A Season in the Sun

by Randy Roberts

  One reason for Mantle’s newfound success was that he had become as comfortable in Manhattan as he was in Yankee Stadium. Early in Mantle’s career, Yankee player and coach Tommy Henrich had explained to Cannon Mickey’s only flaw: “He lives in Commerce, Okla., and plays ball in New York.” He meant that Mantle was in New York but not of New York, that Mickey’s cultural baseline remained rural Oklahoma. The further from his hometown he traveled, the more uncomfortable he became, and no place in the United States was more spatially, socially, and culturally different from Commerce than New York. There Mickey seemed like a plow horse in the Belmont Stakes.

  That, Cannon asserted, had changed. “Now New York is his town as much as Commerce.” As a celebrity he now moved through Midtown Manhattan as comfortably as Sinatra or DiMaggio. New Yorkers “knew him on Park Avenue and Madison Avenue,” his wife, Merlyn, recalled years later, “and they were singing his name on Broadway. Everywhere we went, his admirers sent over bottles of champagne or whatever he was drinking.” He didn’t have to make speeches or curry favor. He was Mickey Mantle, and as long as he hit tape-measure homers for the Yankees, he ruled the city.43

  And in May 1956 he reached new heights of performance and fame. He hit his sixteenth home run for the season against the Athletics and his seventeenth three days later against the Tigers. In the Detroit game he went 5–5, raising his batting average to .421 and his RBIs to thirty-nine. When he was intentionally walked in the seventh inning, a chorus of boos echoed throughout Briggs Stadium. Yet Mickey didn’t complain. Now twelve games ahead of Ruth’s home run pace, he pleased even his New York critics with his awe-shucks approach to the record. He would let Ted Williams talk about the intricacies of hitting. He merely swung at the ball. “I just hope I can keep it up. I’m just going to keep swinging and hoping. That’s all that I can do.” Then, stealing a page from baseball’s book of clichés, he added, “I’m taking every day one at a time.”44

  Coming from a batter hitting .421 with seventeen homers, banalities read like rare insights. As never before in New York, anything with Mickey’s name on it sold. There was a rush to capitalize on him. On May 26, for example, the New York Journal-American headlined, “The Mantle Story… Begin It Tomorrow!” The theme of the profile was “Can the Oklahoma Kid break Ruth’s record?” In it veteran sportswriter Hugh Bradley took on such “hard-hitting” questions as “Is this hitting spree just one of those passing things?” What Bradley wrote hardly mattered any more than what Mickey said. His photograph and name in a headline sold papers.45

  The Yankees played their thirty-ninth game of the season against Boston. It was not their most impressive performance, with Red Sox knuckler Willard Nixon taking a 7–0 shutout going into the ninth inning. Then, with two outs, Mantle parked a pitch into the right-center bleachers for his eighteenth homer. It put him nine games ahead of Ruth’s pace. The Babe’s eighteenth homer in 1927 did not come until the Yankees’ forty-eighth contest of the year. Increasingly in New York and across the country, such minutia seemed to matter.46

  By the end of the month, Mickey had hit twenty home runs, sixteen of them in May. No previous player in the history of the game—not even Ruth—had enjoyed such a brilliant May. In 1920 Ruth heralded a new age in the evolution of baseball. Now, in 1956, Mantle seemed poised to do the same. And all the while advertisers, television executives, and media consultants clamored for his attention. With each home run, one could almost hear an echo of the Babe: “Let’s see some other son of a bitch match that.”

  CHAPTER 6

  The Boy Has Come of Age

  “Baseball is not a game for boys.”

  —MURRAY KEMPTON, New York Post, 1956

  It was an ideal day for baseball, especially in the eyes of a young boy. On a gloriously sunny Memorial Day afternoon, eight-year-old Billy Crystal tugged on his father’s sport jacket as he followed him into Yankee Stadium, which looked to him like a cathedral. A wave of excitement washed over him and his teenage brother. The colorful sights were unlike anything Billy had ever seen on his black-and-white television. Greeted by the aroma of hot dogs, mustard, beer, and cigarettes, crowds of people streamed through the turnstiles while gatekeepers welcomed them. “Tickets, please. Yearbooks here. Programs. Tickets, please.”1

  When the Crystals reached their seats down the third base line, Billy looked in awe at a scene that seemed plucked out of The Wizard of Oz—the expansive emerald field, the beautifully manicured diamond, and the bright white bases sitting “like huge marshmallows.” Mesmerized, he scanned the field, watching his idols, some running and throwing, while others lounged around the batting cage, laughing yand shouting encouragement. For a boy growing up in New York, baseball was everything. It was the game that defined his summers, bonded him with his brother and father, and filled him with dreams of playing in the house that Ruth built.

