by Allen Barra
Though he could not have known it at the time, Willie needn’t have worried. Durocher and Stoneham had simply left the park because they had seen what they needed to see.
* Incorrectly identified by Mickey many times in later years as “Rogers Hornsby Jr.”
† But it must have been a different song by Mickey’s favorite country singer. Paul Hemphill’s 2005 biography Lovesick Blues: The Life of Hank Williams lists the song as a 1950 release.
‡ Joe Becker Stadium in Joplin is very nearly as historic as Birmingham’s Rickwood Field. Like Rickwood, Joe Becker saw numerous appearances from the great stars of the Negro Leagues—Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, and Cool Papa Bell played there many times on barnstorming tours. The foundation for the park was built in 1913, three years after Rickwood opened, and was called Miners Park. It was later renamed Joe Becker, to honor a well-known umpire, scout, and business manager for the team. The stadium has survived numerous fires; in the 1970s it was rebuilt in retro style with hand-painted signs in the outfield. In 2004 it hosted the USA Baseball Tournament of Stars.
§ Craft had sent a glowing report to Lee MacPhail, outlining all of Mantle’s considerable strengths and his only real weakness, his still-erratic play at shortstop. His natural position, Craft said, was probably center field.
Mickey at age fourteen. His father, Mutt, had already been making him practice his baseball skills for years.
PERSONAL COLLECTION OF THE MANTLE FAMILY
Thirteen-year-old Willie in 1944. Even at this age he was playing ball with his father’s industrial league pals. BIRMINGHAM PUBLIC LIBRARY
Fairfield, Alabama, the town where Willie went to school, was a planned community for employees of U.S. Steel. BIRMINGHAM PUBLIC LIBRARY
Mickey, right, stands with his father, Mutt, on the porch of the Mantle family home at 319 North Quincy Street in Commerce. This was taken after the 1950 season; the house had been spruced up a bit with money Mickey brought home from playing for Joplin. NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME, COOPERSTOWN, N.Y.
Jackie Robinson once referred to Willie’s boyhood home in Westfield, Alabama, as “clapboard and windblown.” Actually, it wasn’t bad—better-looking, in fact, than the Mantles’ home in Oklahoma. BIRMINGHAM PUBLIC LIBRARY
Mickey the Joplin Miner in 1950, playing Class C ball. Between the time this photo was taken and Mickey’s debut with the Yankees the following year, he put on perhaps twenty pounds of hard muscle. CORBIS
Willie at age seventeen in 1948, playing for the Birmingham Barons of the Negro League. MEMPHIS AND SHELBY COUNTY ROOM, MEMPHIS PUBLIC LIBRARY & INFORMATION CENTER.
Willie early in 1951 with the Minneapolis Millers, just before he was called up to the New York Giants. Later in the season, Mickey played in Minneapolis and was told of the amazing young black ballplayer who had been there just a few months earlier. SPORT MEDIA GROUP
This caricature of Willie appeared in the Minneapolis Tribune the day after it was announced that Mays had been called up to the parent team in New York. Willie was such a hit in the Twin Cities that there was an uproar among the fans when they learned he was leaving. Giants owner Horace Stoneham took out an ad in the paper apologizing to them but also reminding them, “It would be most unfair to deprive him of the opportunity he earned with his play.” ARTIST: MURRAY OLDERMAN
Mickey with Tom Greenwade. Perhaps to avoid friction, Mickey perpetuated the myth that Greenwade “discovered” him. What Greenwade actually did was cheat the Mantle family out of thousands of dollars that Mickey should have received in bonus money.
PHOTOGRAPHER UNKNOWN
“Taste, taste. You’ll hit homers with this.” Hank Bauer introduces nineteen-year-old Mickey to the glories of New York delicatessen food at the Stage Deli. Bauer and Mickey shared an apartment above the legendary deli. The server is co-owner Max Asnas.
