by Allen Barra
Henrich recalled in detail fifty-six years later the play in which all his instruction came together: “Jim Busby was the runner at third base. He was pretty fast, and I figured that given the depth at which Mickey would catch the ball, Jim had about a 90 percent chance of scoring. From the moment Mickey moved in to catch the ball, I could see his motions were perfect, that he was doing it exactly the way we had practiced it. He already had his momentum shifted forward at the catch, brought his glove down, and had the ball in his throwing hand while he was stepping forward. His follow-through was flawless.”
Henrich also remembered one detail that Berra did not: “Busby was such a dead duck he actually tried to stop and looked as if he was going to head back to third base.” Henrich said he had seen every great outfielder in the major leagues in his time, from the Cardinals’ Terry Moore to the Dodgers’ Carl Furillo to his own teammate Joe DiMaggio to Willie Mays. Mantle’s throw, he insisted, “was the greatest I ever saw an outfielder make, ever. When I saw that throw, I thought, This kid isn’t going to just be a great slugger, he’s going to be a great all-around player.”11
Johnny Hopp, who dressed alongside Mantle all during the spring, told his teammate, whom he nicknamed “The Champ,” “You’re going to make a million dollars out of this game.” Mickey just grinned. As Hopp later recalled, “He just did everything you’d ever want to see on a ballfield. The home runs were only part of it. Casey said one time that the kid runs so fast that he doesn’t even bend the grass when he steps on it.”12
Mantle had so much talent that everyone seemed to forget he was a nineteen-year-old with only a few spring training games beyond the Class-C level. Yankee GM Lee MacPhail, whose ecstatic quotes continually poured gasoline onto the Mantle bonfire in the spring of 1951, later insisted that he was not engaging in hyperbole. “No one knew what would happen on a major league field,” he said later, “but Mantle had more ability than Gehrig, Ruth, anybody. He could hit with Ruth’s power, and Ruth never hit from both sides of the plate like Mantle. Ruth had a great arm, but so did Mantle.” Every day, MacPhail remembered, he’d say to himself, “He’s the guy who’s gonna be the solution for us—and he just about was. We all believed that.”13 The problem for which the Yankees needed a “solution” was, of course, how they were going to replace Joe DiMaggio when he retired.
All through Willie Mays’s career, whenever an obstacle appeared in his path, it magically seemed to vanish. The rapid demise of the Negro Leagues after Willie’s championship season with the Black Barons in 1948 didn’t hurt him at all because, thanks to his father and Piper Davis, he was ready to make the leap to the big leagues. And through some spectacular luck—beginning with the fact that Jackie Robinson had already broken the color barrier—he signed with exactly the right organization in exactly the right city that could help shield him from the still-powerful influence of Jim Crow. Mickey Mantle’s career, in contrast, seemed to run along an opposite course: every time skies were overpoweringly bright, storm clouds quickly gathered. And even as the hype generated by the Yankees’ front office made Mickey prematurely famous in the spring of 1951, the draft board, reacting to that hype, was compelled to reexamine his status.
World War II hadn’t made much of an intrusion into the worlds of either Mickey or Willie. In movie theaters they saw newsreels and films about American victories; their fathers were excused from military service because of their mill and mine work and also their numerous dependents. Now, both Mantle and Mays were quickly becoming aware that their country was involved in a bloody police action on the Korean peninsula. And for Mantle, the fan mail and press were beginning to get nasty. Scarcely anyone who saw Mickey in photographs or in person could believe he was anything but a marvelous physical specimen of young American manhood. How, asked sportswriters who hadn’t the slightest notion what osteomyelitis was, could Mickey Mantle not qualify for military service? (One writer even made a snide comment to the effect that, after all, a bone disease in his leg shouldn’t keep Mantle out of the service since he would not be required to kick anyone in Korea.)
It didn’t help that the Yankees’ front office intervened directly to ask the Oklahoma draft board to give Mickey another physical; to many it seemed like influential New York interests were trying to manipulate Mantle’s status. But the draft board didn’t need the Yankees or anyone else to tell them what a second examination made obvious: osteomyelitis, even in a state of remission, automatically designated Mickey 4-F.