  In the fifth inning, Billy’s hero, a rugged, handsome man with a bull’s neck, carried a bat to the left side of the plate. Digging his spikes into the dirt, Mickey Mantle firmly planted his back foot like a stake. Bending at the knees into a deep crouch, he cocked the bat, his fingers flexed around the thin handle. He focused his eyes on the pitcher, the Washington Senators’ Pedro Ramos, who nodded at the catcher, preparing to deliver a fastball. As Ramos wound up, Mantle clenched the bat, appearing—for only an instant—motionless. Then, as the ball reached the plate, he twisted his muscular torso, swinging in a flawless motion. Crack! The baseball took off like a rocket.2

  Mantle’s eyes followed its flight into deep right field, his bat wrapped all the way around his back. The moment the wood collided with the baseball, everyone in the stadium leapt to their feet. As he remembered it, Crystal couldn’t see a thing over the tall priest standing in front of him. He only heard that crack, prompting him to jump onto his seat, trying to see where the baseball had landed. The ball ascended toward the gray-green facade of the far-right-field upper deck and would have flown over the stadium roof had it not hit the filigree. Stunned, the priest blocking Billy’s view shouted in an Irish accent, “Holy fucking shit!”

  No one had ever hit a ball that far in Yankee Stadium. No one had even come close. Not Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Jimmie Foxx, or Hank Greenberg. Using the Reeves Analog Computer, “one of the world’s most intricate computing machines,” Dr. Louis Bauer and his wife, Dr. Frances Bauer, claimed that had the ball not struck the high right-field facade, it would have traveled 481 feet. For the rest of the season, whenever Yankees fans found their seats, their eyes inevitably wandered to “the Spot.” “Arms point and people stare in admiration,” Sports Illustrated’s Robert Creamer noted. That home run and the nineteen others he had hit since opening day imbued Mantle with more confidence than ever before. Sportswriters and teammates observed that he had matured, becoming more poised on and off the field. “The boy,” teammate Jerry Coleman said, “has come of age.”3

  AT THE BEGINNING of June it appeared that Mantle had a legitimate chance of breaking Babe Ruth’s home run record and winning the Triple Crown. Leading the majors in six hitting categories, Mantle had a .425 batting average, twenty home runs, and fifty RBIs; he was eleven games ahead of Ruth’s record pace. With the Yankees six games in front of the Indians and White Sox, it seemed that nothing could stop them or Mickey, except maybe Lou Boudreau.4

  When the Yankees faced the Kansas City Athletics on June 5, they hoped to end a three-game losing streak. However, Boudreau, the A’s manager, had other plans. In the bottom of the first, when Mantle stepped to the left side of home plate, Boudreau gave his team the signal, calling for a dramatic shift toward right field. Only the A’s pitcher, catcher, and first basemen remained in their traditional positions. The second baseman backed into shallow right field, the shortstop shifted over toward the second baseman’s usual slot, and the third baseman played shallow center field. The left fielder moved in closer to third base, while the center and right fielders covered the deep gaps.5

  Puzzled, Mickey saw an emp
ty left side of the infield. He figured that Boudreau was daring him to bunt down the third baseline. He had never seen this defensive alignment, but it was not the first time that Boudreau had employed the shift against a powerful left-handed hitter. As manager of the Indians in 1946, he instructed his team to pack the right side of the field against Ted Williams, but the “Splendid Splinter” refused to take the opportunity given to him by Boudreau’s shift. Hitting to the left side of the field would be too easy. And besides, he thought, he could just drive the ball through the fielders or over them. Damn the shift. “If I smack the ball over the fence,” he’d said, “they’ll have a hard time fielding it.”6

  Facing the Boudreau shift, Williams hadn’t asked anyone for advice. By contrast, Mantle looked into the dugout, hoping Casey Stengel could offer help. After reading the signals from his manager, he tried bunting, notching two foul balls before striking out. He struck out again during his second at bat and grounded out to first later on, in the sixth inning. Finally, in the eighth inning, with Hank Bauer on first, Boudreau was forced to call off the shift. Without the distracting defensive alignment, Mantle slammed a two-run home run. Still, the Yankees lost, 4–7.

