Whatever hopes the Fenway faithful had for the season quickly vanished in early April when Ted slipped on a shower clog, injuring the arch in his right foot. For more than five weeks, he didn’t start a game, though he occasionally pinch-hit. Sitting on the bench, he grew restless. By the time he returned against the Yankees on May 29, sportswriters had discovered that Mickey Mantle stories sold more newspapers than reports about an aging and injured Williams. Boston columnists suggested that the Yankee slugger had replaced him as the best hitter in baseball. “When the ballplayers start to talk about another player like the Sox were talking about Mantle tonight,” the Boston Globe’s Cliff Keane wrote on June 19, “you know he’s great. They’re talking about him the way that they used to talk about Williams years ago.” After Mantle hit two more home runs the following day, Harold Kaese’s Globe column headlined, “Red Sox Need Homers from Ted to Win.”11
Williams accepted the challenge. The next day, he hit his first home run of the season—and a brief, spectacular rivalry was born. It was classic Teddy Ballgame, crusty and resilient, motivated by the doubters. For years, Boston columnists had written Williams off. This would be the year, they said, that his body betrayed him. But he always roared back, Updike wrote in 1960, “back from Korea, back from a broken collarbone, a shattered elbow, a bruised heel, back from drastic bouts of the flu and ptomaine poisoning. Hardly a season went by without some enfeebling mishap, yet he always came back, and always looked like himself.”12
Williams refused to concede his self-proclaimed title as the best hitter in the game. His fierce inner pride, his single-minded determination, drove him during every at bat. Failure at the plate was unacceptable. It made his blood boil. That fury, he believed, made him a better hitter. Cursing beneath his breath, he stepped into the batter’s box demanding perfection. He told his younger teammate Jimmy Piersall, “Kid, there’s only one way for you to become a hitter. Go up to the plate and get mad. Get mad at yourself and mad at the pitcher.”13
By the time the Yankees rolled into Boston on July 4, Ted Williams was hotter than a habanero. In the previous fifteen games, he had hit .431, raising his season average to .375, two points better than Mantle. Suddenly, Mickey found himself competing for the batting title against the last Triple Crown winner. Williams wouldn’t admit it publicly, but he had made up his mind. He wanted one more batting title. About a month earlier he had told writers that he couldn’t hit fastballs anymore. Yet no one his age had ever looked better. “At thirty seven, an age when most ball players have hung up their spikes,” Al Hirshberg wrote, “Williams is still the most feared hitter in the business.”14
In the first game of the Independence Day doubleheader, Williams faced Yankees starting pitcher Johnny Kucks. Carrying a 3.19 earned run average, the slender twenty-two-year-old right-hander from Jersey City had recently learned that he was on his way to his first All-Star game. A sinker ball pitcher, Kucks could still picture the gopher ball that he had floated over the plate against Williams the previous season. If Johnny wasn’t careful, Ted would make him pay again. Pitching against Williams, he recalled, was difficult because Williams had complete command of the strike zone, laying off balls that skimmed the edges of the plate—and because if he didn’t swing at a close pitch, umpires gave him beneficial calls. One time, when a catcher argued that a called ball was actually a strike, the umpire reminded him, “Mr. Williams will let you know when your pitcher throws a strike.”15
In the bottom of the seventh inning, with two men on base, two outs, and the score tied 2–2, Williams stepped to the plate. He looked at the pitcher, beginning his routine muttering. “When I hit,” he said, “I think to myself, ‘Boy, I’ve got to be quick with the bat, quick with my hands, quick with the bat.’” He repeated, “Quick with bat, quick with my hands.” He expected Kucks would throw a mixture of sinkers and sliders. When Kucks began his sidearm delivery, Williams anticipated the pitch and walloped a three-run homer. The Red Sox took the lead, 5–2.16
Billy Martin wouldn’t let the Yankees give up. In the ninth, they fought back, taking a one-run lead on Martin’s two-run homer. In the bottom of the inning, Boston’s Jackie Jensen hit a game-tying single into shallow center field. Still tied in the bottom of the eleventh, Boston center fielder Jimmy Piersall came to the plate with men on first and second. Facing Yankees reliever Tom Sturdivant, Piersall looped a single toward Mantle in center field. Mickey charged toward the rolling ball and scooped it up. As he stepped into the throw, his right cleat stuck into the turf, twisting his right knee. He managed to fling an off-balance throw to Berra at home, but Boston’s Billy Goodman had already crossed the plate for the game-winning run.17
Afterward, Mickey hobbled around the locker room. This injury appeared much worse than the one he had suffered in April. He had not missed a game all season, but there was no doubt that he would skip the second game of the doubleheader later that night. As Mickey unwrapped “several yards of bandages” around his injured right leg, he listened to Gus Mauch tell a group of writers that he had sprained lateral ligaments behind his knee. “Tomorrow we’ll look and see if there’s any swelling,” the trainer explained.18
“Won’t swell,” Mantle grumbled in frustration. “Sure of that.”
