Larsen knew he was in trouble the moment Hodges hit the ball. He figured it had a chance to at least reach the warning track near the outfield fence, and like everyone else he wondered about the condition of Mantle’s leg. Mickey quickly backpedaled, pivoted, and sprinted toward the left-center-field wall, his head up, eyes tracking the ball. As it began dropping, he extended his left arm, fast approaching the fence. Mel Allen described the drama for his radio listeners: “Mantle digging hard. Still going… How about that catch?!” Running full speed, Mickey somehow managed to stab the ball. It was, he said later, the best catch he ever made. The remarkable feat seemed to answer all the questions about his health.42
By the end of the seventh inning, with the Yankees leading by a slim 2–0 margin, everyone in the stadium knew that Larsen had an opportunity to do something never done before. Pitching a perfect game—“27 up, 27 down,”—meant tossing nine complete innings without allowing a player on base and winning. Prior to 1956, only four pitchers had ever tossed a perfect game and all in the regular season, the last in 1922 when the Chicago White Sox’s Charlie Robertson faced the Detroit Tigers. But no pitcher had ever completed a no-hitter in the World Series, let alone a perfect game. Before Game Five began, the odds that Larsen would throw a perfect game were 76,000 to 1. He had a better chance of being hit by a car as he crossed the street on his way to the stadium.43
In the Yankees’ dugout Larsen’s teammates avoided sitting next to him. “By then,” he later said, “the guys on the bench wouldn’t even look at me.” Mel Allen struggled to explain to radio listeners that Larsen so far had pitched a perfect game without actually using the term. Baseball’s superstitious culture frowned upon anyone acknowledging what everyone was thinking: if Larsen could protect his flawless outing, it would be the greatest pitching performance in history. Remarkably, between innings as he smoked a cigarette in the dugout, he turned to Mantle and asked, “Wouldn’t it be something if I a pitched two more innings with a no-hitter?” Mantle didn’t answer, staring at him as if he were a martian, and then walked away.44
Returning to the field in the eighth, Don began to feel added pressure. “It’s funny how lonely you feel on the mound at a time like that,” he said later. Toeing the rubber, his heart pounding, his arm felt heavier. Narrowing his focus on Yogi Berra’s signs, the moment distracted him. The crowd hummed, and he heard a ringing noise in his ears. He could feel the eyes of every man, woman, and child in the stadium fixed on him. He thought about his parents watching on television. “The more I thought about it,” he said, “the more my hands began to sweat.”45
After retiring the side in the eighth, Larsen took the mound for one final inning and prayed. He stood three outs away from accomplishing something that Walter Johnson, Christy Matthewson, Cy Young, and all the other greats never had. Arthur Daley suggested that with each pitch the tension in the stadium grew like a red-faced boy blowing up a balloon. At any moment it might pop. Before the inning began, Yogi patted him on the back. “They’re still in the game,” he reminded Larsen. “Get the first guy. That’s the main thing.”46
Standing in center field directly behind Larsen, Mantle felt his knees shaking. “I kept praying the ball wouldn’t be hit to me,” he confessed. As the afternoon sun began fading, shadows fell across the field, making it difficult for Mantle to spot the ball. Seeing Carl Furillo approach the batter’s box, Larsen muttered, “Throw strikes.” “Throw strikes,” he repeated. Behind the plate Berra tried distracting Furillo. “This guy’s got good stuff, huh?” Furillo glared at him. “Yeah, not bad,” he said. After fouling off two pitches, Furillo took a ball and fouled two more. Then he popped out to right fielder Hank Bauer.47
Larsen took off his cap, wiped the sweat from his forehead, and took a deep breath. Two outs to go.
Next up: Roy Campanella. On the first pitch Larsen threw a meaty fastball. Campy frightened the crowd when he connected on a long fly, but it bent foul into the upper-left-field stands. Larsen shrugged it off and snapped a curveball on the next pitch. Campanella bit, dribbling a slow grounder to Billy Martin for an easy out.
Two down, one to go.
