A Season in the Sun

by Randy Roberts

  The Yankees’ chances of winning the World Series hinged on Mantle. He devoted spring training to improving his hitting, adjusting his stance, and standing farther away from the plate and deeper in the batter’s box. That change helped him better recognize the pitches coming toward him as the ball flew out of the pitcher’s hand. In the past, pitchers jammed him with inside fastballs. In the spring of 1956, though, he developed a better sense of the strike zone, waiting patiently for balls that entered his “happy zone”—pitches about chest high that he could pull. Training his eyes to look for the right pitch to hit was essential. So too was realizing that he didn’t need to swing from his shoestrings to drive the ball. With his natural strength, a smoother, more efficient swing would produce enough power to propel the ball over any fence. He may have been dubbed “the Natural,” but now he finally realized that “good hitters are not born: they are made.”63

  Mantle appeared rejuvenated at the plate, ripping liners into the outfield alleys and driving majestic home runs into the clear blue sky. “The Switcher” crushed ball after ball. From the press box, his bat looked “nine feet long and a yard wide.” There wasn’t a ball he couldn’t hit. “The box score doesn’t give a true picture of Mickey Mantle’s power,” Joe Trimble wrote in the New York Daily News. “Mileage charts are needed.”64

  Shirley Povich, covering the Yankees’ spring training games, had not seen a player captivate crowds like Mickey since Babe Ruth. “The Mickey Mantle home run has been the season’s best show in Florida.” Studying him, Povich sensed that he was on the verge of greatness. Remarkably, Mickey struck out only once all spring, and fifteen of his twenty-four hits went for extra bases. Everywhere Povich went, Mickey Mantle was all anybody wanted to talk about. “This, you hear on all sides and are willing to believe, is Mickey Mantle’s year. This is the one when he’ll burst into full magnificence.”65

  But any veteran observer of spring training had heard that kind of prediction before.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Great American Game

  “Why… can’t the Oklahoma Kid land the Triple Crown? This should be his year of decision.”

  —DAN DANIEL, The Sporting News, April 25, 1956

  At precisely 1:05 p.m. on April 17, 1956, the leader of the free world and a small retinue of followers slipped silently out of the White House into waiting limousines at ONION. The motorcade sped north-northeast past BLACK and LIME, continued until CARROT, and then headed compass north to APPLE, a massive steel and concrete structure built hurriedly in 1911. Every step had been carefully scouted and studied, every movement planned and coordinated. Each intersection along the way had a code name and an ETA. The entire trip took ten minutes. The man sitting in the bulletproof limo had time to briefly consider the most pressing problems of the day. President Dwight David Eisenhower had an election looming and an important decision to make about whether to keep or dump his running mate. He had upcoming meetings with foreign heads of state, crucial economic legislation pending, and a brewing crisis in the Middle East.1

  But all that could wait. Now it was time for the Great American Game of baseball.

  On opening day Americans celebrated their country as much as they did the sport. After all, baseball was the national pastime. In 1907 the much-publicized Mills Commission—appointed by Albert Spalding to research the origins of the sport—determined that Major General Abner Doubleday had “invented” baseball in 1839, a conclusion that significantly strengthened the linkages between the sport and the national ethos. Cooperstown, home of author James Fenimore Cooper, was associated with the great American myth of the West, Natty Bumppo’s Leatherstocking tales, and the irresistible spread of Anglo civilization toward the Pacific Ocean. And Doubleday, the man who had fired the first shot in defense of Fort Sumter and bravely commanded a corps in the opening engagements at Gettysburg, connected baseball to the struggle for the Union and the abolition of slavery. It hardly mattered that the Mills Commission got the story all wrong, that its evidence amounted to a single, uninvestigated letter written by a man with an addled memory. Then as now, Americans craved a mythical and glorious American past, and authenticity was not terribly important. The trinity of Cooperstown, Doubleday, and baseball became central to our national history.

