When Mantle hit a ball that spring, Henrich thought, it was often like he was hitting a golf ball. His home runs seemed longer and more majestic each day. And so as the Yankees moved north and west through California, Mantle began to hit as no rookie had ever hit before, home run after home run, drives that were soon to be known as tape-measure drives. Bolstered by the news reports from the camp, the crowds grew ever larger, and it was said that when the tour was over, the Yankees had played in spring training before more than 500,000 people, an astonishing figure. It was all about Mantle, about people wanting to see this amazing rookie hit one of his awesome drives. Even the players gathered when he took batting practice every day, and they were as awed as the people in the seats.
Wherever they played that spring, someone would point to a place where some player had hit the longest home run ever, and Mantle would proceed to hit one even longer. The consensus was that the longest one he hit came during a game with the University of Southern California, at the USC field. It was the longest home run that Tom Henrich had ever seen. Mantle hit it to right field, and it seemed to jump off the bat, and because the fence was made of wire, the fans were able to see where it landed. It was, thought Henrich, the length of two complete home runs—at least six hundred feet. Jerry Coleman thought it made the rest of the hits in the game look like those of Little Leaguers. Henrich, who had grown up on the mythic deeds of Gehrig, Ruth, and Foxx, thought mythic deeds always belonged to those who had gone before; now, right in front of him, this kid who was almost young enough to have been his son was entering not just the book of baseball records but the world of baseball myth.
It had all been too much for Mantle. He was “the Phenom.” It was Stengel who gave him the nickname that spring. My Phenom, he called Mantle to reporters, a name that Mantle hated. He did not like all the attention, particularly when he had yet to play in a big-league game, and yet to earn those raves. That pressure to be the greatest ever was far more than any young player wanted or needed. He came to the big city carrying his meager belongings in a straw suitcase (actually, he said, it was not even a straw suitcase, it was just a sack). “What a hayseed,” Whitey Ford remembered thinking the first time he saw Mantle. Even when he went out and got better clothes, he was still awkward. Taken out to dinner by his teammates on one of his first days in New York, he had watched them order shrimp cocktail and then admitted that he had never seen a shrimp before. In an early interview with Joe Trimble of the Daily News, Mantle was scared to death and apparently irritated Trimble with the limited nature of his answers. Trimble later wrote that Mantle was “a hillbilly in a velvet suit.” To Dan Daniel he was a kid “in a bad haircut whose sports coat barely covered his wrists.” The image of a hick stayed with him for quite a while and, his friends thought, caused him a fair amount of pain when he was young. Later on, he was good at making fun of the clothes he wore back then—the loud sports jackets, the cowboy boots and blue jeans, which were not then in fashion—and he liked to tell of how Hank Bauer, one of his first roommates, had taken him out to buy several suits at a local store favored by Yankee players.
It was, he said years later, a difficult orientation. He had been painfully shy at first, essentially still a high school kid who, in his own words, was afraid to smoke in front of his father. There was one memorable game in which he struck out again and again against Walt Masterson, a shrewd pitcher then with Boston who had given Ted Williams fits when he was with Washington. Masterson started Mantle high, just around the letters, and then threw him ever higher pitches, which Mantle kept chasing until finally the pitches were far out of the strike zone and almost unreachable. That first season the Yankees realized they had not done him any favors with that huge buildup, and Stengel soon called him in and told him they were going to send him back to the minors so that he could regain his eye. Both Stengel and Mantle were in tears. “Don’t get down on yourself,” Stengel said. “We want you to get your confidence and your timing back.” They sent him to Kansas City, which was still their Triple A farm club, and, at first, still feeling the pressure there, he did badly—one hit in twenty-two at bats for the Blues. He called his father in tears, and Mutt Mantle drove up to see him. Mickey, desperate now, told his father everything was going wrong, but Mutt Mantle had little sympathy. He had worked all his life in the lead and zinc mines, like his father before him, and his baseball experience was restricted to a semipro league called the Lead and Zinc League, where, as his son would later say, they played for a keg of beer afterward. Mutt Mantle started throwing his son’s belongings into a suitcase. “What are you doing?” the boy asked. “I’m taking you home,” Mutt Mantle said. “I thought I raised a man, but you’re nothing but a coward.” So Mickey stopped feeling sorry for himself, got his eye back, and hit .361 for Kansas City before being recalled to New York in August.
A few weeks later, he found himself playing in his first World Series game. There was noise and pressure everywhere, and countless strangers, who seemed to know him, would come up to him and tell him what they expected from him in the coming days. It was all too much for him. In desperation he knocked on the door of Tom Greenwade’s hotel room. Though Greenwade was out, Mrs. Greenwade was there, and Mantle asked if he might come in and just sit quietly for a while.