“Well, maybe it will, and maybe it won’t,” Mauch replied.
“No, it won’t,” Mickey insisted. He cringed at the thought of another injury, especially when he was having the best season of his life.
“Well, let’s hope,” Mauch said, masking his pessimism.
The following afternoon, Mickey boarded a 2:00 p.m. train out of Boston with a swollen knee. Sportswriters speculated that he would miss at least a week. With the All-Star game only five days away, there was little chance that he would play in the Midsummer Classic. Later that night, he visited the Lenox Hill Hospital on the Upper East Side, where he received the news: he hadn’t torn any muscles or ligaments, but he had sprained his medial collateral ligament and would have to wear a single-hinge brace until his leg healed.19
By 1956 Boston Red Sox great Ted Williams was entering the last act of his playing career, but his competitive fires burned just as intensely as they had in 1941, when he hit .406. He believed that he was still the best hitter in the game and was determined to stop Mantle’s bid for the Triple Crown. Courtesy of the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
The All-Star break couldn’t come soon enough for the Yankees. Although they had won five straight games leading into it, Billy Martin joined Mantle on the bench with a nagging hamstring injury. It was terrible timing for Martin, who had finally broken out of a slump, hitting .350 over his last eleven games. To make matters worse, Yogi Berra was nursing a sore left ankle after a foul ball caromed off him. And that wasn’t the worst of it. Berra’s batting average had plummeted seventy-six points since June 14, the worst slide of his career. Hitting .281 was certainly respectable, but he wasn’t swinging well enough to justify his $55,000 salary, the highest on the club. Yet there was good news too. A few days after hurting his leg, Mickey made an announcement: “I feel good,” he said. “I’m ready anytime.”20
Team doctors authorized him to return to the field if he played with a brace on his right knee. On July 8, the last game before the break, he started against the Washington Senators. Testing his leg in center field, he played four innings and managed a single in one of his three plate appearances. Casey Stengel, however, worried that Mickey was rushing back. The skipper wanted him to sit one more day, but Mantle wouldn’t listen. “What are you going to do?” Stengel asked a group of writers. “He is a cripple and insists on playing.”21
A BAG OF BATS sat at the edge of Ted Williams’s hotel bed. No possession mattered to him more. In Washington, DC, on the eve of the All-Star game, while most players spent the night on the town, he declared in the early evening that he was going to order a big steak and go to sleep. He needed rest. “Williams,” Mickey Mantle later recalled, “was the one guy on the American League team who took the Al
l-Star game seriously.”22
No one who really knew Ted was surprised that he preferred to spend an evening alone with his bats. Unlike Mickey, who loved rooming with Billy Martin, Ted refused to share quarters with another player. When the Red Sox traveled on the road, he didn’t join his teammates for a game of cards or a round of beers. He’d much rather be by himself, honing his bats with a bone, grinding down the wood. After wiping away the dust and rosin, he would weigh them on his own scale to ensure that they had not absorbed any moisture from the humid summer air. If they were too heavy, he’d ask the clubhouse attendant, Johnny Orlando, to put them in the dryer.23
Williams lived by a routine. Before every game he stood in front of a large hotel mirror, usually wearing only an undershirt and his underwear, swinging a bat. He wanted to see how he looked with the bat in his hands because he had to look good. “My name is Ted Fuckin’ Williams and I’m the greatest hitter in baseball,” he would declare through clenched teeth. He’d swing the bat and repeat his mantra. “My name is Ted Fuckin’ Williams and I’m the greatest hitter in baseball.”24
While Williams spent the night imagining a stellar All-Star game performance, Mickey barhopped with Whitey Ford and a few friends from other clubs. He later admitted that he treated the mid-season break “as a three-day party.” He was unconcerned about rehabbing his leg or resting his body or about the exhibition game the next day. He cared only about his night out in the nation’s capital. In Washington, the FBI learned a year later, a prominent bookie arranged dates at a brothel “for members of the New York Yankees,” including Mantle.25
