A Season in the Sun

by Randy Roberts

  The Yankees’ affluence generated widespread antagonism among opposing fans. There was something unfair and undemocratic about the Yankees’ accumulated wealth. The Yanks, Douglass Wallop wrote, were “exasperating, irritating, and, if not downright un-American, certainly disruptive of American institutions.” Critics believed that the Yankees played with arrogance, and their entitled fans were just as bad, if not worse, than the players themselves. In the public imagination, Yankees fans represented corporate America. They were advertising executives who drove Cadillacs and drank wine in the exclusive Stadium Club. They were aristocrats and big-business Republicans. “Wall Street bankers supposedly back the Yankees,” Gay Talese wrote. “Smith College girls approve of them; God, Brooks Brothers, and United States Steel are believed to be solidly in the Yankees’ corner.”45

  Yet most Yankees fans were not bankers and business tycoons, of course. The team had countless blue-collar, beer-drinking supporters in the South Bronx. “The Yankee fan,” Charles Dexter wrote in 1954, “is faceless and nameless. He comes from all levels of society, from all parts of the nation, and even from foreign lands.”46

  Regular fans identified with the players, knowing that they came from humble beginnings and grew up in neighborhoods similar to their own. An Italian immigrant, Yogi Berra’s father came to St. Louis knowing nothing about baseball. Billy Martin grew up fatherless in a penurious neighborhood in West Berkeley, California. Whitey Ford was raised in Astoria, Queens, on a block thick with second-generation Irish, Italian, and Polish families. And Mickey Mantle came of age in a dusty mining town in the heartland. The team’s roster represented the country in microcosm, plucked from ordinary circumstances. Together, the Yankee stars embodied a cross section of working-class America.

  AFTER HIS TORRID START to the 1956 season, Mickey Mantle seemed destined to win the Triple Crown. The Yankees’ beat writers were convinced that he would do it. By June 15, he held a comfortable lead in all three batting categories. Hitting .392, he led Detroit’s Charlie Maxwell in batting average by twenty-one points, and he had hit twenty-two home runs, six more than Yogi Berra. Together, Mantle and Berra had earned a reputation as the “greatest one-two punch the Bombers have boasted since Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.” Only Kansas City’s Harry Simpson stood within ten RBIs of Mantle’s commanding lead.47

  Three days later, with Mantle appearing on the cover of Sports Illustrated, the magazine announced that “The Year of the Slugger” had arrived. There was no better proof of Mantle’s preeminence than his eighth-inning blast that afternoon at Briggs Stadium. With two men on and no outs, the Yankees and Tigers were tied 4–4. Behind the plate, with a brisk fifteen-mile-per-hour wind blowing in from right field, the Detroit catcher told Mickey that the gusts were too strong for him. “Mickey,” Frank House said in an Alabama drawl, “you ain’t gonna hit one out of here today.”48

  Mantle ignored him, focusing all of his attention on Tigers pitcher Paul Foytack. Then he smashed a letter-high fastball deep toward right field. House rose from his catcher’s squat, watching in disbelief as the ball continued to rise until it landed on the second deck of the roof, 110 feet off the ground. When the ball bounded onto Trumball Avenue, several parking attendants rushed onto the busy street to nab it, but they were too slow. A taxi driver spotted the bouncing ball on the pavement, slammed the breaks, and jumped out of the car. He scooped up the souvenir, hopped back into his car, and sped away “as if he had robbed a bank.”49

  After the game, dozens of writers circled Mantle’s locker as he relaxed with a cold beer. Detroit’s reporters could hardly remember the last time a player had hit a home run out of Briggs Stadium. In fact, only once before—in 1939, when Ted Williams clobbered a ball just inside the foul line—had a player accomplished the feat. While reporters buzzed around the locker room, Mickey’s teammates debated which of his home runs had traveled the farthest.50

  Two days later, he hit two more home runs from the right side of the plate, his twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh of the year. More remarkable than his power display, though, was the spectators’ response. The crowd got so excited that the game had to be stopped twice when people ran onto the field. Hoping to get close to Mantle or shake his hand, nearly two dozen fans of all ages, boys and girls, “came pouring out from the four corners” of the stadium during the ninth inning. Watching from the press box the local writers were amazed. “I’ve seen a lot of famous ballplayers play the game in Briggs Stadium,” a telegrapher said, “but never have I seen any demonstration like the one they gave Mantle.”51

