Sometimes their hijinks became dangerous. Passing the time during their monotonous train travels, Mickey and Billy stripped down to their undershorts and wrestled in the aisles of a Pullman car. Given Mantle’s weight advantage, Martin always started the contest attempting to snare the bigger man in a hold but usually ended up flat on his back calling mercy. Occasionally, though, he got the best of Mick. “I fixed him once,” Billy said. “I put my fingers inside his mouth, got him by the gums. He threw me, but he couldn’t eat for two days.”41
When they weren’t wrestling, they played a sport called “nose poker.” At the end of a head-to-head poker hand, the winner chose a card from the deck. If he pulled a ten card, he got to swat it ten times at the loser’s nose. A skilled handyman swiping the celluloid card back and forth could produce a red nose, not to mention tears. “Once the train gave a lurch,” Mickey said. “Whitey caught me right on the chin with his left fist. That bled me.”42
Their antics were likely fueled by something more than just youthful energy. Both drank too much. After games they downed beer in the clubhouse, turned to harder alcohol during dinners at Danny’s Hideaway and rounds at Toots Shor’s, and guzzled a “hair-of-the-dog” hangover cure the next morning. This concoction was dangerous enough, but an assortment of pills made it positively combustible. Childhood demons haunted both men, but Martin’s were more apparent. In 1956 sportswriter Al Stump spent several weeks with Billy collecting material for a feature article in the Saturday Evening Post. He concluded that the physical and especially emotional demands of playing big-league baseball were too much for most young men, and Martin, “the most unhappy young man in the major leagues,” was a case in point. Combative on and off the field, plagued by family and marital troubles, subject to manic highs and lows, he suffered from insomnia, hypertension, and melancholia.43
Billy’s solution to his problems was pharmaceutical. Insomnia and a lack of appetite caused him to lose weight and flag during the late innings of games. He turned to sleeping pills. They seemed to do the job, and his performance on the field improved, but increasingly he fought bouts of depression. Daily trips to St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue helped some, but so too did “nerve pills.” Billy told Stump, “I took over three hundred goof balls [a combination of amphetamines and barbiturates]. Even then, most nights I’d be walking the floor until daylight.” The combination of sleeping pills and antidepressants was not a long-term solution. He needed something to make him feel better and energize him for games.44
By the 1950s baseball had just what Billy and other listless players required. To be sure, not all baseball players suffered from Martin’s string of afflictions. But during a 154-game season involving extended road trips, fatiguing train rides, day games contested under the hot sun, doubleheaders, and nagging injuries, they all tired at one point or another. Some had trouble sleeping in strange beds; others missed their wives and children when on the road for a week or two. Like Martin, many players didn’t sleep well. They showed up at the ballpark bone weary and irritable. Baseball seemed less a game than an ordeal. The answer to a whole host of troubles was a little green pill.
Ballplayers called them “greenies,” though they were not always green. Some were orange. The pills were amphetamines. The most prevalent brand, Dexedrine, was green; another favorite, Benzedrine, was orange. Stimulants and sports share a history that goes back to the ancient Greeks, and modern high-performance athletics has a long history of doping. And athletes recognized early on the benefits of amphetamines. By 1939 cyclists—as well as long-distance truck drivers—had discovered the miracles of Bennies. But it was during World War II that the gospel spread. German storm troopers blitzed into Poland and France emboldened by amphetamines, and every army used phentermine and methamphetamine drugs during the war. Physicians lauded their ability to push soldiers beyond the normal limits of the human body, staving off fatigue and instilling confidence.45
In the years after the war, family doctors prescribed amphetamines for a wide variety of maladies. They were hailed as a way to shed unwanted pounds and as an answer to general ennui. As authorities on the drug Lester Grinspoon and Peter Hedblom observed, “Never before has so powerful a drug been introduced in such quantities in so short a time, and never before had a drug with such high addictive potential and capability of causing irreversible physical and psychological damage been so enthusiastically embraced by the medical profession as a panacea or so extravagantly promoted by the drug industry.”46
