Mickey paced the locker room. How did he feel? a reporter inquired. “Me, why I’d feel swell if only I could find out whether I can win this thing.” Thinking for a moment, he then added, “I ought to be satisfied with the batting title, which is really something, but I’m all tied up in this triple crown business now and have to find out.”
It was maddening. He went back to pacing.
Teammates told him not to worry. He would win. Mickey wasn’t so sure. Failures and losses, injuries and deaths had defined his life more than successes and victories.
He got dressed and waited.
Someone came in with news from Cleveland. The game was over. Kaline had grounded out in the ninth without getting another RBI. “Good,” said Yogi, “then Mickey gets it.”
For the first time in what seemed like months, Mantle smiled—relaxed, satisfied, fulfilled. Fifty-two home runs, a .353 batting average, and 130 RBIs. He led each category in both leagues. He was only the fifth player in history to accomplish that feat, the others being Ty Cobb (1909), Rogers Hornsby (1925), Lou Gehrig (1934), and Ted Williams (1942). Mutt Mantle probably never even dreamed that big.
A reporter asked Mickey what it meant to him. He struggled with his response. He didn’t have the words. He was easily tongue-tied and not given to any sort of introspection. How could he tell the worldly reporters of New York City about Mickey Mantle? He had inherited a dream, his father’s dream, and it pushed him and nurtured him. One hundred thousand or more pitches thrown between his tiny home and shed, within sight of the Eagle-Picher chat mountains in Commerce. Hundreds of games on dusty, alkali fields that turned his eyes as red as a rat’s. The pain and uncertainty of osteomyelitis, an affliction that could have killed him. The high-and-inside hole in his swing that got him sent back down to the minors. The failures and injuries and boos that dogged him as a young Yankee. The shadows of Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio that blocked the sun from his face. And now this—the Triple Crown. The realization of his old man’s dream. How could he possibly summon some Yogi-like quip? How could he wrap his life into a neat, pithy statement and deliver it to them on a silver platter?
What did it mean to him? It meant anxiety at night and worries during the day, playing injured and struggling through slumps, hitting tape-measure home runs and winning games, laughing with his friends and drinking at Toots Shor’s. It meant being a big-league ballplayer living a big-league life. Boiled down to its essence, it meant that in 1956 he was the best player in the game.
He couldn’t, and didn’t, put it into words. But that big, wide-faced Mickey Mantle grin said it all.
YEARS LATER IN DETROIT a young kid taunted Al Kaline, who had come so close to Mantle in 1956. “You’re not half as good as Mickey Mantle,” he shouted. Kaline, a good and decent man, took it in stride. “Son,” he explained, “nobody is half as good as Mickey Mantle.”
Everyone in New York wanted a ticket to the 1956 Subway Series. During the 1950s, there was no greater rivalry in baseball than the feud between the Yankees and Dodgers. This was the last time that vendors ever sold a World Series program featuring the two New York clubs. After the 1957 season, Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley moved the team to Los Angeles, marking the end of an era for New York. Courtesy of the University of Notre Dame Special Collections.
CHAPTER 10
Aristocrats and Bums
“Now come baseball’s final moments. The Barber has thrown his last pitch. The Dodgers have won.… Mantle has his triple crown.… The season is over and now it is the World Series. This should be the climax, the ultimate in the extravagant drama that claimed the rapt attention of so many Americans this year.”
