by Marty Appel
The neighborhood would follow suit as the “Yankee blue” was applied to the subway station and, in 1972, even the neighboring Macombs Dam Bridge. The ticket kiosks had blue roofs—although that was the choice of Dr. Frank Stanton, CBS’s president. Dorfsman preferred a candy-stripe look.
The dark blue became the “team color,” although the team’s jackets, caps, and sweatshirts had been dark blue for years.
New graphics were selected for signage and a “telephonic Hall of Fame” was installed where fans could lift a telephone receiver and hear great moments in Yankee history. One such moment, hastily added, would be Mantle’s five hundredth home run, belted in Yankee Stadium on May 14, 1967, which made him only the sixth player in history to reach that milestone.
Burke arranged for the stadium offices to move to Yankee Stadium, shutting down 745 Fifth Avenue and building offices for everyone along the 157th Street side of the park.
An enhanced sound system was installed at the stadium with a top CBS sound engineer, Paul Veneklassen, overseeing its quality. A deal was struck with Lowrey in 1965 to add live organ music, and the organist was Toby Wright for two years, with Eddie Layton coming along in 1967 to play a Hammond. Eddie played for the CBS soap operas in the afternoon and then hustled to Yankee Stadium for night games. Stadium “hostesses” patrolled the stands to look pretty and answer questions.
Burke hired a house photographer, Michael Grossbardt, to shoot every home game and to provide more artistic photography for team publications, some published by CBS-owned Holt, Rinehart & Winston. (Previously, the Yankees would use photographers like David Blumenthal, Luis Requena, Neil Leifer, or Bob Olen and then would ask newspapers or wire services for use of game action photography.) The New Studio was hired to design the annual yearbook, instead of just relying on the printer, Terminal Printing of Hoboken.
Columbia Records recorded a theme song, “Here Come the Yankees,” written by Bob Bundin and Lou Stallman and recorded by a house band, Sid Bass and his Orchestra, with vocals by Mitch Miller’s famous “Sing Along with Mitch” chorus.
They got opera star Robert Merrill to record the national anthem, and, beginning in 1969, he often performed it live, sometimes in his own Yankee uniform with 1½ on the back.
Promotion days proliferated. Aside from Bat Day, Ball Day, and Cap Day, there was Postcard Day, Keychain Day—anything one could imagine, and eventually they were offered to sponsors who added their logos to the products and picked up the cost. Senior Citizens’ Day was added, around the same time that Ladies’ Day disappeared after a few men sued over discrimination.
MacPhail, paying attention to his area, traded Clete Boyer to the Braves for outfielder Bill Robinson, and sent Maris to the Cardinals for third baseman Charlie Smith after the ’66 season. Boyer’s eight years with the Yanks saw him become the best-fielding third baseman in the team’s history.
Smith was a journeyman who was just the best the Yanks could get for Maris at the time. Roger’s skills had faded. He would claim the Yankees had not properly informed him of a hand injury that severely affected his play, and his parting was bitter.
Maris’s injury prevented him from gripping the bat properly. He was in pain. Once Dr. Sidney Gaynor ruled out a broken bone, the front office thought it was taking Maris too long to get back into the lineup. They dropped hints that he might be “jaking it.”
“For three months, everybody questioned if Roger was really hurt,” recalled Al Downing to Maris biographers Tom Clavin and Danny Peary. “That is a long time to be ridiculed. He wanted to play but he just couldn’t hit or throw. The sixties was the last decade before there was any kind of sports medicine. Today they’d do an MRI and it would’ve been taken care of.”
Roger finally saw his own physician and an X-ray revealed a fracture of the hamate bone at the base of the hand. When Roger went to Houk with the evidence, Houk said, “Rog, I might as well level with you. You need an operation on that hand.” As Clavin and Peary wrote, “The words ‘I might as well level with you’ etched themselves in Maris’s brain. He would quote them often over the years to convey his sense of betrayal by Houk and a Yankee organization that had known the severity of his injury but kept it from the press, the fans, and him.”
Maris played two final years for St. Louis, regained his love for baseball, and played in two more World Series before retiring to Florida, where appreciation for his career finally blossomed.