  After the final out, a mob flooded the field. “This time,” one writer observed, “it was a mass movement. Hundreds of them came out of the stands. From where I sat, they looked like bugs.” As the crowd swarmed him, Mantle clutched his hat, breaking for the Yankees’ dugout. The groundskeepers had to turn on the sprinklers just to get the fans off the field.52

  Outside New York, baseball fans didn’t care that Mantle played for the Yankees. “To youngsters,” the New York Post’s Leonard Koppett wrote, “a hero’s a hero no matter what team he plays on.” Mickey had become a folk hero, “baseball’s Paul Bunyan,” a larger-than-life figure whose exploits on the field were quickly relayed as tall tales of superhuman power. “Mr. Muscles” was a symbol of might and vigor. From ballparks to bars, from street corners to schoolyards, Mantle was the “most talked about player in the land.” “In every ballpark,” Koppett wrote, “someone has a story to tell about” Mantle hitting a home run “where no one had ever hit one before.”53

  From Detroit the Yankees traveled to Chicago, where more than 47,000 fans packed Comiskey Park for a doubleheader—the stadium’s largest crowd of the year. In this case, the demonstrations Mickey inspired were not joyous and peaceful. In the late innings of the second game, drunken fans heckled and cursed Mantle from the bleachers, tossing food and trash at him. A wild pack of men stormed center field, scaring Mantle until police hauled them away. “How do I know what those fans are going to do?” he asked reporters afterward, clearly alarmed. “They may stick out a hand, they may stick out a knife.” Handling fame proved more difficult than hitting a curveball. “If I were to shove a fan out of the way,” he added, “I would be hooted out of the park. You should hear what they holler at me. Can’t something be done?”54

  But on the whole the tumult in Chicago was an aberration. Writers filed columns about Mantle’s popularity in stadiums throughout the American League. Fans who used to jeer the Yankees, a New York Times writer observed, were now cheering the Bronx Bombers all because of Mantle. League president Will Harridge noticed the shift. “Everywhere I went this morning, in the restaurant, in the elevator, and in the barber shop, it was Mantle, Mantle, Mantle.” The White Sox’s first sellout pleased Harridge too. In the burgeoning television age, when owners and executives feared that too many fans would prefer watching baseball at home, Mantle lured people to the park in a way that no player had since DiMaggio during his 1941 hitting streak.55

  Comparing Mantle to Ruth, some reporters wondered if Mickey benefitted from a livelier ball. Were his home runs the product of his natural ability? Or were baseballs being manufactured differently than in the past? Harridge adamantly denied that the balls were “juiced.” “The specifications for their manufacture is the same, hasn’t changed in years,” he said. “The workmanship, due to improved machinery, is probably superior, but, I repeat, the specifications are the same.”56

  The president of Spalding, the major leagues’ ball manufacturer, agreed. “There definitely has been no change in the baseball for a number of years,” Walter Gerould said. In truth players were hitting more home runs in 1956 because of the players’ increased size and bat speed and their strategy at the plate. Twenty years earlier, the average baseball player stood two to three inches shorter and weighed ten to twenty pounds less, depending on the position. Standing five foot eleven and weighing 196 pounds, Mantle was built like a heavyweight boxer with nearly identical proportions to Rock
y Marciano’s.57

  “The Muscle Men” of the 1950s did not choke up on thick-handled bats like Ty Cobb or Rogers Hornsby, who poked the ball across the infield. Instead, they swung from their shoestrings using lighter, slender-handled bats that bent “like a reed when swung hard” and could easily snap but could produce blurring velocity through the strike zone. When Babe Ruth hit sixty home runs in 1927, he swung a sledgehammer—Black Betsy, for instance, weighed forty-two ounces, nearly ten ounces more than the toothpick Mantle used.58

  Mantle may have used a lighter bat than the Babe, but Yankees coach Bill Dickey, who played with Ruth, said that it didn’t matter what kind of wood he used or if the balls were juiced. “Regardless of whether the ball is dead or lively, if Mantle hits it right, it goes a long way. Mickey has more power than Ruth or Gehrig had. I’ve never seen anyone who could hit the ball so far.”59

