Mickey and Willie

by Allen Barra

  About four in the morning, the train made a brief stop in Joplin, Missouri, home of Joe Becker Stadium, built just three years after Rickwood Field in Birmingham. Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, and other great Negro Leaguers had played barnstorming games there, though Willie was too young to have played with them. The ballpark’s lights were still on from the previous night’s game between the Carthage Cubs and the Joplin Miners, which had featured a slugging shortstop named Mickey Mantle.

  * Willie neglected to mention to Mickey that in 1949 the Black Barons, having won the Negro American League pennant the year before, had made enough money to buy a new bus with air conditioning and reclining seats.

  † Most black ball historians are in agreement that fans considered the Negro League World Series second in importance to the All-Star Games, where they could see the best players from all over the country in a single game.

  ‡ In his 1988 autobiography, Mays said this occurred in 1948, but that would have been impossible, as he did not make his Birmingham Black Barons debut until July 4 of that year.

  § Greenwade had been a minor league manager and pitcher and had worked for both the St. Louis Browns and Brooklyn Dodgers, reporting to Branch Rickey in both organizations. Greenwade had some part in the signing of Roy Campanella and possibly Jackie Robinson from the Negro Leagues.

  ‖ Also son of Yankees team president Larry MacPhail, who was fired—or quit, according to which source you read—for a drunken display at the team party after the Yankees won the 1947 World Series.

  a In his early memoirs, Willie was fond of pointing out that when he left New York after the World Series to go home to Alabama, he had not yet learned to drive; he was in fact helping foster his image as an amiable schoolboy. It wasn’t until his 1988 autobiography that he boasted of the convertible he bought with his bonus money.

  6

  “This Is Your Chance”

  One day near the end of June 1949, Mutt Mantle and his oldest son, not yet eighteen years old, drove the nearly three hours from Commerce to Independence, Kansas, the home of the Yankees’ Class-D club in that region. Mickey would talk about how scared and homesick he was, telling Herb Gluck, “I had an empty feeling in my stomach. I was in strange surroundings, didn’t know where I’d sleep or take my meals, and Dad wasn’t going to be around anymore.”1

  Mickey could not have known at the time that it was not Commerce he was homesick for, it was his father. He would be back in Commerce in the fall, but after that he would visit his hometown as seldom as possible. Except for a handful of friends, he felt no attraction for it; since he had been old enough to walk, the only things that held any emotional attachment for him were his family and baseball. And at least, in Independence, he still had baseball.

  When they arrived in Independence that day in June, Mutt and Mickey went to the Darby Hotel and knocked on the door of Harry Craft, the manager of the Independence Yankees. Craft was shaving, but wiped his face clean and shook hands. Mickey’s first impression was not good. Craft struck him as aloof, which was almost certainly because he was comparing him to Mutt and Barney Barnett, the only two figures of authority he had ever really known. Craft was a professional, a company man, and he was also Mickey’s introduction to the world of big-time professional baseball. Though Mickey could not know it at the time, he had a friend in Harry Craft. Craft was the closest thing young Mickey would have to the kind of mentor that Willie Mays had in Piper Davis.

  Born in the little town of Ellisville, Mississippi, Craft had been a ballplayer himself—and not a bad one. In the Southern League one year he hit .341 and played several games at Rickwood Field in Birmingham. He played parts of six seasons in the National League, all with Cincinnati, beginning in 1937 when he was twenty-two. He made the All-Star team in 1939 and 1940, but he was never a star, though he had a reputation as a fine outfielder. (In 1940 he led NL outfielders in fielding percentage at .997.) His career was interrupted by military service in 1942, but that probably worked out well for him, since he had hit just .249 with 10 home runs in 1941 and didn’t figure to get much better.

  Harry’s big professional break came when, out of the service, he managed to get a job in the Yankees organization. He knew young talent when he saw it, and he knew how to nurture it. The Yankees proved to be his ticket to a career in baseball; after his playing days were over, he would manage in the minors and for seven years in the big leagues with three different teams.