Bouncing on their feet, the crowd clapped and cheered, in a state of near rapture. Again, Larsen turned his back to the plate, removed his cap and dabbed the sweat from his brow. He picked up the resin bag, tossed it a few times, covering his right hand in a fine powder, and then wiped his hand on his pants.
Pinch-hitting for Sal Maglie, Dale Mitchell, a left-handed reserve outfielder, was the Dodgers’ final hope. Anxious, Mantle’s mind teetered between fear and focus. “Please don’t hit it to me,” he thought. He worried that Mitchell, a slashing hitter, might flip a low, looping fly in front of him. But he was also concerned that if he moved any closer toward home, Mitchell might line one right over his head. Uncertain, he stayed put. Calling the game for the Dodgers, Vin Scully remarked, “Yankee Stadium is shivering in its concrete foundations right now.”48
Larsen’s first pitch, low and outside, missed the plate. The crowd groaned when the umpire called it a ball. Berra signaled for a slider. Larsen delivered strike one. Mitchell swung at the next pitch. Strike two. Then Mitchell fouled a curveball. Larsen took a deep breath and fired another fastball. Mitchell began his swinging motion but checked it.
“Strike three!” the umpire shouted.
It didn’t matter that Mitchell thought the ball was well off the plate. The game was over. The crowd erupted. Yogi Berra thrust his right arm into the air, raising the ball like a trophy, and darted toward the mound, leaping into Larsen’s arms. The entire Yankee team mobbed them. Fans flooded the field, celebrating with the players.49
Don Larsen had entered the record books. It was, Arthur Daley noted, “akin to catching lightning in a bottle.” Soon, it seemed that everyone in New York was hailing him as the hero of the series, “the imperfect man” who “pitched the perfect game.” Yet the following morning, when fans opened up the pages of the sports section expecting to read all about Larsen’s gallant performance, they discovered that his estranged wife had filed a complaint with a Bronx court claiming that since their separation he had failed to pay alimony. Vivian Larsen’s lawyer told the press that Don had deserted her. “While this baseball hero is enjoying the luxuries of life and the plaudits of the public,” he charged, “he is subjecting his fourteen-month-old baby girl and his wife to the pleasures of a starvation existence.” Larsen, however, swore that the marriage existed “in form only” for the sake of the child. They never even lived together, he said. If the Yankees won the World Series, however, he would have no trouble paying alimony. Each player on the winning team figured to receive nearly $10,000.50
THE YANKEES HAD WON three straight home games and needed only one more victory at Ebbets Field to win the series. For all the attention justly accorded to Larsen, Mickey Mantle had played a decisive role in the outcome of Game Five. His miraculous catch preserved the perfect game, and his home run, Robert Creamer argued, “cost Maglie the ball game. In all probability, it also cost the Dodgers the Series.”51
Thanks to Mantle and Larsen, everyone—even the Yankees themselves—seemed to think that the series was over. Pitcher Tommy Byrne admitted later, “I think Don’s perfect game may have actually hurt us a little bit. It was such an emotional thing with everyone jumping and yelling and congratulating Don that it seemed like we had just won the World Series. And some of us may have forgotten that we hadn’t won anything yet.”52
After losing Game Five to the Yankees, Jackie Robinson could sense that the end was near. In the winter of his career, he realized that if the Dodgers did not win one more game, his playing days could be over. But he wasn’t giving up just yet. In the bottom of the tenth inning of a scoreless pitching duel between the Dodgers’ Clem Labine and the Yankees’ Bob Turley, Robinson proved that he had one last heroic moment left. With two men on and two outs, he stepped to the plate against Turley, who had already struck out ten Dodgers. After fouling the first pitch
into the seats along the third base line, Jackie smacked a fastball into left field. As the ball sailed over Enos Slaughter’s outstretched glove, Jim Gilliam rounded third and crossed home plate. The Flatbush faithful exploded with joy, watching the Dodgers swarm Jackie, slapping him on the back and head.53
The Dodgers lived to play another day, as the Yankees mourned another loss at Ebbets Field. “Our clubhouse,” Mantle recalled, “was like a morgue.” Hardly anyone spoke. On the quiet bus ride back to the Bronx, Billy Martin sat next to Casey Stengel, imploring him to replace Slaughter with Elston Howard, who had just returned from the hospital, recovering from strep throat. Slaughter had misplayed Robinson’s drive in the tenth inning, Martin thought, and cost the Yanks the game. “If you’re going to keep playing that fucking National League bobo out there,” Martin complained, “we’re going to blow this series. You better put Elston out there.” And, he added, “you better get Skowron’s ass back on first base.”54
An eavesdropping reporter could not believe that a ballplayer would challenge the manager’s authority the way that Martin had. But Billy knew how to push Stengel’s buttons. “You think you know the Old Man that well?” the reporter asked. Grinning, Martin replied, “I’ll pick the lineup for you tomorrow.”55
A YEAR EARLIER THE Brooklyn Dodgers became the second team in history to lose the first two games of the World Series and nevertheless go on to win the championship. In 1921, when the series was best-of-nine, the New York Giants lost the first two games to the Yankees, then won five of the next six. However, in October 1956, the Yankees did not have the luxury of three more games. They had to win now. Their chances of success looked bleak. Going back to the 1955 World Series, they had lost six consecutive games on the Dodgers’ home turf.