The sporting press could have prevented much of the ugliness to come by simply pointing out that Mickey had no say in the matter and would not have been accepted in the armed forces even if he volunteered. Instead, the stigma would plague him through the entire decade and result in more hate mail, booing, and bad feelings than had ever been directed at an athlete.
All during spring training, Casey Stengel delighted in showing Mickey off to reporters. Attendance for the spring exhibitions had been just under 279,000, a record largely set because of the curiosity surrounding Mickey, who batted .402 with nine home runs. The Yankees’ last exhibition series had been capped off against the Dodgers in Brooklyn, where every New York writer could see him firsthand. Before the first game, Stengel walked Mickey out to the outfield of Ebbets Field to instruct him on the angles a ball might take on a ricochet off the concrete barrier, giving the rookie the benefit of his own experience in the Dodgers’ park. Mantle was astonished to learn that Casey had played major league ball. Stengel, chuckling, later recounted the story to the beat reporters. “Boy never saw concrete before,” he told them.14 Mickey had four hits in the final exhibition game, including a long home run, stole two bases, and threw a runner out at third base; some of the press were now predicting he could take DiMaggio’s place right then.
The press coverage at times bordered on the hysterical. In the April 15 edition of a small circulation paper, the New York Compass, Stan Isaacs, later to become one of the city’s most popular sportswriters, wryly noted, “Since the start of spring training, the typewriter keys of the training camps have been pounding out one name to the people back home. No matter what paper you read, or what day, you will get Mickey Mantle, more Mickey Mantle and still more Mickey Mantle. Never in the history of baseball has the game known the wonder to equal this Yankee rookie. Every day there’s some other glorious phrase as the baseball writers outdo themselves in attempts to describe the antics of this wonder.”15
In regular foot races in camp, Mickey outran his teammates by such wide margins that he embarrassed them. He was repeatedly clocked running from home plate to first base: he was 3.0 seconds from the left side and 3.1 from the right side. It was almost a consensus among sportswriters that no other player in the big leagues was that fast. At least not yet—Willie Mays had not yet been called up to the Giants. “Whenever the black players heard that Mickey Mantle was the fastest man in baseball,” Monte Irvin says, “we always said, ‘Yeah, maybe. The fastest white man.’ I would have loved to have seen a race between Mickey and Willie when they were that age.” Who, I once asked Irvin, did he think would have won? He paused. “Mickey, maybe to first base, even from the right side of the plate. Willie by maybe a quarter-step goin’ from first to second.”16 In a 1987 interview Piper Davis pretty much agreed with Irvin’s assessment: “Willie might have lost a race to first base by half a step to Mickey. But I saw them both play. Willie, of course, a lot more than Mickey. But I saw Mickey a couple of times and he was a human streak. But I don’t believe he could turn as fast as Willie. I don’t believe anyone could go from first to third or second to home faster than Willie.”17
Myths began to spring up around Mickey, and some of them survive to this day. One was that he was a terrible shortstop. Though he often looked bad at short, a check of minor league fielding records reveals that Mantle was no worse than most of his contemporaries. In 1949, for instance, Mickey committed 47 errors in 89 games, but given the condition of the pebble-strewn fields the young men played on and the poor l
ighting in most of the ballparks, that was about par for the course. Another shortstop, Dwayne Melvin, who played for Miami, made 71 errors in just six more games than Mickey; still another, Sal Nardello, a shortstop for Pittsburgh, had 75 muffs in 118 games for the same .886 fielding percentage as Mickey.
One problem with his play at shortstop was discovered by Yankee coach Frank Crosetti, who had played more than 1,500 games at the position for New York from 1932 to 1948. After watching Mantle mis-play a ground ball he had easily caught up to, Crosetti asked to see his glove. “Where’d you get this piece of shit?” he asked. Mickey mumbled that the glove had been a Christmas gift from his father—it was the Marty Marion glove Mutt had given his son years before. The cost had been a whopping $22, nearly one-third of Mutt Mantle’s weekly salary. It was not a piece of shit, as Crosetti called it; it was a fine piece of craftsmanship for a semipro player. But it was not the kind of tool needed for the big leagues. The next morning, when Mickey walked out onto the practice field, Crosetti shoved a brand-new major league fielder’s mitt in his stomach; it was understood, though he never told Mickey, that Frank had paid for it himself. Mickey put the Marty Marion model away and later brought it back to Commerce.