  As the three men stood in Craft’s hotel room, Mutt shook Mickey’s hand and mumbled, “This is your chance, son, take care of yourself and give ’em hell.” Mickey started to tear up; Craft, sensing that this was a good moment to jump in, put his hand on the teenager’s shoulder and told him that they had a decent bunch of kids there, most of them around Mickey’s age, and that he would enjoy playing there, adding, “Just keep your nose clean.”2

  Things quickly loosened up. It didn’t take Mickey long to realize that he was surrounded by a bunch of boys with backgrounds similar to his own who were pretty much in the same situation he was in. “It seemed more like high school” than professional baseball. “Somebody always had a car. We’d pile in and shoot over to Pop’s Place, our big social hangout, near the busiest corner in town.”3 It also didn’t take Mickey long to latch on to a potential troublemaker, a third baseman named Lou Skizas, a skirt chaser, card player, and free spirit. “The nervous Greek” Mickey called Skizas, who was a pre-1950s hipster from the streets and alleys of Chicago. One of Mickey’s Commerce pals who paid him a visit in Independence would later size up Skizas perfectly: “He was a poor man’s Billy Martin.”4

  Under Skizas’s addle-brained influence, Mickey lapsed back into adolescent behavior such as waging water-gun fights and throwing food on the team bus; Craft shook his head and clenched his jaw muscles. After a couple of years in the minors, he had already seen enough antics like this to last a lifetime, and he knew to let them roll off his back. Craft tolerated the boys’ rambunctiousness because they played good ball. They won at home and they won on the road. Traveling on the team bus, Mickey would pass through Bartlesville (to play the Pirates), Carthage (the Cubs), Shanute (the Athletics), Pittsburgh (the Browns), Iola (the Indians), and Ponca City (the Dodgers). Mickey would remember the roads they traveled as “long dusty roads with stopovers only to get out and have a bite, take a piss, and climb right back again.”5

  Craft tried to work with Mickey at shortstop but didn’t make much progress. Mantle never did quite learn to plant his feet right and get balance when he threw, and with his powerful arm the ball often wound up in the stands behind the first baseman. (Legend has it that a chicken-wire screen was installed on the right-field side of the stands in the Independence home park to keep spectators from being injured.) The manager had more success with Mickey’s hitting. He couldn’t get him to cut down on his swing—no one would ever succeed at doing that, not even Casey Stengel—but he did preach to him the importance of waiting for the right pitch. On the bases, Craft taught Mickey to run with his head down and watch how outfielders played balls hit in the gaps; see, he told Mickey, how good they are at hitting their cutoff man on long throws. The experience, combined with Mickey’s dazzling speed, began to make him a smart, aggressive base runner. For Mickey to go from first to third or second to home on just about any single was soon taken as a given.

  And as Piper Davis had done with Willie, Craft gave Mickey sound advice on off-the-field behavior. Steve Kraly, Mickey’s roommate at Independence, thought that Craft was “actually like a father to us … he taught us what baseball was really like in the minors. He made us think about what to look forward to if we moved up, he made us think about the game, getting yourself prepared to play better baseball, moving up to better leagues, better traveling, better living.”6

  At the plate, Mantle, not used to the tougher pitching of the Kansas-Oklahoma-Missouri League, was slow out of the gate. After the first week, he began to have serious doubts and actually thought
of going back home. He was, in his words, “wound tight, overanxious—sometimes after a strikeout, feeling frustrated and mad at myself, I’d trot off the field and let loose a vicious kick at a dugout water cooler.” After striking out twice against Independence’s archrival, Carthage, Mickey began what was to become his career-long battle with water coolers, kicking one so hard that a stream of cold water had his teammates jumping out of the dugout. For the rest of his stay with the Yankees, they called him “King of the Broken Water Coolers.”7

  But he matured and finished the season at .313, just two points higher than Willie Mays had hit the same year playing at a similar level of competition against Negro League pitching. In a key game against the Carthage Cubs in front of a sellout crowd, Mickey came up in the ninth inning with the score tied and belted a long drive to center field; Bill Hornsby, son of the great Rogers Hornsby,* chased the ball deep into the center-field pocket, lost it in the lights, and by the time he was able to peg it back into the field Mickey had wowed the crowd by wheeling around the bases and scoring the winning run with an inside-the-park homer.