ERNEST SISTO/NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX
One of the most famous photos of Willie Mays ever taken, playing stickball with kids in the streets of Harlem. Mickey also played stickball in the street with kids, but there were no cameras around to preserve the moment.
NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME, COOPERSTOWN, N.Y.
“And over there’s where Ted Williams hit one ten rows deep …” Casey shows Mickey the fine points of Griffith Stadium in Washington on Mickey’s first road trip. SPORT MEDIA GROUP
Leo Durocher shows his new center fielder around Shibe Park in Philadelphia. Leo would owe his posthumous 1994 election to the Hall of Fame in large part to having managed Willie Mays. SPORT MEDIA GROUP
A River Ran Between Them. Old Yankee Stadium is on the right; the Polo Grounds, the home of the Giants and later the expansion New York Mets, on the left. From the grandstands of the Polo Grounds you could see Yankee Stadium in the distance. AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS
Mickey and Willie met before Game 1 of the 1951 World Series at Yankee Stadium. Some unknown photographer thought to ask the two young New York phenoms to pose together. BETTMANN/CORBIS
“What’s the matter, kid?” Joe DiMaggio asks his fallen rookie teammate. In the first game of the 1951 Series, Willie Mays lofted a fly ball into right-center. Mickey stepped on an open drainpipe as he raced for the ball and tore up a knee that had already been ravaged by osteomyelitis. An injury caused by a negligent groundskeeper—or Willie Mays?—prevented Mickey from being the greatest player who ever lived. SPORT MEDIA GROUP
Mickey returned to the zinc mines of Commerce after the 1951 season. That’s Mutt to the left; in the center, also wearing a miner’s helmet, is Cliff Mapes, who had worn number 7 before Mickey in the Yankees lineup. It isn’t known what Mapes was doing in Commerce. CORBIS/BETTMANN
Willie points out his name on the bat to his father, William Howard “Cat” Mays. Manager Herman Franks is in the middle. AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS
Perhaps no ballplayer had an easier time in military service during the Korean War than Willie. He would later admit he wasn’t particularly proud of his nearly two years in uniform, most of it spent playing baseball. Mantle, meanwhile, was vilified by fans and press for having been rejected for service. SPORT MEDIA GROUP
The Mantle boys play cards while Mutt, seated, and Lovell look on. Apparently sister Barbara was not invited. SPORT MEDIA GROUP
Willie’s stepbrothers and stepsisters back in Fairfield admire a gift from Willie—a new record player. Willie’s mother, Annie, is absent from the picture, suggesting that it might have been taken after her death in 1953. INTERNATIONAL NEWS PHOTOS/CORBIS
7
“You’re Going to Eat Steak”
In the spring of 1951, Willie Mays moved from Florida to Minnesota. Nothing could have seemed more alien to Willie at that point in his life than the city of Minneapolis. There were a couple of black players on the Millers, but on most days there were more black people in the home team dugout than the stands.
For all that, Horace Stoneham could not have taken better care of his budding superstar. It would have been hard to imagine a city in the United States in 1951 with less racial tension than Minneapolis, and even harder to imagine a manager more congenial than Tommy Heath. Born in Akron, Colorado, in 1913, Heath had had a spotty major league career. He had played 134 games at catcher for the St. Louis Browns from 1935 to 1938, batting just .230, then parlayed his smarts and experience into a professional career as a coach, scout, and manager. He had led the Millers to a pennant the previous season.
The Millers called Tommy “The Round Man” for the 215-plus pounds he packed on a five-ten frame. Heath pretended not to hear them and chuckled. Willie regarded him as “a deep thinker, and a very good student of the game. I learned how to think baseball when he was around.”
Mays was the first black player Heath had ever worked with; Willie found him to be “very fair, something I appreciated as a kid trying to play among men.”1 Much to his surprise, Willie also found the fans and the local press congenial. In fact, a couple of Twin Cities writers who had seen him play in Florida had already been beating the drum, lea
ding Millers fans, who were as passionate about their team as fans in big league cities, to pack the stadium for opening day.