Ballplayers may not have been able to spell “ennui,” but they knew a performance enhancer when they experienced one. Some had used amphetamines during their military service, but they did not have to introduce their teammates to them when they returned home. Greenies were already prevalent; candy jars full of them awaited players who needed a pick-me-up before a game. Pittsburgh slugger and future Hall of Famer Ralph Kiner recalled that after a stint in the navy, he returned to the Pirates; when he complained of fatigue between a doubleheader, a trainer offered him some Bennies. As he remembered, “All the trainers in all the ballparks had them.”47
“Don’t go out there alone” became the common admonition in the locker room. Every training room had colored pills—vitamins, “pep” pills, amphetamines, and painkillers. Players downed them like jellybeans. For some they became the breakfast of champions, certain to cure a hangover, turn a road trip into a joy ride, make an ache disappear, and get you ready to play the game. Whatever the truth—and there is no clear answer—players were convinced that with the help of their little green friends, they swung faster at the plate, moved quicker toward a ground ball, concentrated more sharply, and performed better. And theirs was the ultimate performance business. Especially for players like Billy Martin, who was prone to slumps at the plate, energy, aggression, and field generalship were the recipe for staying in the major leagues. He had an extended family, child, and ex-wife who depended on his big-league salary. He approached amphetamines like he did drink: if one would make him feel good, he’d order a double and go from there. The side effects of overusing the drug—high blood pressure, abnormal heart beat, irritability, insomnia, anxiety, heightened aggression, and even psychosis—did not concern him, though he did fall into the dangerous cycle of using uppers to perform and downers to sleep.48
Martin told Stump about his pill use, an admission that did not endear him to Yankees general manager George Weiss. In that sense Billy was a rarity. In the 1950s and 1960s, most players did not broadcast that they took greenies before games, though some later mentioned it in candid memoirs. It was their secret, an aspect of the game that ran counter to its all-American image. Since Mantle was reticent to talk about anything with reporters, he followed baseball’s code of silence. But it seems unlikely that he would have denied himself the perceived benefits of the pills. In 1961, for instance, when Mickey felt physically run-down, Yankee announcer Mel Allen told him to visit Dr. Max Jacobson—the notorious Dr. Feelgood frequented by wealthy Wall Street insiders, jet-setters, A-list celebrities, and even the new president and First Lady of the United States—for a quick lift. Jacobson gave Mantle a shot of amphetamines mixed with vitamins, human placenta, and eel cells. Far from curing Mickey’s blues, the shot led to a series of complications. But the episode was evidence that he was willing to experiment with an untested drug.49
Whitey Ford, Mickey Mantle, and Billy Martin saw themselves as the Three Musketeers, dashing athletes who played one game during the day and another at night. To the Yankees management, they were perpetual troublemakers whose escapades constantly threatened to get out of hand and tarnish the squeaky-clean image of the team. Courtesy of the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
We can’t know what Mantle was ingesting in the summer of 1956, but we have a clear idea of Martin’s consumption, and we know that the M&M boys were racing around the locker room like spirited colts, playing practical jokes on their teammates, and behaving like circus clowns. For the two troubled players, it wa
s all great fun, and they probably never considered that someone might get hurt.50
Then, on August 22, during Mickey’s slump, the New York Daily News ran a story with the headline “Mantle Denies Leg Injury.” The tale that he and the Yankees denied was that Mickey had broken his leg in some clubhouse horseplay. He hadn’t, but the antics were real enough, and the scenario was all too believable to George Weiss. Mickey, Weiss knew, was a natural-born follower with a liking for rough-humored bad boys. Billy was just the sort of “bad influence” that attracted the slugger. And, as Roger Kahn commented, “a non-conformist fits the Yankees the way a teetotaler fits Toots Shor’s.”51
CHAPTER 9
The Best in the Game
HARRIET: “What will you hope to accomplish, Roy?”
ROY: “Sometimes when I walk down the street I bet people will say there goes Roy Hobbs, the best there ever was in the game.”
HARRIET: “Is that all?”
ROY: “Is that all?… What more is there?”