  Nothing stood in Independence’s way that season. These were kids who intended to play ball for the New York Yankees; they were good, and they knew it. And as the season progressed, they knew it even more. They ended up winning the KOM pro league with a smashing victory over the Pittsburgh Browns. Mickey’s confidence was building, and with it his expectations. When the team bus pulled back into Independence that night, the Yankees were expecting some kind of victory celebration, but it was late, and the townspeople hadn’t yet gotten the news. The streets were dark and quiet. Harry Craft looked around and told his boys to have their own party, right there in the streets, which they proceeded to do. Mickey remembered that Lou Skizas scrambled to the top of the bus and began howling Hank Williams’s great tune, “Long Gone Lonesome Blues,” which Mickey said was “my favorite country song at that time.”†

  The locals began to walk outside to see what all the fuss was about, and Dan Peters, a policeman, began to climb the bus to pull Skizas down. Craft, who knew Peters, put his hand on his shoulder and told him that his boys had just brought glory to Independence by winning the KOM League championship. (Peters hadn’t heard.) The manager diverted the policeman with a beer.

  Though he couldn’t see it right away, Mickey was swiftly moving out of the world of his boyhood. Some of the Independence Yankees’ games were played in the same towns he knew as a Whiz Kid; in Miami, family and friends came out to watch him play, including Nick Ferguson. Earlier in the season, Mickey had told Nick and another pal, Donnie Dodd, to come up and visit him in Independence, trying to convince them to try out for the Yankees. He was sure that Harry Craft would give them a look if they made the trip. Ferguson and Dodd did take a bus up to Independence and hung out with Mickey, but both shied away from a tryout. They had decided on other career paths. Mickey began to realize that he could never go home again.

  But he did go home again, for a while, after his first pro season ended. On his first night back, he surprised Lovell by leaving a stack of tens and twenties—an eye-popping $290 in cash—on the breakfast table. It seemed like nothing about Commerce had changed in the few months he had been away, but everything had changed for him. Mickey didn’t enjoy playing the celebrity and aw-shucks-ed his way through stories about what professional ball was really like and what it felt like to win the league’s championship. He spent a few days hunting quail with his pals around Whitebird and on weeknights drove the Fleetline Chevy into Commerce to see a Gene Autry Western or a cops-and-robbers flick. On Friday nights he took in football games with his friends. He was not, though, in a position to take it easy for the rest of the year, and neither was his family. Mutt was now a ground boss for the Blue Goose Number One mine and was earning a respectable $75 a week. He found Mickey some odd jobs—most of them, fortunately, aboveground—running errands and assisting the electricians. His weekly pay was just under $35, actually a slight increase over what the New York Yankees, the richest team in the major leagues, paid him for finishing the season with their farm team.

  There was also some time for girls. Earlier in the year, while still in high school, he had fallen for a pretty blond-haired, freckled-face girl named Jeanette Holmes, who had the added attraction of a willingness to do his homework. But the relationship between Miss Holmes and Mick Charles (which, his friends say, is what he was calling himself at the time) didn’t go beyond the exchange of a class ring. (Jeannette would later tell David Falkner that “I always wanted his baseball jacket. I would have liked to get that from him.”8) A classmate, Ivan Shouse, set up a date for him with a friend of his sister, a pretty girl named Merlyn Johnson, whom he had met when she was a cheerleader. They were both so shy that on their first date they mostly listened to their friends talk and laugh, saying little to each other.

  In November, the Mantles received a stunning postcard—Mickey was to report to the local draft board for a physical. Father and son looked at each other and shook their heads—life had blindsided them, and it looked as if Mickey’s booming baseball career could be sidetracked indefinitely. A few weeks later, before Christmas, Mickey would get one of the few genuine breaks he ever had when the draft board declared him 4-F because of the osteomyelitis that had nearly cost him a leg three years earlier. That break, though, like nearly all the breaks Mickey ever got, was qualified. Within a couple of years, that classification would bring him so much public scorn that he would wonder if it had been a break at all.