8
AS THE ST. LOUIS Cardinals prepared to leave their camp in Florida, Barney Schultz, in the spring of what was to be his twentieth season in professional baseball, was told that he was going to be assigned to the Cardinal Triple A farm club in Jacksonville. For most men this would have been a terrible blow, for it seemed to mark, once and for all, the end of his major-league career. He had been optimistic about sticking with the big-league club, because he felt he had pitched well after being traded to them in mid-season in 1963. But any disappointment he felt was buffered by the rest of the offer—the Cardinals said that they hoped he would stay with the organization and eventually become a pitching coach either in St. Louis or with one of the farm clubs. In the meantime, he would begin the season as both a relief pitcher and a pitching coach for Jacksonville. The Cardinals, Schultz thought, were being eminently fair—his salary would remain the same. The more he thought about the prospect, the more it pleased him, because it meant that he could continue a career in professional baseball, which was the one thing he loved, and the only thing he knew. He was thirty-seven years old, and he had been in baseball ever since he had graduated from high school in 1944 at the age of seventeen. He was best described as a journeyman: of his previous nineteen seasons, some part of five had been spent in the big leagues. He had a total of 32 big-league decisions to his credit—17 wins and 15 defeats. He was literally king of the road, for among other cities and towns, he had played in Hagerstown, Maryland, Rock Hill, South Carolina, Terre Haute, Indiana, Macon, Georgia, Schenectady, New York, Urica, New York, Denver, Colorado, Omaha, Nebraska, and Charleston, West Virginia. He loved it all, and he was filled not with disappointment that his career had not been more brilliant, but rather with wonder that an ordinary man like himself, with something of a lame arm, had salvaged enough ability for a full career doing what he loved. He was grateful to have been able to share in the friendship and camaraderie that was at the heart of a baseball season. It was, he thought, a life to be proud of: “Barney,” a friend once told him, “millions and millions of American boys grow up with one dream—playing in the big leagues, and you’re one of the handful who actually did it—the handful out of millions.”
By 1964, he was aware that he was different from many of the young players now coming into the game, whose expectations both of what they were going to accomplish and of how much money they were going to make were so much greater than his; for much of his career he had made three thousand or four thousand dollars a season. The truth was that his own career had been virtually over before it started. In 1945, in his second year in professional baseball, he was still a hard-throwing young right-hander with Wilmington in the Phillies’ organization. Some fifty years late
r, he remembered with stunning clarity the fateful night when Wilmington played Lancaster. It was hot and muggy and he was more than a little tired. In the seventh inning he faced Nellie Fox, soon to have an exceptional career as a major-leaguer. Worn down by the heat, Schultz did what many young pitchers do when they are tired—he reached back and tried to throw too hard, and something happened to his arm. The next day he could not even tie his shoelaces and a roommate had to do it for him. Medical treatment in those days, especially in the minor leagues, was primitive. If an injured player was lucky, he might get a rubdown. What he had probably done, Schultz decided years later, was tear the rotator cuff in his pitching arm, which was perhaps the worst thing that could happen to a pitcher until the miracles of modern surgery began to help in the seventies. It was usually a career-ending injury. He was told by the Phillies’ organization to rest his arm in the off-season, and he did, but the following season he could barely get the ball to home plate. Gradually his arm loosened up during spring training, but it was obvious to Schultz that he would never again be a power pitcher. If he was to have a career, it would have to be one of throwing junk, particularly a knuckleball that had been taught to him by a neighbor. That kind of career could exist in an era when there were lots of minor leagues and the money paid to minor-league ballplayers was minimal. It was a life of finding temporary housing in new cities from which he would soon be gone, of figuring out how to live and save some money on a tiny salary, and of riding beat-up buses over long distances to the next town to play under lights that never would have been approved by any association of optometrists.
In 1955, the summer he turned twenty-nine, Schultz reached the big leagues with the Cardinals, as a reliever. He pitched in 19 games that season, always in relief, for a total of 29.2 innings. His earned run average was a hefty 7.89, and it did not surprise him greatly that the next year he was sent back to the minor leagues for four more years. In 1959, he made another appearance in the majors, this time as a reliever with Detroit (13 games, 18.1 innings pitched, and an earned run average of 4.42). Thereupon he went back to the minors again. That was pretty much the story of his life, but Barney Schultz not only survived, he persevered. It was far better than the alternatives; he had once taken a winter job working in a plant, and the people who ran it asked him to come back as a foreman. It might well have paid him more than he was making as a minor-league pitcher, but the work did not interest him. Baseball was what he loved. When he was told that he would eventually become a pitching coach, it was more or less how he hoped his career would end up.
As Schultz started the season pitching and coaching for Jacksonville, it was, he thought, a nice moment in his life. He was pitching well that spring. He was primarily a knuckleball pitcher and now he had his knuckler down cold. He could almost always throw it for strikes. In the previous season the Cubs had traded him to the Cardinals, and he had done what was probably the best pitching of his career. He had appeared in a total of 39 games, had won 3 and lost none; even more important, his earned run average was down to 3.59. He had become the classic knuckleball pitcher—no power, but rubber-armed—and the fluttering, dancing ball he threw was the bane of good hitters and catchers alike. (By this time Schultz brought his own catcher’s mitt to the park for the catcher—it was more like a first baseman’s glove than a true catcher’s mitt.) Managers loved him, though, because he could pitch every day.
