side of the plate, shifting all of his weight onto his sore plant leg as he unleashed his swing. He appeared helpless, robbed of any real power. He struck out twice, tapped a weak ground
er to the mound, and flipped a single into right field. Stengel had no choice but to bench him for the last two games of the series.

  For Mickey, the season ended with great disappointment. As a pinch hitter in Game Seven, he hit an impotent popup. That was his final contribution. After losing five championships to the Yankees, the Brooklyn Dodgers finally beat them to win the World Series. For the first time in Mantle’s five-year career and on his fourth series appearance, the Yankees failed in Game Seven. Mickey Mantle, a writer from Baseball Digest concluded, “was practically useless in the Series.”50

  Mantle had reached the nadir of his career, blaming himself for the Yankees’ failures. But something happened to him during the Fall Classic that would change the way people viewed him the following season. Suffering on the field, sacrificing his body as he hobbled across the grass and flailed at the plate, he finally earned the respect of writers and fans. By the end of the championship, Gross suggested, Mantle “was loved by the customers more than at any other time.” It appeared that Stengel had pressured him into playing when he was physically incapable. The fans could see that Mantle was human, flawed even, “not a young god who would pull lightning from the sky.”51

  After Game Seven, Mantle sat alone on a stool in front of his locker, hunched over with his hands covering his face. Not even a kiss from Grace Kelly could have cheered him up. When Stengel noticed Mantle sitting in the corner, staring at the floor, the skipper walked over and put his arm around Mickey’s shoulder. “Son,” Stengel advised, “I want you to be a tough loser. That shows that you want to win, but don’t go blamin’ yourself for losin’ the Series.” He reminded Mickey that no one player lost the championship. One day, he predicted, Mickey would “bust out and be the big man of this here team.” “I wouldn’t be surprised,” the manager said, “if it happens next year.”52

  DESPITE THE DISAPPOINTING ending to the 1955 season, Mantle remained the best hitter in the American League. That year he hit .306 and led the league in five batting categories: home runs (37), triples (11), walks (113), on-base percentage (.431), and slugging percentage (.611). And yet he finished fifth in MVP voting. He could not understand why teammate Yogi Berra won the MVP again—for the third time in five years—when he had better statistics in most hitting categories.

  In early 1956, before spring training began, he talked to Bill DeWitt, the Yankees’ assistant general manager. Mickey said that he was happy for Berra’s success, but he wondered, “What’s a guy have to do to be considered Most Valuable?” “Maybe,” DeWitt suggested, “a ballplayer has to do more than have a good season on the field. Maybe he has to win a little personal popularity.”53

  Few players had ever been more popular than Berra. “Everybody,” the New York Journal-American’s Frank Graham wrote, “loves Yogi.” Berra was “the best, the most consistent, [and] the hardest working player on the club.” While Mantle remained sidelined during crucial stretches, Berra was durable and reliable, catching doubleheaders without complaint. If Yankees fans booed Mantle for underperforming, they admired Berra for overachieving. Yogi made up for his lack of an athletic physique with alertness, skill, and industriousness. Built like a gnome with a “homely face,” Yogi, according to the press, did not look like a Yankee. Writers turned the stout catcher, known as much for his verbal gaffes as for his exceptional play, into a cartoonish figure, a halfwit who read comic books in the clubhouse because the pictures made the stories easier to follow.54

  Reporters loved to tell stories that affirmed Berra’s image as the comical catcher. When he first joined the Yankees in 1947, manager Bucky Harris reminded him not to chase pitches off the plate. “You’ve got to think when you’re up at the plate,” Harris instructed. “Think!” Predictably, Berra struck out and returned to the bench, muttering, “Think! Think! How the hell are you supposed to think and hit at the same time?”55

  It was a classic Yogi tale. Yet it never happened. The story—like most Yogisms—was the creation of a sportswriter who most likely fashioned it out of something he heard near the batting cage or in the press box. The story became funnier when the punch line came from Yogi. But Berra was not the endearing character the writers made him out to be. David Halberstam recalled that his colleagues who covered the Yankees found the real Berra to be “a crude and dull man, as apt as not to yell something foul from the Yankee bus at teenage girls; but in print he was the cuddly Yogi, full of quips.”56