  Even before the Mills Commission’s report, presidents had taken note of baseball’s distinctive qualities. In the summer of 1862, sometime before the Second Battle of Bull Run, Abraham Lincoln abandoned the White House for an afternoon and took his youngest son, Tad, to a game. According to a story passed down over the years, Lincoln sat along the first-base line, Tad positioned between his father’s long legs, and for a few hours forgot about the war and enjoyed the spectacle and the warm sun. Already the mythology of “the national game” was taking shape—its rural imagery, suspension of time, and innocent appeal. That summer men and boys were playing some variety of baseball in Union and Confederate camps, on village greens in New York and Boston, and in open fields in New Orleans and Charleston. The North and South may have been at war, but even in prisoner camps, Yanks and Rebs could still meet on friendly terms on a baseball diamond.2

  A formal presidential imprimatur arrived in 1911, on a cold opening day. President William Howard Taft, at one time a fairly good second baseman and power hitter, accepted Clark Griffith’s invitation to throw out the first ball at the Washington Senators’ first game of the season. A local record of more than 12,000 spectators attended the contest, thrilled to watch Taft lob a ball from his box seat to Walter Johnson, who promptly fired a one-hitter. And Taft liked the action. He stomped his feet to keep warm, tossed peanuts in the air after Herman A. “Germany” Schaefer belted a home run for the Senators, and exhibited the homespun characteristics of the common fan. Commenting on the sport, he later said, “The game of baseball is a clean, straight game, and it summons to its presence everybody who enjoys clean, straight athletics.”3

  So began the springtime ritual celebrating one nation under baseball. Griffith considered the event a promotional stunt, but over the years it helped glue game and nation together. Woodrow Wilson, a genuine baseball enthusiast, frequently attended contests and encouraged the owners to play regular schedules during the Great War. Though he preferred golf and poker, Warren Harding went to games to demonstrate his democratic inclinations. And dour Calvin Coolidge, while seldom ever showing emotions at the ballpark, attended three Senators games, including a scorching-hot June doubleheader during the 1924 season. He expounded on the role of baseball in American life. “There is a place, both past and future, in America for true, clean sport. We do not rank it above business, the occupations of our lives, and we do not look with approval upon those who, not being concerned in its performance, spend all their thought, energy and time upon its observance. We recognize, however, that there is something more in life than the grinding routine of daily toil, that we can develop better manhood and womanhood, a more attractive youth and wiser maturity by rounding out our existence with a wholesome interest in sport.”4

  Franklin D. Roosevelt democratized the opening-day ceremony. Prior to his assumption of the presidency, the ritual of throwing out the first ball was a dignified exchange between the chief executive and the Senators’ starting pitcher. The process was entirely too formal for FDR, lacking the hurly-burly quality he loved. So rather than lobbing the ball to the pitcher, he tossed it willy-nilly to a mob of players who scrambled wildly for the souvenir. The president rewarded the winner with a smile, handshake, and autograph.5

  Baseball, Roosevelt thought, served a political purpose. It was all about having fun. With the gloom of the Depression hovering above Griffith Stadium, he wanted the fans to forget their worries. FDR even laughed at himself. On opening day in 1937, during the president’s squabble with the Supreme Court, a plane flew over the stadium pulling a banner reading, “Play the game, don’t pack the court.” Chomping peanuts, Roosevelt beamed as brightly as anyone in the ballpark.6

  And in the dark days after
Pearl Harbor, when Japan swept American defenders off Guam and Wake Island and US soldiers had retreated to the Bataan Peninsula, with few rations and even fewer hopes of rescue, Roosevelt decided that, no matter what happened, professional baseball would not be a casualty of war. In response to Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis’s inquiry about the status of professional baseball, FDR gave his unequivocal support. “I honestly feel that it would be best for the country to keep baseball going,” he wrote. “If 300 teams use 5,000 or 6,000 players, these players are a definite recreational asset to at least 20,000,000 of their fellow citizens—and that in my judgment is thoroughly worthwhile.” And though the quality of play dipped and the uniforms became a bit threadbare, the game endured through the war.7

  By the time Ike arrived at Griffith Stadium in 1956, opening day was as much a part of the political calendar as the State of the Union address. He claimed to be a diehard Senators fan—he promised enigmatically to “be for the Senators from the beginning, and I will be there on the last day of the game”—but in 1953 he missed the first game of the season, choosing instead to tee off at Bobby Jones’s Augusta National Golf Club. The storm of criticism may have been responsible for what was officially called a rainout in Washington, and Ike hurried back to attend the rescheduled game. It was a lesson in the priorities of his constituents. The democratic diamond trumped the elitist fairways.8