  Yet Mantle had shown that he wasn’t afraid to sacrifice his power numbers by bunting for the good of the team. He knew that if patient, he would get a chance to drive the ball. A few days earlier, he admitted that he already sensed that something had changed for him by that point in the season. “I’m certain that I’m a better player than I have been,” he said. “I think I have acquired confidence.” It was that quiet confidence that made him more dangerous than ever, the kind of confidence that made pitchers nervous at the sight of him.7

  DAY AFTER DAY, week after week, month after month, Mickey Mantle was great copy. He was the story of the season. And as long as he produced at the plate, generating daily headlines about superhuman deeds, readers demanded more stories about him, and publishers sold more newspapers. There was not a newsstand in New York, or any other major city for that matter, where people could not find a feature story about him. When he finally fulfilled his potential in the summer of 1956, leading columnists began shaping Mantle’s heroic image, fashioning a tale about the country boy who made good, a modest, hardworking husband and father who overcame injuries, immaturity, and struggles at the plate to become the embodiment of the American dream.

  “One thing is sure,” Dan Daniel declared in The Sporting News. “Mantle has become a great box office attraction, an established hero.” Daniel and other sportswriters noted how Mantle had become more cooperative with the press, making a clear effort to win their favor. If he had come to New York in 1951 “a scared, confused kid,” the New York Times’s Arthur Daley suggested, he had now become a “reasonably poised man.” Mantle was no longer an immature boy bashfully walking through the clubhouse with his cap pulled low. Now, he looked reporters directly in the eye. He embraced the responsibilities that came with being a professional and the game’s biggest star. Studying him, Hugh Bradley agreed with Daley. “At last,” the New York Journal-American columnist observed, “the kid has become a man.”8

  His accomplishments on the field and his improved relationships with writers led them to conceive of Mantle as an ideal man. He was the strong, silent type, modest, resilient, and reliable. He was the perfect athlete for an era when John Wayne was the nation’s most popular movie star. Like Wayne and the other Western regulars, Mickey spoke sparingly. He demonstrated his character through action rather than words. In a photo essay, Life portrayed him as a maturing young player, “the most valuable man on the team.” Boys idolized him, dreaming of being just like Mickey, while grown men marveled at his athletic feats.9

  Mantle’s ascendance occurred at a time when Americans revered traditional masculine vigor and rugged individualism. In postwar America, after GIs returned home from the battlefields of western Europe, Japan, and Korea, many felt lost working in factories and massive corporations. Ordinary men became faceless cogs of corporate America, emasculated by hierarchical organizations. In 1956 Fortune editor William H. Whyte argued in The Organization Man that a collectivist ethic made American men soft. Other writers saw the threat against traditional masculinity in a variety of sources: affluence, excessive leisure time, women in the workplace, suburbanization, and the decline of rural America—Mickey Mantle country. “For men to become men again,” Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote, “their first task is to recover a sense of individual spontaneity.”10

  Sports provided men that opportunity, offering the kinds of thrills that no job could. Driving a truck or selling insurance, reporter Dan Wakefield wrote, was “predictably empty of moments of truth, glory, or excitement on the job.” But baseball, he claimed, was an unpredictable game of action and risk, a sport that tested men’s individual skill and mettle. Fans venerated Mantle and other ballplayers in part because they confronted the threat of injury, jeopardizing their own security and livelihoods.11

  As the public learned how Mantle’s debilitating injuries hampered his capacity to play the game, he became all the more heroic in their eyes. He embodied the tension between promise and failure, strength and fragility. His vulnerability on the field made him a flawed hero, yet more authentic and relatable. Longtime Yankees fan and comic Richard Lewis observed that Mantle appeared to be Superman in pinstripes. “But the truth is,” Lewis added, “he was just a regular guy. He had this aura about him that he was just one of us.”12

  Spectators in the stands seemed to identify with Mantle. It was almost as if, writers suggested, they lived vicariously through his performances. Each game, each time he went to bat, offered him—and them—a shot at redemption, the opportunity to demonstrate self-worth and prove that the lone individual still mattered. Sacrificing his body, he displayed his manliness on the field: running hard around the bases on brittle legs, sliding across the dirt into home, crashing into outfield walls. But most of all, men admired him for the way he harnessed his raw power, punishing fastballs and crushing home runs farther than any other man. “That’s what made the male regard Mantle that way,” Dodgers pitcher Ed Roebuck said. His towering home runs did more than break stadium records. Those tape-measure shots defined him as the quintessential man. A few seasons later, when a reporter asked what made Mantle so special, Yankees publicist Jackie Ferrell answered, “He led the league in manhood every year.”13