—ROBERT CREAMER AND ROY TERRELL, Sports Illustrated, October 8, 1956
Billy Martin could still see the blood on his hands. Losing the 1955 World Series had shattered him. Cursing and shouting, he had burst into the dressing room and pulverized his locker, slicing his knuckles. He couldn’t tolerate failure. When he had finally calmed down, he retreated to the showers, hiding the tears. He hated himself for crying, but he couldn’t suppress the pain. For an hour he had avoided reporters and his teammates. “I didn’t want the fellows to see me,” he said. “I couldn’t stop crying. I don’t want to feel that way again.”1
Martin dreamed about another shot against the Dodgers. On the eve of the 1956 World Series, he told the New York Post’s Milton Gross, “I’ve been itching for a year to get back at them.” He replayed one particular moment from the previous series over and over again in his head. In the sixth inning of Game One, with the Yanks leading 6–3, Martin hit a triple off Don Newcombe. After Don Bessent replaced Newk, catcher Roy Campanella visited him on the mound, warning the reliever that Martin played like a gambler with house money. “Watch that man,” he said loud enough for Martin to hear him. “He’s got a notion.”2
Billy was not especially fast. And it would have been foolish for him to try to steal home with a right-handed pitcher on the mound and a left-handed batter at the plate. But Campy remembered that Martin had called him “spike shy,” an intolerable insult to any catcher. Squatting behind home plate, Campanella peered at Martin out of the corner of his eye. Sure enough Billy broke toward home after the second pitch. Barreling toward Campy, he slid feet first. When they collided Martin threw an elbow, but Roy got the best of him, slapping his throat with a hard tag. Martin sprung to his feet, clenching his fists, glaring at Campanella. He hardly heard the umpire call him out.3
Now, a year later, he hoped that he would meet Campy again. He tried stealing home plate five times during the 1956 season. “I was practicin’ for Campanella,” he said. “Does he still tag ’em high on the pants?” If he had an opportunity to steal home, there was no way that an umpire would determine the outcome. “I’ll not only go across the plate ahead of any throw, but [I’ll] carry Campy with me.”4
Those were fighting words. For the past decade no rivalry defined Major League Baseball more than the one between the Yankees and Dodgers. Nearly every October it seemed that the Yankees—and their arrogant fans—tortured all of Brooklyn. Yankees supporters delighted in reminding Brooklyn natives that the Dodgers were losers. Bums. Failures. Even the Giants won the World Series once, they said. Dodgers loyalist Bill Reddy recalled one painful October evening at a New York tavern when a Yankees fan taunted him. “You Goddam Dodgers,” the man slurred, “you lay down like dogs.” Incensed, Reddy interrupted the heckler with a shot across the jaw. In Brooklyn, mocking a man’s baseball team was like insulting his family.5
Brooklyn, a resident journalist noted, developed in the “long shadow of its more glamorous and vertical neighbor.” Manhattan seemed to be more important, the epicenter not only of New York but of America. It had the biggest and best of everything—Broadway, Wall Street, Times Square, the Empire State Building, and Yankee Stadium. Dwarfed by the city, Brooklyn appeared drab, devoid of monuments to human ambition and replete with the hard-pressed. If Manhattan offered the fairy tale of fame and fortune, Brooklyn offered cheap rent. “All the underdogs in the world live here,” novelist Thomas Wolfe once reflected. “The dishwashers, the fellers who run the subway train, the fellers in cafeterias, the elevator operators, the scrubwoman, the fellers who work in chain grocery stores—they all live here.”6
In the mid-1950s, Brooklyn was in decline. The signs were everywhere. Manufacturing jobs disappeared, and so did the workers. At its peak, the Navy Yard, once the largest single employer in the borough, employed more than 70,000 people, but by the onset of the Korean War, the number of jobs it provided had dropped by almost half. And as middle-class residents left for the suburbs, the borough’s tax base—and its social services—suffered. “The Eisenhower era bragged of the good life for all, a time of abundance and prosperity,” Pete Hamill later wrote. But in Park Slope, where his parents lived, affluence “didn’t touch the Neighborhood. The prosperous were gone to the suburbs; among those who stayed, money was still short.”7
Yet in 1955 the Dodg
ers had given Brooklyn a reason to celebrate. For years, the borough had thirsted for a championship, only to be turned away at the well. Finally, after losing to the Yankees five times in the World Series, Brooklyn parched no longer. On October 4, 1955, the Flatbush faithful raised their glasses, bottles, and flasks, saluting the men who ended the drought. It was the most exciting moment in Brooklyn since VJ Day. Dodgers fans flooded the streets, cheering and yelling, “We did it! We did it!” Taxi drivers blared their horns; church bells pealed; factory whistles blew.8