—BERNARD MALAMUD, The Natural, 1952
Every day that Mickey remained mired in a slump, Ruth’s record drifted further beyond his reach, and Ted Williams crept closer to him in the race for the batting title. What made it all the more frustrating was that he did not have the foggiest notion of how to end his hitting woes. Williams, of course, would have known how to climb out of the hole. Teddy Ballgame understood that slumps stemmed from fundamental flaws. Great batters tried to hit the ball hard up the middle, hit it in the air, and maintain discipline in the batter’s box. “If I’m hitting the ball hard and not getting hits, I didn’t worry,” he once explained. “I would say, ‘The law of averages is going to catch up with this.” So he concentrated on smacking the ball with authority into the outfield because he knew that a fly ball was less likely to be an out than a grounder. He also understood that he had to wait for the right pitch and not chase balls outside the strike zone. “A great hitter should walk three times for every strikeout,” he insisted. Williams, in short, avoided prolonged slumps by mastering every nuance of hitting—where to hit a ball, when to go after a fastball, when to lay off of a curve, how to shift his weight, and how to adjust his hands. Nothing about hitting was too unimportant for him to analyze.1
Mickey, however, relied more on muscle memory, the valuable but mostly unconscious retention of previous swings located deep in the fibers of his arms, legs, and torso, rather than technique. And muscle memory was critical. It let him know if a swing felt right or wrong. Yet knowing that a swing felt wrong did not help him make the next feel right. That took a more conscious understanding of the mechanics of his swing, the very thing that Williams had and he did not. In the meantime, he pressed, swinging too hard, going after unhittable pitches, and compounding his travails by forming bad habits. In August 1956, Mickey knew only that the baseball looked like a golf ball, and he desperately wanted it to appear as large as a full moon.
Mantle’s slump instilled hope in the Yankees’ American League rivals. Although the Bombers’ lead over Cleveland bounced between seven and nine games, if Mickey faltered, his team might—just might—fall apart. “Mickey has been the man who has carried the club all season,” argued Indians general manager Hank Greenberg. “Unless he returns to hitting solidly, Casey Stengel will be in real trouble.” Greenberg’s forecast appeared a touch too dire; yet New York journalists fretted that perhaps Mickey was nursing a slight injury after all. They had seen it before—the long stretches of early or mid-season brilliance followed by late-season mediocrity. When a hitter as talented as Mantle stops hitting, it gives rise to all sorts of apocalyptic musings.2
He continued to struggle. Following two disastrous series against Boston and Baltimore, he managed one hit in seven at bats and struck out three times in two games against Cleveland. Then, in the opening game of a doubleheader against Chicago, he again failed to get a hit, going 0–3 with two strikeouts. In eight games, between August 16 and 23, he had three hits in thirty-one at bats, an abysmal .097 average. Mantle’s slump seemed to be affecting his team. The Yankees had dropped five of their previous eight games. The club’s failures mystified Stengel. “I’m just disgusted,” he remarked after the game. “We had no pitching, no hitting. We looked awful. Even the defense looked bad.”3
In the nightcap against Chicago, the Yankees’ struggles continued, though Mickey rebounded in a 4–6 loss. In his first time at the plate he legged out a bunt, using his speed to record a hit. In the fifth inning he clubbed a 457-foot triple off the center-field fence. And he finished the evening with a ninth-inning home run. The “tape-measure job” into the upper left-field seats was his first homer in ten games. It kept him slightly ahead of Ruth’s record pace, but given Babe’s memorable September, his chances of breaking the record seemed remote.4
A bunt, a triple, and a home run—in one of the mysteries of baseball a slumping batter had once again found his groove. Mickey was hot, and now he felt like he was swinging at softballs. In the final eight games of August, he went 16–32, batting an even .500. Five of his hits were home runs. Once again he was the darling of New York, belting homers in Yankee Stadium and making appearances on television shows. And as his home run tally increased, so did his fee for walk-on appearances. In June he received $1,000 for a brief stint on TV; now he earned $1,500 to take a bow on such programs as The Arthur Murray Party.5