AFTER A WINTER spent fretting over the state of the team, the Yankees played their opening game in Washington in ’67, with President Johnson throwing out the first ball. In the third inning, in his second at-bat, Bill Robinson homered to break a scoreless tie, and the Yanks went on to win 8–0 behind Stottlemyre.
Robinson was a personal favorite of Burke’s. He wanted him to succeed badly. He was tall and rangy, he was black, and he seemed like a good statement for a team “moving in new directions” (wink).
But that was the high point of his season.
The team moved up to ninth place with two more victories than the year before, 72. Robinson never got going: He batted .196 with just six more homers and lost his outfield job to another promising but ultimately disappointing player, Steve Whitaker.
Ford, who had passed Ruffing as the winningest pitcher in Yankee history in 1965, ran out of gas in ’67 and retired.
After breaking the record, Ford won only four more games. One of his last two wins was a shutout against the White Sox, the 45th of his career, and his ERA for his final season was 1.64, but he was getting by on cunning and wile, and at age thirty-eight he wanted to leave with dignity. His .690 career winning percentage was the highest in history for any 200-game winner.
ON 1967 OPENING DAY in New York, a Boston rookie named Bill Rohr had a no-hitter into the ninth when Ellie Howard broke it up with a base hit. Each time the Yankees went to Boston that season, Howard was booed.
On August 3, the Yankees traded him—to Boston! They didn’t get much in return, but they cleared the roster of another aging player and Jake Gibbs, a converted infielder, became their catcher.
Few players have ever been traded so kindly. Praise and affection were heaped on Howard for his Yankee service. He was sent to a nearby team that was going to the World Series. He was essentially promised a job with the Yankees whenever his career ended. (He would indeed return as first-base coach two years later, the first black coach in the league.)
Just the same, Arlene Howard told the media her husband had been treated unjustly. “The Yankees are not the Yankees we knew and loved. It’s a completely different organization,” she said. “I could never get used to mediocrity, and that’s what we have now.” It was another low moment for a team that just couldn’t seem to get it right anymore.
That left only Mickey Mantle from the Stengel years on the ’68 team, and that was where I came in, hired by Bob Fishel to answer Mantle’s fan mail. I had written a letter looking for a summer job and was assigned to an office not far from the clubhouse catching up with about forty cartons of unopened mail. Fishel knew every unanswered letter represented a possible future Mets fan.
There was a sign near my office that said, ABSOLUTELY NO WOMEN BEYOND THIS POINT. That meant the clubhouse was near; the taboo would be broken in 1978 when a court ordered the clubhouses open to all journalists.
That summer, I walked in the outfield to look for the drain on which Mantle tripped in ’51. I was shocked to discover that the outfield wasn’t flat, but contained many small hills and gullies, as you’d find on a golf course. I discovered storage areas in the basement where old trophies and photo blowups were stored. Employees and groundskeepers would bring bag lunches and sit in the stands. It was remarkable what a different feel the park had when it was empty.
Mantle treated me well. He saw right through my scheme of saving up “important mail” to review with him personally. There was no important mail. Everyone just wanted an autographed baseball.
It was sad to watch Mick in what would be
his final season. No announcement was made, but there was a feeling. It was his fourth straight bad year. What was Mickey Mantle doing hitting .238? And who were these teammates? What was he doing batting behind Andy Kosco?
The ’68 team had a shortstop named Gene “Stick” Michael, purchased from the Dodgers, and a third baseman named Bobby Cox from the Braves organization. No one would have thought that there were two future Hall of Famers on that year’s team—Mantle and Cox—but Bobby went on to an illustrious managing career. Cox and Mantle even pulled off a triple play, started by pitcher Joe Verbanic, and it would be the last triple play the Yankees would execute for forty-two years.
Michael went on to one of the most multifaceted careers in history, as player, coach, scout, minor league manager, major league manager, general manager, and special advisor. His later influence would be huge. In the meantime, he’d emerge as the team’s regular shortstop, pairing with Clarke in the middle of the infield for seven years.