We did it. The chant revealed the close ties between the Dodgers and Brooklyn. In a land of a thousand accents, Brooklyn never perfectly represented the melting-pot ideal, but at Ebbets Field Italians, Irish, Poles, blacks, and Jews shared a common language as they cheered for their Dodgers. The players were the idols of the borough, heroes of aspiring big leaguers who dreamed that they too would someday represent Brooklyn. In October, whenever the Dodgers competed in the World Series, teachers turned on radios so that kids would not miss an inning. After school let out, children raced home, hearing Red Barber or Vin Scully’s voice echoing through open brownstone windows. Some stopped on their way and stood in front of appliance stores, watching the games on television. Most kids knew the Dodgers by their nicknames—the Duke, the Little Colonel, Campy, Oisk, Newk, and Skoonj—like they were relatives or neighbors down the street. In Brooklyn, kids bragged to their friends about running into a Dodger at the local grocery or how they had followed a player home after a game. The sight of the players in the neighborhood, out of uniform, made Brooklyn feel a little smaller, like a village, and the Dodgers more familiar, like a factory-town team.9
For Brooklyn’s working-class residents, the Yankees were New York’s team—or, more accurately, Manhattan’s team, even though they played in the Bronx. Across the East River the fans from the city lived a world apart. If the Yankees were perceived as corporate America’s team, the Dodgers belonged to the blue-collar ethnics of Brooklyn, “dem bums” who wore denim and white T-shirts in the boisterous bleachers of Ebbets Field. “When we played the Yankees,” future radio and television host Larry King observed, “it was us poor Dodger fans against the rich.” Yankees fans “were different from us. You would never wear blue jeans to a Yankee game. And the Yankee fans didn’t scream. They clapped, like at the opera.”10
In the 1950s, being a baseball fan went to the very core of a New Yorker’s identity; whom one rooted for revealed one’s neighborhood, heritage, and cultural values. Doris Kearns Goodwin recalled of growing up on Long Island, “In each home, team affiliation was passed on from father to child, with the crucial moments in a team’s history repeated like the liturgy of a church service.” Every autumn, New Yorkers argued about baseball in bars, subways, delis, drugstores, and stadiums. And legions of Dodgers fanatics made sure that Yankees fans who came to Ebbets Field understood that they had entered enemy territory.11
During one October series, when a Yankees fan cheered too enthusiastically, a Brooklyn man said, “Why don’t you go back where you belong, Yankee lover?”12
Then the intruder made a mistake. “I got a right to cheer my team,” he said. “This is a free country.”
“This ain’t no free country, chum,” the Dodgers fan replied. “This is Brooklyn.”
IT SEEMED THAT EVERY October America fixed its gaze on New York. In the postwar era, between 1947 and 1956, a New York franchise appeared in every World Series but one. And in 1956 the Yankees and Dodgers met in the Fall Classic for the fourth time in five seasons. The Subway Series defined the city and affirmed New York’s centrality in American life. It had become New York’s own weeklong holiday, though one characterized by drama and suspense.
Some fans outside the Big Apple had grown tired of New York’s baseball supremacy. “In the corn and rutabaga belts, in the rolling mill and pressed steel valley of the Midwest and in the highly cultured city of Boston,” Jimmy Powers reported, fans grumbled that another Subway Series was “bad for baseball.” Critics complained that the dominance of New York’s teams made baseball too predictable. But the rivalry between the Yankees and Dodgers still generated national interest. Tourists traveled to New York, packing the city’s hotels in the hope that a concierge or a doorman could help them score tickets. Viewers from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, watched the televised series on NBC. Shortwave radio networks made it a global event, bringing the games to American servicemen stationed in Europe, South America, and the Pacific.13
On the eve of the series, journalists cast their predictions; most believed the Yankees would win. Bookies set the betting odds at 3–2 in favor of the Bronx Bombers. Although the Dodgers had won the last series in seven games, sportswriters noted that the Yanks had played without “the most formidable slugger of modern times” at full strength. Mickey Mantle, Arthur Daley contended, could “swing this series all by himself.”14