The truth is that the Yankees wanted Mantle in the lineup now and in Phil Rizzuto they had not only a capable shortstop but one who had walked off with the 1950 American League MVP Award. It was Joe DiMaggio in center field who needed replacing. A story often repeated in early Mantle biographies was that GM George Weiss was reluctant to commit to Mantle, but Stengel talked him into it. Lee MacPhail told David Falkner that this was not true. “Once we made an outfielder out of him, the decision to jump him to the Yankees was really simple.”18 Mickey’s speed and throwing arm made it logical to send him to the outfield, especially after Henrich began working with him.
It was significant that the man who played outfield so many years beside Henrich did not help Mickey; Joe DiMaggio, perhaps resentful that a nineteen-year-old had been anointed as his successor, said nothing to encourage the painfully shy rookie. There may have been another reason for DiMaggio’s reticence: he despised Casey Stengel, who did not kowtow to him. DiMaggio did a slow burn every time he picked up the paper and saw another quote from Casey on Mantle’s potential. Of course, Joe wasn’t aloof only with Mickey. He kept a distance from all the Yankee players and generally traveled alone to and from games in a cab. Just about the only man in the organization with the nerve to prick DiMaggio’s ego was the Yankees’ longtime clubhouse manager, Pete Sheehy. Once, the story goes, Sheehy was asked by DiMaggio to examine what he thought was a bruise on his backside, where he had been hit with a pitch. Was there something there? There was, replied Sheehy. “It’s from all those people kissing your ass.”19
As spring training drew to a close, the publicity began to overwhelm Mickey, who receded into a shell. After the last game with the Dodgers, Stengel told his players that they would be attending the wedding of their hotshot young left-hander, Edward Charles “Whitey” Ford, who’d had a sensational 9–1 record during the Yankees’ pennant drive the previous season and was home on furlough from the Army. The reception was at an Irish bar in Queens. Mickey was so shy that he stayed on the bus during the entire affair. Afterward, Ford and his bride joined the team on the bus, where he shook hands with a red-faced Mantle. Whitey’s first impression of Mickey was uncharitable: “I thought, ‘What a hayseed!’ ”20 Their relationship on and off the field would soon improve.
The Yanks were scheduled to open the season against the Washington Senators. Mickey and some of the other rookies, who had spent the last couple of days getting special instruction in camp, flew to Washington to join the team. They were looking forward to meeting President Harry Truman, who was scheduled to throw out the opening day first pitch, but a three-day rain spoiled the trip. After the rained-out games, the team boarded their handsome private train car for the trip back to New York. Casey walked Mickey down the aisles, passing players he had been reading about in the papers, veterans of the last two world championship Yankee teams. Allie Reynolds, a fellow Oklahoman, stood up from his game of cards and shook hands; Yogi Berra, number two in the AL’s MVP race the previous season, smiled and patted him on the arm. Others wondered what whistle-stop town the kid had come from. Mickey was overwhelmed by the splendid dining car—each booth had stained-glass dividers, and the lamps were curved Art Deco glass. It seemed to be designed to introduce him to the good life in New York. Mickey was literally thousands of miles and, it seemed, decades away from the lonely train journey he had taken from Oklahoma to Phoenix only the year before. Settling into a plush booth, he finally blurted out to Casey what had been on his mind since he had arrived in Washington: did the Yankees intend to put him in the lineup or would they be sending him to a minor league team for more seasoning? Stengel told him with a nod, “I think you’ll stay with us. When we get back there, just be quiet, and I’ll do the talking.”21
The Yankees organization provided no safety net for the rookie. Luckily for the teenager, a Yankee veteran, Henry Albert “Hank” Bauer, took an interest in him. Bauer looked as if he had been sent from central casting to play the tough Marine veteran that he in fact was. By the time Mantle arrived, Hank was in his third season with the Yankees; he chafed at Stengel’s use of him as a platoon player, but he was proud to be a Yankee and could not deny the results: batting against mostly left-handed pitching, he hit .320 in 1950 and collected his second consecutive World Series ring. “I sympathized with Mickey before I ever met him,” Bauer said. “I thought all that draft dodger stuff was phony. I knew that there was no way the armed forces were going to take him with that bone disease, and it burned me that so many guys in the press who never served were suddenly getting all patriotic about Mickey not going. Like he had a choice.”22
When the team returned to New York, Bauer noticed Mickey for the first time as the rookie got off the train at Penn Station. One glance told him there was a lot of work to be done: “He was wearing pants with cuffs that were rolled up, white socks, and, I think, Hush Puppy shoes. We were expected to travel dressed in a suit and tie. Mickey stood out like a farmer in a roomful of Madison Avenue ad execs; he had some kind of tweed jacket and a tie that had—I’m just guessing from memory, but I think there was a peacock painted on it.”23 Bauer walked up to Mickey, slapped him on the shoulder, and introduced himself. He was the first Yankee besides Yogi Berra to offer Mickey any personal attention.