Casey Stengel worried that the cigar box that was Ebbets Field turned fly balls into home runs. So he decided to start Johnny Kucks. It was a risk, Stengel realized. Kucks had not won a game since Labor Day and had struggled in two relief appearances against the Dodgers. Yet Stengel figured that Kucks, in his words, could “throw ground balls,” which meant that he could prevent the Dodgers from hitting fly balls with a chance of leaving the park. But not even Stengel was sure that it was the right move. When Kucks trotted out to the mound in the first inning, he could see Whitey Ford and Tom Sturdivant warming up on the sidelines.56
If Stengel doubted his decision to play Kucks, Billy Martin had full confidence in the advice he had given his boss. Filling out his lineup card, Casey penciled in Moose Skowron at first base and replaced Enos Slaughter in left field with Elston Howard. Perhaps, Stengel thought, Skowron and Howard could make a difference against Don Newcombe, who had pitched miserably in Game Two. The Yanks didn’t realize that Newk was pitching with an aching elbow that made it difficult for him to throw a curveball. Not that it mattered much anyway. The Yanks’ strategy was simple: sit on his fastball and let ’em rip.57
The Bronx Bombers turned Game Seven into batting practice. In the first inning Yogi Berra stroked a two-run homer into deep right field. Then he hit another two-run blast off Newcombe in the third inning. In the fourth, Howard, Martin’s preferred left fielder, blasted a home run over the right-field scoreboard, giving the Yankees a 5–0 lead. Walter Alston had seen enough. Newcombe lumbered off the field, his head down, hiding the shame on his face, while all of Brooklyn booed. In the press box, Red Smith heard a wisecrack: “Calling all parking lot attendants.”58
Skowron didn’t disappoint Martin either. With the bases loaded in the seventh inning, he began walking toward the plate when Stengel whistled at him. Moose was certain that the skipper was going to bench him for a pinch hitter. But Stengel simply had some final instructions: “I want you to try to hit the ball to right field. Stay out of the double play.” Skowron nodded. If the Dodgers had any chance of surviving the Yankees’ assault, Brooklyn reliever Roger Craig had to force Moose into a groundout. When Craig fired a first-pitch fastball, Skowron swung hard and hammered it over the left-field fence, finishing his swing with one hand. The home run sealed the game.59
The Yankees slaughtered the Dodgers 9–0. “They just beat the hell out of us,” Alston admitted after the game. In the Yankee clubhouse, the players celebrated with champagne and beer, hooting and hollering. Although the final game wasn’t as competitive as the series itself, the Yankees’ comeback, Dick Young wrote in the New York Daily News, was “one of the most amazing turnabouts in memory.” How exactly did the Yankees do it? Dominant pitching and power hitting. Johnny Kucks’s brilliant shutout performance made him the fifth consecutive Yankee starter to pitch a complete game. The Dodgers scored just one run in the final three contests. The Yankees, on the other hand, battered the Dodgers, pounding twelve home runs.60
Throughout the city, New Yorkers saluted the Bronx Bombers. In a time of seemingly rapid social and cultural changes, the Yankees’ World Series victory—their seventh in ten seasons—bespoke stability and consistency. The editors at the New York Herald-Tribune suggested that the Yankees’ crown made “one think that the ways of normalcy are coming back into life, that things haven’t changed as much as one sometimes thinks they have changed.”61