  In 1956 he performed his patriotic duty. After warming up his pitching arm, Ike removed his tan gabardine topcoat and heaved a short, high pitch toward a covey of players assembled in front of him. “Oddly, all these well paid guys became a group of butter-finger bushers,” noted one reporter. When the scramble ended, a Yankee infielder emerged with the ball. Holding it high, he rushed toward Eisenhower, seeking his autograph.9

  Ike asked his name, and while Casey Stengel listed the infielder’s credentials, the Yankee answered, “Gil McDougald.” The president smiled, looked briefly at Stengel, and proceeded to write “Joe McDougald” on the ball.

  McDougald had a forgiving nature. “With all that yelling and confusion around there at the time,” he said, “I can’t say as I blame him for blowing the name. It’s a wonder he got any part of it right.”

  On that bathetic note, the 1956 season began. The mood, however, would soon shift radically.

  THE FIELD PRESIDENT EISENHOWER looked out upon was oddly disconcerting. To the seasoned baseball fan’s eye, it appeared ill designed. Center field was east-southeast of home plate, an orientation that forced center fielders to look directly into the afternoon sun. Furthermore, the fences were irregular, a common feature of early-twentieth-century ballparks. Griffith was a relic of the dead ball era, an age of slashing hitters who aimed at the gaps, not home run sluggers who swung for the fences. Before the 1956 season, however, the Senators’ management had given the old stadium a minor facelift. To accommodate a new section of seats, they shortened the distance to the left-field fence from 386 to 350 feet down the foul line and from 400 to 380 feet in left center. The alterations pleased right-handed batters. But the fences in the rest of the ballpark remained distant. It was 408 feet to center and 373 feet to right center, and the modest 320-foot right-field fence was protected by a 30-foot wall. Altogether, the stadium aroused no joy in the hearts of left-handed hitters.10

  Unfortunately for Mantle, Cuban right-hander Camilo Pascual started the game for the Senators. Young and often wild, the six-foot, four-inch, 220-pound pitcher was coming off an unimpressive 2–12 season. Although only in his third season in the majors, he possessed two devastating, though not always dependable, pitches: a fastball and a sharp curve that broke straight down. When he was on his game, he had All-Star stuff; when he wasn’t, he was dangerous to any batter who dug in at the plate.11

  The Yankees opened the 1956 season auspiciously. Pascual got veteran Hank Bauer to foul out to the catcher and struck out rookie Jerry Lumpe. Then he faced Mantle. Batting left-handed, Mickey took two balls and then settled in, looking for a fastball over the plate. He got his pitch, and the crack of the bat reminded Washington Post columnist Bob Addie of the sound of artillery. The ball seemed to gain height as it charged the thirty-one-foot fence just left of center field. It sailed over the wall, out of the stadium, across Fifth Street and bounced off the roof of the home of one Carl T. Coleman. Following in the footsteps of Red Patterson, reporters estimated the ball had traveled about five hundred feet in the air, a distance unimaginable for any other player in the game. Mickey’s power, Addie observed, made the cavernous Griffith Stadium seem like “a miniature golf course”; he added that “Mr. Wonderful” made the faraway fences “shrink like a $10 suit caught in the rain.”12

  Had Mantle left the game at that point, he still would have made all the headlines. But he wasn’t through. In the sixth inning, with the Yankees comfortably up 5–2, Mantle came to the plate with two runners aboard. Once again Pascual fired a fastball, and again the impact of bat to ball resounded like an artillery crack. Mickey’s line drive left the stadium just to the right of left-center field and “was on its way out of town when it struck the branch of a tree” and landed some 438 feet from home plate. From the press box reporters watched the entire flight of the ball, marveling at Mantle’s power.13

  None of the veteran scribes could recall any other player, not even Babe Ruth, hitting two homers in one game over the distant center-field fence at Griffith. After the game sportswriters quizzed Yankees coach Bill Dickey about Mantle’s feat. Considering that Mickey had hit almost 1,000 feet of home runs, Dickey judged that “they just don’t come any better.” In all his years of coming to Griffith Stadium, he had only seen one player hit the tree in center field: Ruth. “I remember that very clearly,” he said. “It made that much of an impression on me.” Casey Stengel agreed with Dickey’s assessment. He rated Mickey’s drives above those of Ruth, Jimmie Foxx, Lou Gehrig, Ted Williams, Hank Greenberg, and Joe Jackson. And he even suggested, after this first game of the year, that if Mickey could cut down on his strikeouts, he could top Ruth’s single-season record of sixty homers.14