If Mickey lived everyday like it was his last, Ted lived for tomorrow. Mantle abused his body; Williams treated his like a temple, avoiding cigarettes, alcohol, and late-night escapades. When Ted first started dating, he let every woman know that he followed a self-imposed curfew. “I don’t care what we do,” he’d say, “just so long as you let me get home by midnight.” If Mantle looked at his watch, it was only because he wanted to know if the bar was closing.26
Mickey treated his talents like a renewable resource. He didn’t worry about wasting them. Over the years, as his body broke down from various injuries, he ignored doctors who prescribed rest and rehab exercises. He assumed that he would recover without much effort. Baseball had always come easily to him. He figured that he could play the game on natural ability alone. So, when the season ended, he stopped thinking about the sport.27
Williams, on the other hand, obsessed about building his body. He worked with weights, pulleys, and a hand-sized metal contraption with springs, squeezing it to boost the strength in his wrists and forearms. After games he knocked out one hundred fingertip push-ups. Few teammates ever beat him in a push-up contest. The competition drove him to be better at everything he did—push-ups, pull-ups, hitting. If a reporter suggested that he succeeded on natural ability, he would erupt. “They never talk about practice,” he boomed. “Practice! Practice! Practice! Dammit, you gotta practice!”28
The central difference between Williams and Mantle was ambition.As a confident young hitter, Ted arrived in Boston dreaming about immortality. “When I’m finished with baseball,” he said, “I want to be able to walk down the street and have folks point to me and say, ‘There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived.’” When Mickey came to the big leagues, his biggest concern was making the team. He was stunned that the Yankees gave a roster spot to a nineteen-year-old. “I am overawed,” he said in 1951. “I don’t really belong here.”29
Over the years, whenever the Yankees played the Red Sox, Mantle studied Williams at the plate. “I was like everybody else,” he said. “When he took batting practice, I got up and watched. He was the best hitter I ever saw.” During spring training, Mantle approached Williams to ask him a few questions about hitting. The Boston veteran reminded him to wait for a good pitch. It was the central lesson he offered younger hitters. “Make them pitch to your strike zone,” he instructed, “not theirs.”30
One time before a game, Williams confused Mantle with a series of questions of his own. When Ted asked him which hand was his power hand and which was his guide hand, Mickey had no idea what he was talking about. After listening to him, Mantle tried applying his theories at the plate, but imitating Ted only made batting more difficult. He didn’t get a hit for about twenty-five straight plate appearances. While Williams was interested in the science of hitting, going as far as meeting with a physics professor at MIT to learn about the aerodynamics of a curveball, Mantle was all brawn and instinct. “Hell,” Mantle said years later, “I just used to go up there swinging.”31
The Yankee center fielder reminded Williams of Jimmie Foxx, the stout, powerfully built slugger who finished his career with 534 home runs, second only to Babe Ruth at the time. The volatile crack of Mantle’s bat against the ball reverberated just like those hit by “the Beast.” “It sounded like cherry bombs going off when Foxx hit them,” Williams recalled. In Ted’s view, Mantle had joined elite company. There were few hitters he admired more than Foxx. But Mantle, Williams suggested, had become more than a power hitter. Mickey had greater discipline in 1956, and it showed. Ted told Yankees beat writer Tom Meany that Mantle had a legitimate shot to finish the season with a .400 batting average, high praise coming from the last man to do it. “Mickey has everything going for him,” he said. “He has the speed to beat out bunts, so they can’t play him too deep, and the power to drive it past them if they creep in on him. He bats both ways, so you can’t play him in any particular field. And he has Yogi Berra hitting behind him, which means the pitchers can’t put him on base without leaving themselves open to two runs instead of one.”32