But even in the middle of a streak, the ghost of Babe Ruth loomed, seemingly just out of reach. An illustration in the New York Post depicted Mickey’s plight. Looking toward the heavens, Mantle says, “It’s Tough Babe!” A voice from the clouds answers, “Keep Swinging Kid!” Going into the Yankees’ final game in August, Mantle’s home run total stood at forty-six, still fourteen short of Ruth’s record. But he took heart from the Yankees’ schedule. They were headed to Washington for three games—and Mickey hit in Griffith Stadium like he owned it.6
MANTLE’S PURSUIT OF THE home run record was the story of the season. For many fans, especially fair-weather ones, Mickey Mantle was baseball. His exploits kept interest in the game high; he gave people something to talk about and reason to turn to the sports section each day. With Mickey chasing Ruth and the reenergized Dodgers closing in on the Braves in a tight National League pennant race, baseball became more exciting with every game. The demand to see Mantle was so great, suggested sportswriter Jerry Nason, that the entire American League owed him a bonus.7
Even President Dwight Eisenhower wanted another chance to see him swing the bat. On Friday, August 31, he quit work early, took a two-hour nap, and made a surprise late-afternoon visit to Griffith Stadium to watch the Yankee slugger. Before the contest Ike asked to meet the player everyone was talking about, and Mickey, cap in hand, made a brief visit to the president’s box. They were introduced and huddled for a few minutes. Initially Ike urged Mickey to “hit two home runs for me tonight.” Then he amended his request: “I hope you hit a home run. But I also hope Washington wins.” It was less an executive request than a plea from the country’s highest-ranking sports fan.8
Mantle did his part, punishing Camilo Pascual for the fifth time of the season. In the seventh inning he cracked his forty-seventh homer over the high right-field wall. The Senators, however, failed Ike. Although outfielder Jim Lemon hit three home runs into the left-field bleachers—a feat that only Joe DiMaggio had previously accomplished in Washington—the Senators lost to the Yankees 6–4. Still, the president thoroughly enjoyed the ballpark atmosphere. He beamed at every home run, rising out of his seat and leading the applause. With an election on the horizon, he sought to affirm his love for the Great American Game.9
In 1956 President Dwight Eisenhower proved Mickey Mantle’s good luck charm. On three occasions with Ike in the stands, Mantle homered. In this photo, taken on August 31, Eisenhower asked Mantle to hit a homer for him. The slugger graciously obliged. Courtesy of Getty Images.
At the beginning of September, the Yankees were coasting toward the American League pennant, but
Mantle’s quest to break Ruth’s record and win the Triple Crown teetered uncertainly. He remained four games in front of Ruth’s 1927 pace, but with twenty-nine games remaining he had to belt thirteen homers to tie the record and fourteen to break it. It was a daunting prospect. By September the season’s toll on players’ bodies was beginning to show. For the Yankees, it was time to give players like Mantle, Yogi Berra, and Whitey Ford a respite to rejuvenate their sore legs and arms before the World Series. But rest for Mickey was a dream. He essentially had to hit a homer every two games to surpass Ruth, and his grip on the Triple Crown was by no means secure.10
History was not in his corner. Of course, in 1927 the Babe had entered September on pace for a fine season (by his standards) and finished the month in Valhalla. After tallying forty-three homers by the end of August, in September he hit seventeen more in twenty-nine games, including six in the first seven games of the month and four in the last five. Other stars had approached but fallen short of Ruth’s achievement. In 1930 the Chicago Cubs’ irrepressible star Hack Wilson had begun September with forty-six homers. He finished the month with fifty-six. In 1932 the Philadelphia Athletics’ slugger Jimmie Foxx had started the last month of the season with forty-eight dingers and ended up with fifty-eight. And in 1938 the Detroit Tigers’ power hitting Hank Greenberg had gone into September like Ruth with forty-three homers. He too had a magnificent final month, but ended the campaign with fifty-eight.11
Greenberg and Foxx understood the obstacles and pressures Mantle faced. “Mickey’s difficulties will come in the last four or five days,” Greenberg warned. “Everybody will be more conscious of his attempt to break the record and the pitchers will be more careful.” Foxx agreed. Mantle, he judged, “had the tools to do it,” but he was uncertain about the Yankee star’s “temperament.” To break Ruth’s mark, Mickey would need to avoid slumps, remain healthy, and most of all filter out all the noise about the Great Bambino, the September curse, and the magic of the number sixty. No one in a generation had done it. Many in baseball believed no one could.12
A Season in the Sun Page 20