  Journalists were still buzzing about Mantle’s opening-day heroics two days later, comparing his power to Babe Ruth’s and his swing to Joe DiMaggio’s. It took the marriage between Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier of Monaco to push Mickey off the front page of the New York dailies. And that was fine with him. Uncomfortable with the praise and reluctant to talk about his performance, he dismissed the “crazy comparisons.” Reporters tried to get him to explain how he hit the ball so hard and how he rated himself against the best to play the game, and he didn’t have the words or inclination to answer them. He just wished Stengel would stop talking so much about him. “I’m no Ruth, Gehrig, Foxx, Williams or whoever they say. I’ll just be satisfied with having a good year and that’s about it.” And the best he could say about his power was, “Those two hits off of Pascual were going to leave the park. They just felt good and I figured they would take a pretty good ride.” But it wasn’t for him to say how many more he would hit, and it was “right silly” for him to talk about Ruth’s record. It was time, he thought, to stop all the chatter about Mickey Mantle.15

  IN TRUTH, HOWEVER, BASEBALL desperately needed Mantle to be great. The sport was mired in a slump, and nothing the lords of the game did ended the dry spell. And like players struggling at the plate, the owners began to fear that their slump, the sport’s slump, might be permanent.

  The numbers told part of the story. In the half decade after World War II, baseball dominated the American sports landscape just as the United States dominated the world. These were the boom years. Consider the average attendance at major-league games. During the prosperous 1920s, the figure was 7,531; during the hard 1930s, it slipped to 6,578; and during the first half of the 1940s, when the nation was at war, it rose to 7,438. But with peace and postwar prosperity, attendance soared. Between 1946 and 1949 it more than doubled, climbing to 16,027.

  Between 1947 and 1949 total yearly attendance reached
about 20 million. Then it tumbled—to 16 million in 1951 and then 14.3 million in 1953. The 30 percent decline in four years was ominous and hard to explain. The owners entertained various theories unsupported by any real evidence. How could they end the freefall? They had no idea.16

  Only in retrospect would the trend make sense. In 1956 the owners focused on the attendance decline, but their failure to understand the sport’s sudden prosperity made it impossible to grasp the reversal. A century of data from 1900 to 2000 demonstrates a fairly steady ascent in attendance marked by occasional swings. The 1946–1955 decade was one of the more volatile periods. The first half was like DiMaggio’s fifty-six-game hitting streak—seemingly everything went right. The second was like the Chicago Cubs quest for a World Series ring. Some things simply defied the odds.17

  The shift had underlying causes. From 1950 to 1955, America was undergoing dizzying demographic changes. The nation was on the move, nowhere more so than in the cities east of the Mississippi River that boasted major-league teams. The race was toward the suburbs. Between 1950 and 1960 all ten of the cities with major-league teams declined in population. Fleeing high real estate costs, taxes, and social problems of the inner cities, citizens relocated to the ring of towns around them, leaving behind their baseball stadiums rooted in deteriorating neighborhoods and serviced by collapsing infrastructure. Attendance at ballparks, including Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds, mushroomed in the heyday of streetcars and plummeted in the rising age of the automobile.18

  Postwar suburbanites, furthermore, enjoyed a wide range of entertainment options. “Why should a guy with a boat in the driveway, golf clubs in the car, bowling ball and tennis racket in the closet, a trunkful of camping equipment, two boys in Little League and a body full of energy left over from shorter working hours pay to sit and do nothing but watch a mediocre game?” wondered a fan writing to Sports Illustrated in 1958. And if residents of Levittown or some other new development wanted to sit and watch something, they could always turn on their television sets—by 1956 three-fourths of American families owned at least one—and follow the exploits of Lucy, thrill to a gunfight on a dusty western street, or, on almost any given night, cheer as two boxers slugged it out. They could also watch their baseball team in the comfort of their own homes, where beers were less expensive and restrooms infinitely cleaner.19