On July 10, a sellout crowd of about 28,000 packed Washington’s Griffith Stadium to see the game’s greatest players. When the public address announcer introduced the All-Stars, including six Yankees, no two players received a greater ovation than Mickey Mantle and Ted Williams, save perhaps hometown favorite Mickey Vernon. The game was more than an exhibition; it was a national event, watched by millions on NBC and featured as a cover story by Sports Illustrated. And the All-Stars themselves were the elite of America’s sporting fraternity. “No athlete in any other sport in any part of the world,” the magazine’s Robert Creamer observed, “is accorded such widespread and insistent homage as the American major league baseball players.” Being an All-Star, like Mantle and Williams, meant that a player had become one of “the gods, and the Pantheon of each league as constructed each July is heaven, the desired perfection dreamed of by the baseball follower.”33
During the Great Depression, when baseball attendance declined by 40 percent, owners and sportswriters invented new ways to commemorate the biggest stars of the past and present, cementing baseball’s place in American life. In 1931, the Baseball Writers Association of America established the modern practice of voting for the MVP. Two seasons later, at the suggestion of Chicago Tribune writer Arch Ward, Comiskey Park hosted the “Game of the Century,” the first midsummer exhibition played by the biggest stars in the American and National leagues. And in 1936, the charter members were inducted into the Hall of Fame. Three years later, those legends—Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Christy Matthewson, and Walter Johnson—were enshrined in the hall during a ceremony in Cooperstown, New York, baseball’s fabled birthplace. Each of these honors—the MVP award, the selection for the All-Star game, and induction into the Hall of Fame—celebrated individual achievement in the team sport.34
Mickey didn’t intend to perform like a Hall of Famer in Washington. He looked as though he had enjoyed himself too much the night before. Wearing a brace on his right knee, he fanned in his first two at bats, against Pittsburgh’s Bob Friend and Milwaukee’s Warren Spahn. Standing in the on-deck circle in the sixth inning, with the American League trailing 0–5 and one man on base, he watched Ted Williams square off against Spahn, a nine-time All-Star and a contender for that season’s Cy Young Award. Williams loved facing the best pitchers in the game on su
ch a grand stage. It was his chance to show everyone that he was the best of the best. When Spahn tested his bat speed with a fastball, Williams belted a towering shot toward center field, where Duke Snider watched it fly over his head and drop into the American League bullpen.35
Then Mantle dug into the right side of the batter’s box. Spahn had gotten the best of him in the fourth inning, but Mantle now had a better feel for his delivery and the speed of his fastball. In the press box, writers expected little from him, especially after two strikeouts. He simply could not pivot on his knee the way he normally did. But when Spahn hung an off-speed slider, Mantle muscled the ball into the left-center-field stands. He drove it “merely with his arms,” an impressive display of power that left the crowd thundering with applause. Even he was surprised that the ball had cleared the fence. “I thought it was an outside pitch,” he said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have swung.”36
The back-to-back home runs by Williams and Mantle renewed the home crowd’s hope for an American League victory. But the AL never scored again, losing 7–3. Besides the homers by Mantle, Williams, Willie Mays, and Stan Musial, the game, Jimmy Cannon complained, was “boring,” with no major turning points, no real drama. It was “just a ball game with two for a nickel hits falling flabbily.” Afterward, reporters pressed Casey Stengel about losing his fifth All-Star game as American League manager, but he was concerned less about his record than about his starting catcher.37
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