  MICKEY’S BRAWN MADE HIM the “most valuable property anywhere in the baseball world.” By early June, he had become a commodity, the face of Mickey Mantle Enterprises, Inc. His agent, Frank Scott, a diminutive, fast-talking man, opened an office at 400 Madison Avenue where he bargained with advertisers, television executives, and corporate sponsors. Before the season, Shirley Povich noted, Scott’s “efforts to peddle Mantle” generated little enthusiasm. “The Madison Avenue set had put him on a don’t call us we’ll call you basis.” But after Mantle’s torrid May, corporate reps “began calling madly.”14

  Capitalizing on Mantle’s blossoming popularity, Scott made sure that his handsome face appeared everywhere: television shows, print ads, and “every magazine cover except the Ladies Home Journal.” In the month of June, he graced Newsweek and Life as well as Sports Illustrated and The Sporting News. Never before had a baseball player appeared on the cover of all four periodicals in the same month. Readers devoured stories about the reluctant hero who squirmed when journalists reminded him of his greatness. In the midst of his finest season, Mantle continued professing that he could not understand why he received so much attention. But whether he liked it or not, “he was now public property.”15

  Mantle’s bank account benefitted from the attention and Scott’s connections. Scott’s career in baseball began well before Mantle arrived in New York. When he became the Yankees’ traveling secretary in 1947, Scott never thought that he would one day become baseball’s most successful agent. But George Weiss believed that his responsibilities as traveling secretary required that he also act as the
team’s private eye, spying on players who broke curfew or shared a room with a woman. Scott refused to be Weiss’s snitch, and his loyalty to the players cost him his job.16

  After Weiss fired him on October 24, 1950, Scott left the Yankees but stayed in baseball, offering to manage the players’ business interests for a modest 10 percent fee. He convinced them that if they performed well, he could help them earn money from television appearances, testimonials, and merchandising. Phil Rizzuto, Yogi Berra, Hank Bauer, and Eddie Lopat agreed immediately. “Those first players signed with me out of friendship,” Scott said, “and I’ll never forget them for it.” The players trusted him because he was honest and direct. As he told them, “If I don’t make anything for you, then I make ten percent of nothing. I get my fee only on the business I can line up for you.”17

  Gradually, Scott signed more Yankees—including Mantle in 1953—and other New York players too. Willie Mays, Duke Snider, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese, Monte Irvin, and Bobby Thomson joined his list of clients. By 1956, he represented nearly ninety major-league players, most of whom were well known in New York—whether or not they played in the city—the headquarters of the nation’s advertising, publishing, and television firms. But Scott would not sign just any player. He wanted stars. “If a guy bats .250,” he told a reporter, “I can’t do anything for him.”18

  Selling Mickey Mantle to Madison Avenue was easier than selling beer at Yankee Stadium. The more home runs he hit, the higher his stock rose, and the more fees Scott collected for appearances and testimonials. In New York, Yankees players commanded the highest endorsement fees. “People buy winners, not losers,” Scott explained. Throughout the season, the savvy agent worked the phones, letting sponsors know that for $5,000 his client would lend his name to a product for a year. Soon, Mantle’s likeness appeared in ads for more than ten companies, including Wheaties (“Champions are made not born”), Wonderbread (“Helps build strong bodies 12 ways!”), GEM razor blades (“‘GEM gives me more clean shaves than any other blade,’ says Mickey Mantle”), Batter Up pancakes (“Mr. Batter Up, Mickey Mantle, says, ‘Make everyday a Batter Up day. I do!’”), Viceroy cigarettes (“Mickey Mantle, New York Yankees’ home run champion, says: ‘Viceroys are richer tasting… smoother by far! From my very first puff—man, it was Viceroys for me!’”), and Rawlings (“Make your next glove a Mickey Mantle—a glove that’s already set a new record in preference and performance!”). Together, Scott and Mantle were the most successful branding partners since Christy Walsh discovered that Babe Ruth could sell soda pop, candy bars, and cars.19