  Some writers suggested that the best players were hitting more home runs than the stars of the past, but that was inaccurate. The game’s strongest batters—Mantle, Mays, Duke Snider, Eddie Matthews, and Ted Kluszewski—were not hitting more home runs than Gehrig, Hank Greenberg, or Jimmie Foxx. But more players were hitting home runs. In 1946, major leaguers hit 1,215 homers. Remarkably, a decade later they tallied 2,249—nearly 90 percent more. Why? Giants executive Garry Schumacher suggested that players valued the home run more than ever before. “Players have found that the long ball pays off and they’re going for it, even at the expense of averages and base hits.”60

  Schumacher was right. Increasingly, since the 1930s, hitters had swung for the fences, striking out at a higher rate. During the Depression, 41 percent of regular players hit .300 or better, but in the 1950s that number fell to 19 percent. In 1936, the typical player hit .284, but twenty years later he hit .258. The latest strategy emphasized getting men on base and driving them home with the long ball, and power hitters like Mantle were in great demand. National League president Warren Giles explained that scouting had changed after World War II, when teams increasingly searched for young men who could pull the ball. The primary question scouts asked was, “How far can he hit the ball?”61

  In the summer of 1956, no one hit the ball farther than Mickey Mantle. He was distinct in other respects too. On July 1, at Yankee Stadium, in the second game of a doubleheader against Washington, “the Switcher” hit home runs from the left and the right side of the plate. This was not the first game in which he homered from both sides. Earlier in the season, on May 18, he had victimized two White Sox pitchers at Comiskey Park. But this time he belted a dramatic game-winning two-run homer in the bottom of the ninth. When he pounded his twenty-ninth home run, the crowd erupted. The fans had paid to see Mickey hit a homer, and he had delivered beyond their expectations.62

  After the contest, a reporter asked him how it felt to win the game with a walk-off home run. “It’s the greatest feeling in the world,” Mantle said with a boyish grin. “Going around the bases that last time, you feel like a king.”63

  CHAPTER 7

  The Gods

  “If Mantle fails to become the 10th Triple Crown winner in modern baseball history, the man most likely to frustrate him is [Ted] Williams, the man who won the Triple Crown in 1942 and 1947.”

  —HAROLD KAESE, Boston Globe, July 4, 1956

  The debate was over, at least for the season. Everyone knew who was the best player in baseball. It wasn’t Willie Mays or Duke Snider or Hank Aaron. It was Mickey Mantle. “This season, Mantle has come finally to a point where he is generally regarded as the best baseball player in the world and is given a serious chance to become the best ball player of all time,” wrote Newsweek’s Roger Kahn.1

  By early July, Mantle had become something more than the game’s greatest player. He had become a national attraction. At a time when fans still mailed their All-Star ballots to newspaper offices and radio and television stations, Mantle received more votes than any other player. He was the only All-Star to break 200,000, earning 15,000 more than Yogi Berra, 30,000 more than Stan Musial, 70,000 more than Ted Williams, and 160,000 more than Willie Mays.2

  His value to the Yankees and the American League could be measured with every home run. “The home run hitter, not the bunter,” Shirley Povich explained, “fills the parks.” While the typical American League game averaged about 12,000 fans, when the Bronx Bombers traveled to those same cities, some 22,000 spectators clicked the turnstiles to see “Mr. Box Office.” In nearly every American League city—Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Kansas City, and Washington—the Yankees’ opponents set attendance highs when Mickey came to town. “Just to watch Mickey Mantle swing a bat is worth the price of admission,” the New York Times announced.3

  Mantle’s monumental feats both shaped and reflected American culture during the mid-1950s, an age of instant gratification and consumerism. The decade was one of broad prosperity, a boom time of construction and expansion. Everything seemed to be getting bigger and better: rising skyscrapers disappeared into the heavens, ribbons of highways knit the country together, two-story shopping malls sprouted on the outskirts of towns, and split-level homes sprang up on spacious lots. America’s astounding economic growth spurred massive consumption. Advertisers challenged notions of thrift that had been commonplace before the 1950s. Americans were encouraged to buy now and pay later. Young adults with little memory of the Great Depression eagerly purchased chrome-trimmed cars, television sets, and household appliances on credit. “Never has a whole people spent so much money on so many expensive things in such an easy way as Americans are doing today,” Fortune announced in 1956.4