Before Game One, reporters asked the players how the teams matched up against each other. Mantle ordinarily let his bat do the talking. But he couldn’t contain his exuberance. “In my opinion,” he said, “the Dodgers will be a whole lot easier to beat than the Braves.” Dodgers shortstop Pee Wee Reese couldn’t believe that Mickey would insult his team; the Yankee star hardly ever offered an opinion about anything. But it didn’t matter what he said, Reese suggested. The entire series would come down to whether or not the Dodgers’ pitchers could neutralize the Yankees’ power hitters. “If we can stop Mantle and Berra,” Reese said, “we can beat them. And I think we can.”15
The scouting report on Mantle, however, offered the Dodgers little room for optimism. Mantle, Sports Illustrated reported, “could beat you a dozen ways.” He had “tremendous power” from both sides of the plate and could run the bases better than most players in the league. He could “hit it over the fence or bunt for a hit.” In other words, he could do it all. “Pitch him high and tight,” scouts advised, “slip in [an] occasional curve, move the ball around—and pray.”16
THE MORNING EDITION OF the New York Post said it all: “Today’s the Day!” On October 3, 1956, Yankees fans awoke and tuned to WMGM radio, the team’s home station, eager for the latest reports about the Subway Series. The Weather Bureau predicted a perfect day for baseball: sunny, clear skies, and temperatures in the low sixties. In coffee shops and diners throughout the city, baseball fans debated the strengths and weakness of the Yankees and Dodgers over breakfast. In Brooklyn, officials prepared for the president’s thirteen-car motorcade. Ike was expected to land at La Guardia Airport around 11:30 a.m. Unlike his opening-day appearance in Washington, Dwight Eisenhower’s visit to New York a month before the election was well publicized in advance. His entire route was published in the city’s newspapers, a tactic designed to generate enthusiasm for Eisenhower in New York and link him to the prestige of the World Series.17
Two buses of reporters and photographers, dozens of police motorcycles, and three secret service vehicles followed Eisenhower’s caravan from La Guardia to Queens and then over the Interboro Parkway into the Democratic enclaves of Brooklyn. Motoring along Bushwick Avenue, Ike stood in the open-top car, looking resplendent in his brown suit, smiling and waving his fedora as schoolchildren waved back and shouted, “Root for the Dodgers!”18
By noon, an hour before the opening pitch, animated crowds had descended on Ebbets Field. Streams of people scrambled up the cobblestone slope of Bedford Avenue. Once again they looked at the familiar features of the stadium: the redbrick building, with its distinguished arched windows, looked like an old warehouse. Eager fans pushed their way through the turnstiles into the rotunda entrance. The scent of beer, cigars, and Stahl-Meyer frankfurters met them in the grand marble lobby.
From the grandstands spectators looked out over the greenest grass in Brooklyn and a reddish-brown dirt infield outlined in bright white chalk. In the lower boxes, fans packed into narrow seats, close enough to the field that they could see the expressions on the players’ faces. In right field, the une
ven wall featured a manual scoreboard and a forty-foot-high screen. Colorful advertisements decorated the lower wall. Abe Stark’s clothing store (“Hit Sign, Win Suit”), Esquire boot polish, GEM razor blades, Van Heusen shirts, and the Brass Rail Restaurant paid for, and presumably profited from, the famous billboards. Out in left and center field, spectators squeezed into the bleachers, sitting on wooden planks. With the left-field line 343 feet and center field 398 feet from home, the Dodgers’ powerful right-hand batters had no trouble hitting home runs. And since the right-field foul pole stood only 297 feet from home, left-handed hitters frequently pulled the ball over the Schaefer Beer sign onto Bedford Avenue.19
Shortly after 12:30 p.m., President Eisenhower’s limo entered through the center-field gate. More than 34,000 fans rose to their feet as the Fourteenth Regiment band played “Hail to the Chief.” Five members of Ike’s cabinet joined him, including Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. So too did Mayor Robert Wagner, Governor Averill Harriman, and former president Herbert Hoover. Even the Duke of Windsor—the former King Edward VIII—made an appearance. Casey Stengel and Dodgers manager Walter Alston greeted the president at home plate. Then Eisenhower shook hands with Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick, the presidents of the National and American leagues, club owners Dan Topping and Walter O’Malley, and Brooklyn borough president John Cashmore. Eisenhower grinned as he shook hands with every player on the Yankees and Dodgers. For the first time since 1936, when Franklin Roosevelt campaigned for reelection, a president was attending the World Series. But now television offered Americans around the country an opportunity to actually see him celebrating the Great American Game.20
A Season in the Sun Page 23