Stan Bahnsen was 17–12 and won Rookie of the Year honors, Stottlemyre had a 21-win season, and Roy White became a regular and hit 17 homers.
Mantle hit 18. Much to his disappointment, his lifetime average dropped to .298. His 535th homer became somewhat “notorious” in that Detroit’s Denny McLain, en route to a 31–win season, “grooved” a pitch for him to enable him to break a tie with Jimmie Foxx for third place.
Wrote Red Smith, “When a guy has bought 534 drinks in the same saloon, he’s entitled to one on the house.”
White, a switch-hitter who often choked up, came from Compton, California, where he played sandlot games with a stuffed sock and formed a double-play combination with Reggie Smith. It was hard to believe that he’d briefly been a gang member in L.A. (the Van Dykes), as soft-spoken and polite as he was. Signed by the Yankees in 1962, he was converted to the outfield, played for the Yanks in ’65 and ’66, and then was farmed out to Spokane in 1967, where he could have been forgotten. But he hit .343, returned to New York, and went on to enjoy a fifteen-year career, sticking around long enough for the team’s return to the World Series. He would become one of the most respected players in town and would rank high on many Yankee lifetime offensive charts, including fifth in games played at the time he retired.
The ’68 Yanks finished fifth in the last year of one-division, ten-team baseball, and in the Year of the Pitcher, they scored two runs or fewer in 73 of their 162 games.
FOR 1969, THE centennial of professional baseball, the American League added teams in Seattle and Kansas City (managed by Joe Gordon), the pitching mound was lowered, and Frank Crosetti left the coaching lines after thirty-seven years as a Yankee to join Seattle. Cro was the last link to the Ruth and Gehrig teams.
In Seattle, Crosetti would be joined by Jim Bouton, whose time in New York had also run out, and who would learn a knuckleball and have a second act with the expansion Pilots. (A brawl between the Yankees and the Pilots at the aptly named Sicks Stadium was a memorable moment of the Pilots’ only season.)
The Yankees hoped to coax Mantle into another season, happy to pay him $100,000 just to suit up. He had played first base in his final two years, taking to the position quite nicely once his chronically painful legs made the outfield impossible for him. As his popularity remained high, his skills continued to diminish. “I just can’t hit anymore,” he told Dick Young, who prematurely headlined his retirement months earlier.
As spring training opened in Fort Lauderdale, Mantle made it official at a packed press conference. Despite all the injuries, he left with the most games and most at-bats of any Yankee, and ranked third all-time among everyone in home runs with 536, trailing only Ruth and Willie Mays. He was the greatest switch-hitter in history and the most popular player of his time.
A second Mickey Mantle Day was held on June 8, 1969, beautifully choreographed by Fishel. Important figures in Mickey’s life were present, including George Weiss, Harry Craft, and Tom Greenwade. Mick’s mother, Lovell, was there, but not Stengel, who was still boycotting the Yankees since his firing. Maris’s name was booed when emcee Frank Messer mentioned it.
There was a sustained ovation of ten minutes for Mick, followed by a humble speech delivered without notes. “Today I think I know how Lou Gehrig felt,” he said, recalling the “luckiest man” speech. After, he was driven around the running track in a golf cart by groundskeeper Danny Colletti. A crowd of 60,096 helped make the season attendance 1,067,996, a drop of 118,000 from his last year as a player.
The day was emotional for another reason as well. Mel Allen was invited to introduce Mantle from the dugout. He had been on the field for the Gehrig, Ruth, and DiMaggio days, and now this. (Mel, along with Berra, Weiss, Topping, and Webb, had all been back for Old-Timers’ Day in 1967, a sweet year for reunion.)
BOUTON KEPT A notebook on his season in Seattle, and in collaboration with Leonard Shechter wrote Ball Four, a breakthrough book that spent seventeen weeks on the Times bestseller list, helped by a dressing-down from Commissioner Kuhn for telling tales out of school.