  The widespread fascination with Mantle’s awesome power at the plate revealed American reverence for the “bigger is better” philosophy. “The American public is aggressive,” Ford’s director of styling, George Walker, observed. “It’s moving upward all the time … and that means bigness. When the American workingman gets a little money he wants a bigger house and he wants a bigger car.” Consumers demanded wider automobiles, larger refrigerators, bigger television sets—and longer home runs.5

  In the summer of 1956, Mickey Mantle, an American colossus, personified and fulfilled the country’s most fervent desires.

  “FENWAY PARK, IN BOSTON, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark,” John Updike once wrote. “Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter Egg.” Unlike the vast Yankee Stadium, Fenway’s cramped boundaries created an intimacy between the fans and players. Sitting at field level along the baselines, spectators enveloped the grass. The narrow foul territory made life difficult for pitchers since many foul balls that fielders would have caught in other stadiums instead fell into the stands.6

  The stadium’s peculiarities tested the players’ talents. The outfield wall itself was asymmetrical and irregular. The deep gap where center and right field merged formed a triangle. A ricochet off the wall just to the left of the bullpen could transform a baseball into a pinball and turn a routine double into an inside-the-park home run. Although Fenway’s deep right field made it difficult for left-handers to pull home runs, the high left-field wall, only 315 feet from home plate along the foul line, almost dared right-handed hitters to pummel it.

  In 1956, though, there was only one reason for Red Sox fans to visit Fenway: Ted Williams. For the previous three seasons—and for the rest of the decade—the Red Sox played mediocre baseball, never finishing closer than twelve games behind the pennant winner, which was usually the Yankees. In 1952, when Ted joined the marines, the Red Sox entered a rebuilding phase, reconstructing the roster with a “cargo of youthful innocents.” After Captain Williams returned from Korea late in the 1953 season, appearing in only thirty-seven games, the Red Sox, he said, “were no longer a factor.” He hardly recognized the new kids in the clubhouse. Gone were all his old buddies: Bobby Doerr, Johnny Pesky, and Dom DiMaggio (Joe’s brother). Without them, playing baseball just wasn’t as much fun.7

  Dur
ing spring training, Williams was asked whether he could still handle the bat as brilliantly as before. “Let’s face it,” he said, “I’m 37 years old. I won’t hit .350 forever.” He was unsure how much longer he would play at all. Two years earlier, shortly after breaking his collarbone during a tumble in the outfield, he had threatened to retire. Now, weighing thirty pounds more than the beanpole who came to Boston in 1939, he moved a little slower, dealing with the aches from twelve full seasons and two military stints. It was time, he said, to face reality. Few players could still hit at his age. “Foxx was all through at 37,” he reminded reporters. “Greenberg was all through. DiMaggio was all through.” But did Teddy Ballgame really believe that he was all through too?8

  A few minutes before his pessimistic self-evaluation, he had displayed the same boundless arrogance that led him to once declare, “I’m the best goddam hitter in the world.” Standing in the batting cage, he was speaking to the pitcher, to the writers, and to himself, always in his naturally stentorian voice. He turned to a writer and wagered that he could hit a ball over the right-field fence. Williams gave the writer favorable odds: “Two and a half to one. Twenty-five bucks to 10.” The writer agreed. Ted had seven fair balls to win the bet.9

  Williams grinned, relishing any opportunity to prove a writer wrong. “Hey Sully,” he shouted to pitcher Frank Sullivan. “I’ll give you $12.50 if you groove it.” Everyone in the Red Sox camp stopped what they were doing, riveting their eyes on Williams. In the still of the Sarasota sun, he muttered to himself, “Over the wall.” Standing fairly erect, he held the bat almost perpendicular to the ground, firmly gripping it with his fingers. Sullivan threw three fastballs, but Williams failed to pull them. Then, on the fourth pitch, Ted eyed a fastball right where he wanted it. Cocking his hips, he stepped forward with his right foot, uncoiled his body, and snapped his arms and wrists in a graceful motion. Whack! The ball sailed high into right field until it dropped over the wall. “There,” Williams barked. “Into the lousy trailer camp.”10