  The holidays passed, spring came, and the promotion that Mutt and Mickey expected did indeed happen. In the spring of 1950, the Yankees assigned Mickey to their huge minor league facilities in the Ozarks, the same place Tom Greenwade had taken him and Mutt the previous June. This time Mickey knew exactly where he would be going when the season started—the Class-C Joplin Miners of the Western Association. There was only one logical step from there, and that was the New York Yankees.

  At exactly the same time, New York Giants owner Horace Stoneham was deciding where to send his nineteen-year-old phenom from the Negro Leagues, Willie Mays. The Giants had affiliates in Sioux City of the Western League, and Stoneham and his staff agreed that the level of competition there would be perfect preparation for Willie. At the last moment, though, Stoneham got word from some Giants coaches familiar with the Western Association that there were not yet any black players in the league. The owner thought it over and decided the Giants would find a farm team better suited to Mays, even though he was already on his way to Iowa. Willie said, “But I never got to Sioux City. Racial prejudice actually kept me from my first job with a white team. The Giants hoped I could play Class-A ball there, very important in my development, they figured. But Sioux City was not the place for me at that moment.” An incident involving the attempted burial of an Indian in an all-white cemetery had given Sioux City a bad name around the country. Willie had never heard of anything like that happening before, but “then again, I had never played outside the Negro League, either.”9 (Willie, of course, meant “Leagues.”) So secure and isolated had Mays’s life been in Fairfield that the full force of racial bigotry didn’t hit him until he left Alabama.

  So the slowness with which the major leagues integrated its farm systems kept Mickey and Willie from playing against each other in the minor leagues. “To have had Mays and Mantle in the same league at nearly the same age,” wrote a minor league historian, “would have been remarkable.”10

  The Giants, nothing if not paternal, decided it would be better to keep Willie closer to home, meaning closer to New York, where they could keep an eye on him. It was determined that their Trenton farm team in the Interstate League would be ideal, so Mays was diverted to New Jersey. It was all the same to him where he played, but he had one objection to Trenton: the league was Class-B. No one could ever really be certain how the Negro Leagues stacked up to the different levels of the white minor leagues, but the Barons, Willie told Charlie Einstein, played better
baseball than he saw at Trenton (and probably baseball as good as he later saw in Triple-A). “No one really got to know how good the players were in the Negro League since the press”—meaning, of course, the white press—“never covered the games. But I knew it was an experience I would never forget. I was so much richer from it. I didn’t realize that my leaving was another nail in the coffin of all-black baseball.”11 Willie might have been giving himself too much credit—black ball would have been doomed even if Mays and other black stars had not moved on. Willie’s departure from the Black Barons, though, was a severe blow. In the spring of 1950, he was far from the best-known black player in the country and far from the biggest star to emerge from black ball. But he was one thing that Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Satchel Paige, Larry Doby, and Monte Irvin were not—young. The major leagues, not yet taking a chance on young black talent, were purchasing only established stars. Willie Mays had the entire category of “budding young black superstar” all to himself. It was the main reason he would hit the major leagues with such enormous impact a year later.

  It might have been better for Willie if his first exposure to a virtually all-white minor league had been in New Jersey. Instead, he was sent to meet up with his new team in Hagerstown, Maryland, where the Trenton Giants were scheduled to play. It didn’t take Willie long to realize that he was below the Mason-Dixon Line again. In Washington and Baltimore, he could stay in any hotel he could afford, but in Hagerstown, about seventy miles northwest of Washington, he couldn’t sleep in the same place as the rest of the team, and the moment he came out of the clubhouse he heard the first taunt he’d ever heard in baseball: “Who’s that nigger walking out on the field?” On the phone later with his father, Willie told him of the racial slurs; Cat advised him to turn the other cheek. Willie told him he had no intention of turning his cheek. Cat simply told him that such things weren’t going to stop right away and he had to learn not to let a few hate-filled people destroy his concentration. Though Willie later insisted that he hadn’t let it get to him, he didn’t get a hit the entire four-game series; as he later put it, he started his professional baseball career, “0–4 Maryland.”