Bouton’s book was considered scandalous for its violation of the so-called code of clubhouse silence, and it was the first time that fans learned that Mickey Mantle was not always the all-American boy. The book made Bouton persona non grata in the Yankee family and throughout all of baseball. But as controversial as the book was, it heralded a new wave of open sportswriting that forever changed how people saw the game. And while Bouton would remain on the outside looking in, many people, including the next generation of sportswriters, claimed to have fallen in love with baseball because of his revelations about the “inner game” going on, the struggle of journeymen to survive, the nightmares over imagined injuries, the appreciation for everything “big league.” (Bouton, a clever entrepreneur, would later copyright the term “Big League” and would use it to market bubble gum and trading cards.)
Ball Four was an appropriate coda for the sixties, when the nation’s core beliefs were in upheaval, along with the Yankees’ place in the standings.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
TO THOSE WHOSE MOOD CHANGED with every Yankee victory and defeat, the years 1965 to 1975 were painful. There is a tendency to lump them together as the “lost years,” a bad memory, an abomination. But there were also millions of fans, born in the early sixties, who got their first exposure to Yankee baseball in this period, and it wasn’t all bad. Unaccustomed to winning every year, these people enjoyed baseball for what it was really intended to be: the national pastime, a team to root for, a recreational diversion from daily life that was a big part of American culture. Each game was a new adventure. There were come-from-behind wins, heartbreaking losses, misplays and great plays. There was the hope behind a fresh rookie or the arrival of a familiar veteran who has a little more left to contribute.
There was still the classic uniform, the inspiring stadium, the great days at the ballgame, or the fun of listening to the playful Phil Rizzuto, the wise Bill White, and the smooth pro Frank Messer broadcast the games.
White, hired in 1971 on the recommendation of Howard Cosell to Burke, was a wonderful foil to Rizzuto, reining him in if he was going too far, chiding him for “thinking like an American Leaguer,” or acknowledging a point well made.
White didn’t care much for the attention on his being the first African-American to broadcast for a team (Jackie Robinson had done network commentary). But Burke convinced him that with the stadium so close to Harlem, he would be a role model for so many kids growing up there, knowing that when they grew up they could do what he was doing. So he accepted it.
And, of course, for fans in Minnesota, Boston, Detroit, Baltimore, and Oakland, there was the joy of celebrating a championship while the Yankees were down, a chance that had rarely come along before. The four-team 1967 pennant race, barely noticed in New York, provided among the most thrilling finishes to a season in the league’s history.
THERE WAS ALSO a growing awareness in baseball that the “industry” could be better marketed. T
o those ends, Kuhn formed the Major League Baseball Promotion Corporation and, working with the Licensing Corporation of America, got into the licensing business in 1968. Burke was named president of the Promotion Corporation, while keeping his day job. At that point, the twenty teams saw team merchandise as not much of a business, but knew they were being “ripped off by a handful of nobodies,” according to Joe Grant of LCA, who said Burke was “paramount to the success of the operation.” And so the teams agreed to share equally under a managed program of granting licenses to legitimate businesses to produce quality merchandise.
Sharing equally seemed fine for the 1968 Yankees, but eventually their merchandise far outsold everyone else’s. Still, they always participated on an equal basis.
In 1969, professional baseball celebrated its centennial and fans voted on their all-time local teams as well as overall all-time teams. For the Yankees, this was the first such measurement since 1950. It came out with an infield of Gehrig at first, Lazzeri at second, Rizzuto at short, and Rolfe at third; an outfield of Ruth, DiMaggio, and Mantle; Dickey catching; and Ruffing and Ford as the righty and lefty pitchers. On the all-time major league team, Gehrig, Ruth, and DiMaggio earned first-team honors, while DiMaggio, Dickey, and Stengel were among the “greatest living.” Babe Ruth was named the greatest player ever, and DiMaggio the greatest living player, an honor he loved and requested whenever he was introduced.
The ’69 Yankees hoped to spring two new heroes on the fans, both homegrown prospects who had been off on military duty and were now ready to take regular positions in the lineup. One, Jerry Kenney, didn’t work out as hoped. The other, Bobby Murcer, would become the most popular Yankee of his time, and a hero to that generation born around the time Maris was breaking the home run record.