Just how fragile the world of baseball was was brought home to both the Cardinals and the Dodgers on the night of April 22. Sandy Koufax was matched against Curt Simmons, who had taken to calling himself “the poor man’s Koufax.” Three times in 1963 Koufax had beaten Simmons, including the 4-0 shutout he had thrown during the decisive late-season sweep of the Cardinals, one of eleven shutouts he had pitched that season. The night before the game, at the annual dinner of the Knights of the Cauliflower, which was an extended group of Gussie Busch’s partying pals, the Cardinals’ owner publicly challenged Simmons to beat Koufax this year. If he did not, noted Jack Buck, the broadcaster who was emceeing the dinner, the Anheuser-Busch beer truck might have a new left-handed driver.
The Dodgers came into Busch Stadium on a six-game losing streak. Koufax was having trouble with his left arm and was scheduled to have it X-rayed when he returned to Los Angeles. It was not a happy evening for him. He got the first two batters out, but Bill White went after a wild pitch and managed to reach first as the ball got away from the catcher. Ken Boyer walked on four pitches, and then Charlie James, one of the young players vying for a regular job in the outfield, homered. Koufax finished the inning, but then Walter Alston pulled him from the game. Koufax had not wanted to come out—his arm was obviously hurting him, and he kept shaking his head at John Roseboro, the Dodger catcher, whenever Roseboro called for the curve. Later, the Cardinal doctor examined him and said that he had an inflammation of the left elbow and a slight muscle tear in his left forearm. His arm had apparently been bothering him since spring training, but Koufax thought he could pitch through it. He flew back alone to Los Angeles, ahead of the team, and there the Dodger team doctor gave him a cortisone shot. There was talk of his going on the disabled list. His left arm was not merely an arm; for the Dodgers, for better or worse, it was a season. Curt Simmons won the game, 7-6, even though he gave up a mammoth home run to Frank Howard. He had finally gone against Koufax, albeit Koufax with a bad arm, and he had won. “The boys,” he said of the Cardinal hitters, “kept me off the beer truck. It was close though—it was parked just outside.” The Dodgers were now 1-7. With Koufax and Drysdale on the mound in every big series, they sometimes had seemed invincible to the other National League teams. With Koufax possibly injured, they suddenly seemed quite vulnerable.
9
WITH KOUFAX INJURED, IT was possible that the hardest throwing pitcher in the league at that moment was Bob Gibson of the Cardinals, just reaching his full power that season. In late May, Gibson threw a masterpiece at home against the Cubs. He had won, 1-0, while striking out twelve men. The Cubs had gotten just four hits off him. He had not walked anyone. Gibson had been bothered by a stiff shoulder earlier in the season, and he was having trouble warming up, so he had polished his car before coming to the park in order to loosen up his right shoulder, and it seemed to work. As the game wore on, he only got stronger, and he retired the last seventeen men in a row. In the ninth inning, he faced and struck out Ron Santo and Billy Williams, and it seemed, said his manager, Johnny Keane, as if he were saying, “Hurry up and get out of there—I want to go home.” His teammate Dick Groat said he had seen him display that kind of power only once before, in a game that Gibson pitched against Pittsburgh when Groat was still a Pirate. The Pirates had gotten three hits off him—two on sliders, one on a curve, none on a fastball. “I felt that for one given night Gibson was the fastest pitcher I ever faced,” Groat said. Questioned by reporters after the game, Ron Santo of the Cubs said he thought that Gibson was now as fast as Koufax at certain times, and that Gibson’s ball had far more movement than that of the other great power pitcher of the league—Jim Maloney of the Reds.
Gibson was talented, to be sure, with a high-velocity fastball and a very good slider, but it was his competitive fire, his intensity, and his willingness to fight every batter on every pitch that came to distinguish him. His ability in baseball did not exist apart from the rest of his being; rather, his ability as a player was an extension of his will as a man. When opposing teams prepared to battle Gibson (and that was the right word: battle), they were taking on not just Gibson the pitcher, but Gibson the man.
If anyone knew and had mastered the uses of adversity, it was Bob Gibson. He was born during the Depression in Omaha; his father died three months before he was born, and he was one of seven children. His mother worked in a commercial laundry. The family lived in a four-room shack on the north side of the city; as a boy he was bitten on the ear by a rat. He was small and sickly as a child, and nearly died once from pneumonia. Later, the Gibson family moved t
o a government housing project, and for the first time they had heat and electricity. His mother, a woman of great courage and determination, somehow managed to make enough money so that there were always food and clothes for her children.
Gibson was a man of unusual self-discipline. That came from his family, especially his brother Josh, the eldest. Fifteen years older than Bob, his legal name was LeRoy, but he was nicknamed Josh. He was a serious, ambitious man, with a master’s degree in history. He had wanted to teach history, but given the ceiling on what an educated black man could do in those days, he had to settle for a job in a meat-packing house. He had always wanted to coach at a school or college, and he ended up coaching at the local black YMCA, where he touched many lives, most notably that of his younger brother. If he was hard and demanding on the youths he coached in those days, it was because he knew that the way was harder for them, that it was easier for them to quit, and that they had to be better than whites at all things. He was hardest of all on his younger brother, because Josh Gibson saw Bob’s natural ability early on: he pushed him not merely to be good, but to be excellent.
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