Early the next day Bauer took Mickey to Eisenberg & Eisenberg, the store of choice for fashion-minded New York men for more than half a century. Joe DiMaggio shopped there, as did most of the other Yankees. Hank bought Mickey two sharkskin suits and some accessories. “I don’t remember what kind of tie I bought him,” Bauer said, “but it was a heck of a lot more sophisticated than the one with the peacock.”
The self-proclaimed hick and pool shark from Commerce, Oklahoma, proved to be a quick study. “Those Broadway lights,” he recalled thirty-five years later, “the neon glowing, hamburgers sizzling behind plate-glass windows, a carnival atmosphere with Dixieland sounds floating up from the basement steps on 52nd Street. I couldn’t avoid the newsstand dailies. Big black headlines, grisly headlines, a murder a day. This is how it looked to a nineteen-year-old kid from Oklahoma. But I was starting to like the excitement of the big city.”24
He moved into a midtown apartment over the Stage Delicatessen with Bauer and Johnny Hopp (who were both known to put away a couple of beers after the game—but no one had to teach Mickey how to do that). The deli was owned by brothers Max and Hymie Asnas, who looked after Mickey with great affection. The older brother, Max, got Mantle to try matzo-ball soup: “Taste, taste, you’ll hit homers with this.” Hymie saw to it that Mickey finished every meal with a hunk of cheesecake. “It was so good,” Mickey recalled. “I ate just about every meal there.” “You keep eating here,” Hymie promised him, “and pretty soon you can change your last name from Mantle to Mendel.” Mickey certa
inly did change: no doubt aided by regular meals at the Stage Deli, he rapidly put on weight, which on his body translated into muscle. Over the coming months, he would enjoy the company of a swarm of TV and nightclub stars who also dined regularly at the deli and were thrilled to be in the company of America’s most celebrated young baseball player: Joey Bishop, Larry Storch, Buddy Hackett, and others all flabbergasted Mickey by asking for his autograph. One afternoon before a night game with the Cleveland Indians, Mickey went to the Stage Barber Shop, next door to the deli, and discovered that the man in the barber chair next to him was bandleader Harry James. A baseball nut, James recognized Mickey first; Mantle wasn’t sure who James was until he shook hands and introduced himself. James urged Mantle to drop by and visit him and his wife, Betty Grable, if he was ever in Vegas—they’d play a few holes at the Desert Inn golf course. A couple of years later, Mickey, Whitey Ford, and their wives took the Jameses up on the invitation and had dinner at their home. “They were very nice to us,” Mickey recalled.25
Just as in his father’s wildest dreams, Mickey would soon have New York at his feet. But first he had to deliver.
Early in the afternoon of April 17, Mickey Mantle walked up to the lineup sheet posted on the locker-room wall and saw that he would be playing right field and batting third behind the ream’s other spring phenom, Jackie Jensen,‡ and Rizzuto, and in front of DiMaggio and Berra. In the dugout, Mantle stared silently into the cavernous stands of Yankee Stadium, filled with more than 44,000 people. Berra, standing beside him, said, “Hey, what kind of Opening Day crowd is this? There’s no people here.” It took Mickey a moment to realize Yogi was joking. Pitching coach “Milkman Jim” Turner asked him, “How many people watched you play in Joplin last year?” The rookie thought around 50,000 total. Turner pointed out that almost as many people would see him that day. Mickey was speechless. He gulped when Turner added, “And most of them came to see what you look like.”