  Sportswriters were in the business not only of reporting and opining but of selling characters and heroes, and Berra’s public persona made it easier to sell him as the star of the Yankees. Bill DeWitt understood the importance of marketing the team’s players to the public. The MVP, he told Mantle, could not “brush off every newspaperman who approaches him, or just clam up.” If Mickey was ever to become a fan favorite, he would have to embrace the spotlight. “Mickey,” DeWitt advised, “I think you’re going to be the greatest star there ever was… but you’ve got to realize that a star has some obligations, too. If you make an effort and keep out of jams, there’ll be no stopping you. But you’ve got to do your part. You’ve got to come out of that shell.”57

  Mantle took DeWitt’s advice. He was determined to rehabilitate his image. During spring training in 1956, he greeted reporters with a modest grin and a welcoming handshake. The beat writers, accustomed to his curt replies, were stunned to find that an affable storyteller had replaced the introvert. After he pulled a writer aside and showed him his approach at the plate, the reporter gushed to his fellow scribes about the new Mickey Mantle. “Imagine,” he exclaimed, “Mantle trying to explain something to me.”58

  THE SIGHTS AND SOUNDS of spring baseball created a great deal of excitement in St. Petersburg. In the mornings, shortly after sunrise, when the grass was still covered with dew, the Yankees lumbered onto Miller Huggins Field. Rows of players stretched rusty arms and tightly wound leg muscles, complaining about their winter aches. But the warm sunshine on their faces made them feel young again. They came alive, tossing the ball, swinging the bat, and playing pepper, bantering and laughing between drills. The hard, popping sound of the ball pounding into the catcher’s mitt, the crack of the bat colliding with the baseball, the clatter of cleats crossing the cement dugout just before the players took the field—all signaled a new season, a fresh start, and renewed hope for glory.

  “Spring baseball,” Roger Angell once wrote, “is all surmise.” Throughout spring training, fans, writers, managers, and players offered optimistic predictions for the coming season. The consensus among writers was that they envisioned a World Series rematch between the Yankees and Dodgers. No one—especially not Mickey Mantle—could forget the drama of October, a seven-game series that ended with the Yankees’ slugger nursing a hamstring injury while he glumly watched the Dodgers celebrate their first championship.59

  The Dodgers brought back essentially the same team that had won the championship a year earlier. The only major difference, excluding the absence of starting pitcher Johnny Podres, who was drafted into the military, was that the players were a year older. The core group, an all-star cast—Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Pee Wee Reese, Gil Hodges, Roy Campanella, Carl Erskine, Carl Furillo, and Don Newcombe—formed the backbone of a squad that had won four pennants and one World Series in the past seven years. Writers, however, wondered if this team was finally past its prime. Robinson and Reese were both thirty-seven. In fact, not a single player in the National League was active when Reese made his debut in 1940. Right fielder Furillo was thirty-four; first baseman Hodges was thirty-two. And Campanella, the thirty-four-year-old catcher, looked worn out from years of squatting behind home plate, his left hand battered and bruised from catching too many fastballs. His surgically repaired hands hurt so much that he could hardly grip a bat.60

  Jackie Robinson arrived in Vero Beach feeling the effects of time too. The frost sprinkling his hair made him appear older than his actual age. He was heavier and slower than before, troubled by aching ankles an
d sore feet. The previous season, he hit .255, forty points under his prior low, with only thirty-six RBIs; in fact, for the first time in seven seasons, he had failed to hit above .300. Fastballs whizzed across the plate before he could get the barrel around. The bat looked heavy in his hands, as if he were swinging a sixteen-pound sledgehammer. His diminished performance sparked rumors in the off-season that the Dodgers might trade him. Instead, the front office acquired his future replacement: Chicago Cubs All-Star third baseman Ransom “Randy” Jackson. The trade rumors, his reduced playing time, and the arrival of a younger, talented player wounded Robinson’s pride, but he remained deeply competitive. He was determined to prove that he wasn’t done yet.61

  If the Dodgers were favored to win the National League pennant, the Yankees, built on pitching and power hitting, seemed poised to meet them again in October—and win this time. “How are you going to beat them?” Sports Illustrated asked in its season preview: “Berra is the best catcher in the league. Mantle is so good they say he has a disappointing season if he doesn’t hit .400.” Right fielder Hank Bauer and first baseman Moose Skowron added power to the lineup too. Billy Martin, one of the best defense infielders in baseball, sparked the team with his aggressiveness. And the Yankees’ pitching staff, led by Whitey Ford, “a left-hander with all the pitches,” was a polished group that had led the American League in earned run average the previous season. So, Sports Illustrated asked again, “How are you going to beat them?”62