An excited Willie opened his eyes early in the morning on the first day of the season and was startled by the glare coming from his window: for only the second time in his life he gazed at a landscape covered with snow. He shook his head and crawled back into bed. Two hours later, a mildly indignant Heath rang his room: Why wasn’t he at the ballpark, his manager wanted to know. Mays was dumbfounded. How can you play baseball in the snow? Heath patiently explained that it was a problem the Millers were used to—a helicopter had been brought in to blow the snow away. Hurry up and get to the park, he told his new player. As Willie dressed, he wondered, “Did Piper Davis ever play in any snow?”2
Snow, it turned out, was no impediment to greatness. In that first game, Mays electrified the crowd by slamming a long home run over the center-field wall and hitting a double—actually, a bloop single that Mays turned into a two-bagger when the center and right fielders couldn’t decide fast enough who was going to field the ball. The crowd was delighted; this was the kind of play some of them had seen when Negro League teams barnstormed through Minneapolis. The next day Willie Mays became the first black athlete since Joe Louis to have his picture on the local sports pages.
Willie started out red-hot in the cold weather, collecting twelve hits in his first week. The fans loved him. He was everything they’d heard about and more, and after only a few games he became a celebrity in the city. Since there were practically no black-owned restaurants in Minneapolis, he had little trouble eating with most of his white teammates. He also found that doors, literally, were opening to him. Like Mickey, Willie often went to the movies by himself, usually to see a Western. Back in Florida he still had to use a side entrance. “I didn’t care,” he later recalled. “I was having a good spring, just counting the days until we’d break camp and start a new season.”3 Now, for the first time, he had the experience of buying a ticket and walking through the front door like a full-fledged American citizen.
One of his teammates on the Millers was the great Ray Dandridge, who at age thirty-eight was playing out his career as a professional player. “You got a great chance,” Dandridge told Willie. “When I played in the black leagues, we were barnstorming most of the time. Sometimes I played three games in one day. We made about $35 a week and ate hamburger. You’re going to eat steak, and you’re going to make a lot of money. You just have to keep it clean and be a good boy.”4
Dandridge was one of the many Negro League veterans who helped young Mays learn the ropes in professional ball. In Dandridge’s case, he knew that mentoring Willie would be his last achievement in a career that had made him one of the greatest of Negro League stars. Monte Irvin later said, “Ray Dandridge was fantastic. Best I’ve ever seen at third. I saw all the greats—Brooks [Robinson], Graig [Nettles]—but I’ve never seen a better third baseman than Dandridge.”5
There may not have ever been a better third baseman. The first black player for the Millers, Dandridge hit .362 in 1949 and was voted—at age thirty-six—the American Association Rookie of the Year. In 1950 he was voted the league’s Most Valuable Player. The New York Giants’ Sal Maglie, who had seen him play in Mexico, begged the Giants owners to bring him up to the parent club. The word came back that Dandridge was simply too old. “We could have won the pennant,” Maglie would later insist. “I know damn well with Dandridge playing third, we’d have won that pennant in 1950.”6
He probably could have helped the Giants in 1951 as well, though that year New York had a slugger who, like Dandridge, could play third base or outfield. But in 1951 the Giants already had their unofficial quota of black players, so Bobby Thomson was playing on the parent team while Ray Dandridge was hitting .324 on the farm club.*
Triple-A baseball in the late 1940s and early 1950s was a rough, sometimes brutal game filled with hungry youngsters and grizzled veterans, all clawing for a shot at the big leagues. A young black man in a predominantly white league was a particularly inviting target. At a game in Louisville, a six-foot-five right-hander named Joe Atkins threw Mays two consecutive pitches up and in. Willie was used to close pitches from his short stint with the Black Barons, but to get two in a row violated the unwritten rules—it was a stunt Atkins would not have dared to pull had the game been played in Minneapolis, where the fans would have been waiting for him outside the ballpark after the game.