Looking back at the 1950s through the lens of nostalgia, many Americans believe that the decade was a time of innocence, an era when baseball mirrored a country with few problems. But that isn’t true. In reality the Cold War exacerbated social and political tensions. In the atomic age, people lived in fear of nuclear attack, harbored paranoia about Communist spy rings, and submitted to periodic air raid drills. Americans questioned the security of the country’s most important institutions: the government, the military, and the schools. Yet, in troubled times, Mickey Mantle and the Yankees restored faith—at least in parts of New York—in another institution: baseball. The Yankees’ triumph reminded their fans that the National Pastime remained sacred and sound, immune to and untouched by the outside forces that plagued the country. “A world beset by doubts, shifts, and uncertainties,” the New York Herald-Tribune editors accurately noted, “may take some small comfort in the knowledge that at least it can still count on the Yankees.”62
Mickey Mantle wished that he had played better in the World Series. Although he only had six hits in twenty-four at bats—a .250 average—he clubbed three home runs. Plus he had made crucial plays in the outfield. What mattered most, though, was that the Yankees won. Even if he had not played up to his impossibly high standards, it was still the perfect ending to his perfect season.
Over the winter New Yorkers would forget Mickey’s World Series batting average. But they would remember the timeliness of his home run in Game Five and his remarkable stab that preserved Don Larsen’s perfect game. Most importantly no one would forget how the Yankees took back the crown that the Dodgers had usurped a year earlier. “The Yankees,” Jerry Mitchell concluded in the New York Post, “grabbed the championship of the world from the Dodgers like an aristocrat snatching his wallet back from a bum.”63
“Now batting, Mickey Mantle.” When an announcer uttered those four words, anticipation pulsed through spectators. With him standing at the plate the possibilities seemed endless. He might hit a tape-measure homer or strike out with a body-twisting swing. No player of his generation created such great expectations. Courtesy of the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
EPILOGUE
The Last Snapshot
“It is natural to believe in great men. If the companions of our childhood should turn out to be heroes, and their condition regal, it would not surprise us.”
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON, “Uses of Great Men,” 1849
By the end of 1956, Mickey Mantle, only twenty-five years old, had transcended baseball. Sportswriters crowned him simply “the Hero.” A living legend, Mickey was, Gerald Holland wrote in Sports Illustrated, “everybody’s dream miraculously come to life.” Holland described him as a character in a Ring Lardner story, the unsophisticated rube who “left the country boy far behind,” transformed by his deeds on the di
amond and overcoming “his physical handicaps.”1
Mantle could do it all, Holland wrote. He “could run with the speed of a jack rabbit; he could throw strikes to home plate from deep in the outfield; a switch-hitter, he could blast a ball farther than any man who ever lived. He was Elmer the Great,” Lardner’s talented but gullible ballplayer from a midwestern hamlet, an innocent man who loved his hometown sweetheart yet also lusted for a Hollywood starlet. In many ways, his story fit Lardner’s script, except the public only saw the Hero, unblemished by temptation and weakness.2
Playing baseball in the nation’s first city, he had become a brand: home run king, Yankee icon, president of Mickey Mantle Enterprises, television personality, and banquet speaker. “He was now,” Holland noted, “public property.” Millions of kids worshipped him, imitated him, and dreamed that someday they could be him. That meant that he couldn’t swear in public, lose his temper on the field, argue with umpires, or embarrass the Yankees, his family, or the millions of parents who placed him on a pedestal. “We fathers can only do so much,” a man told him. “It is up to you to set the example for our kids.”3
Whether he liked it or not, Mickey Mantle starred in a feature role as the Hero, America’s most beloved sports figure. But the Hero, Ring Lardner understood, was a work of fiction.
A Season in the Sun Page 25