Heath had no intention of giving an opposing pitcher a free shot at Willie. Charging from the dugout, he looked as if he was ready to run out to the mound and take on Atkins despite the height disadvantage. Wisely, he allowed his coaches to catch up and restrain him, but not before he let the Louisville pitcher know, in no uncertain terms, that if he threw another pitch like the previous one he wouldn’t stop at the foul line. Willie recalled his manager’s gesture fondly. “Once again I found someone who was willing to stick up for me, and I never forgot him. He could have taken it easy on himself and let the other teams try to screw up a rookie as they did with every new kid. But he seemed to be especially protective of me.”7
Willie probably did not understand that he was being given preferential treatment; Heath was surely under orders from Stoneham not to let their prize prospect get manhandled.
During the Yankees’ 1951 spring training, Casey Stengel had pretty much avoided all contact with the rookies, but it was quickly brought to his attention that the kid who had the fastest time of anyone in camp on the sprints was also hitting monstrous home runs—from both sides of the plate. Stengel made it from the veterans’ field to where the rookies were playing in time to see Mickey, batting left-handed, slam the ball a good forty to fifty feet over the right-field fence. As Mickey, head down, rounded first base heading for second, Stengel jumped out on the field, waving a bat to get his coaches’ attention. “What’s his name?” he shouted to them. “Mantle?” “Mickey Mantle in spring training, 1951?” remarked his teammate Gil McDougald. “Let me put it this way: it was like watching a young, blond god.”8
Although he was turning heads with his performance, Mantle was under more pressure than he had ever thought was possible. The pressure came from every conceivable source—from his father, who thought that marrying Merlyn Johnson would settle him down; from the U.S. government, which was having second thoughts about his draft status; and from the New York press, which was turning him into the inheritor of the Babe Ruth—Lou Gehrig—Joe DiMaggio legend before he had taken a single at-bat in a major league game.
In a preseason exhibition game on the University of Southern California campus, Mickey jump-started his own myth, which, when sent out over the wires by both New York and southern California sportswriters, became instant legend. In that game, Mantle hit two home runs, a triple, and a single, and one of the homers carried so far over the fence—some estimated it had gone 500 feet—that the USC students went into a state of delirium. Afterward, a crowd of students estimated in the hundreds clogged the locker-room exit, cheering and demanding autographs.
Another blond athletic god who was at the USC athletic facility that day was in awe. In a year, Frank Gifford would become, to many New York Giants fans, the Mickey Mantle of pro football (or as close to it as any player could be in what was then a second-rate professional sport). He was on the adjoining field at practice when people came running out from the baseball stadium to look for the ball Mantle hit. “It was electric,” said Gifford. “It was as if something heroic had just happened. Student, coaches, everyone was buzzing.”†9
In another game on the California junket, against the White Sox, Mickey gave the writers fodder for yet another blizzard of newspaper stories. Catching a fly ball in medium right field, Mantle set, cocked, and fired the ball on a line to Yogi Berra, who was standing a foot in front of home plate. Berra caught it chest high—it was almost as if Mickey had thrown a fastball from the pitcher’s mound. “I couldn’t believe it at first,” Yogi recalled. “The ball hit my glove
so hard it was like catching an Allie Reynolds fastball. All we had heard about and all we had seen so far was Mickey’s power, that and how lousy he was as a shortstop. No one told us he had an arm like that. I was so surprised by his throw I almost forgot to tag the runner”—who was still out by a good six feet.10
Yankees coach Tommy Henrich, who had been a terrific outfielder—a five-time All-Star—had been working hard to convert Mantle from shortstop to the outfield, giving him a crash course in skills that Willie Mays had learned from his father and Piper Davis years before, namely, how to pivot, turn, and throw on balls hit to his right, and how to judge balls that were slicing away from him.