Mickey and Willie

by Allen Barra

  Stengel noticed a hole in the sole of one of Mantle’s cleats and pointed it out to sportswriter Red Smith, who had not seen Mickey play in the spring. Smith whispered, “Who is he?” “He’s that kid of mine,” Stengel replied. “That’s Mantle?” “Yeah, I asked him didn’t he have better shoes, and he said he had a new pair, but they were a little too big.” “He’s waiting,” said Smith, “for an important occasion to wear the new ones.”26

  Fate wasted no time in introducing Mickey to the big leagues: the Yankees’ opponent that day was the Boston Red Sox. Just after batting practice, Ted Williams came over to shake hands with DiMaggio. Joe did not think to introduce the greatest hitter in baseball to the Yankees’ much-publicized rookie, so Williams took it upon himself. “You must be Mick,” said Williams with a grin, extending his hand. Mantle mumbled something in reply; later neither he nor Williams could remember what it was.

  A few minutes later, the Yankees’ Vic Raschi threw the first pitch, and Mickey’s dream became reality. After Raschi retired the order in the top half of the first, Mantle stood in the box and, batting right-handed, took his first big league pitch from Bill Wight, an undistinguished left-hander who would finish 7–7 that season. Forgetting to hold the label on the bat toward his face so he could read it, Mickey shattered his bat, hitting a weak infield grounder. On his second trip to the plate, he popped up to second base. In the sixth inning, with runners on first and third and no outs and Wight still in the game, Mantle started to walk up to the plate. Waiting on deck, DiMaggio, who scarcely spoke to him off the field, stopped him, put a hand on his shoulder, and whispered some words of encouragement to his teenage teammate. Mickey nodded, stepped into the box, and proceeded to stroke a liner over shortstop Johnny Pesky’s head for his first major league hit and first run batted in. The Yankees won 5–0.

  His opening day jitters relieved, Mantle went on a tear and began to treat major league pitchers the same way he had treated those in the Western Association. The next day he batted in two more runs. Two days later, he went 3-for-5. On May 1, playing in his first road game, he made a Chicago White Sox pitcher named Randy Gumperd the answer to a trivia question: who did Mickey Mantle hit his first big league home run off of? Batting left-handed, he drove the ball over the White Sox bullpen, an estimated 450 feet from home plate. A Chicago fan, no doubt anticipating the memorabilia boom that Mickey would eventually inspire, retrieved the ball and later traded it to Mickey for a dozen autographed baseballs. By mid-May, he was among the American League leaders in home runs, RBIs, and runs scored. He was Cinderella with no coach in sight.

  Cinderella, though, was lonely. He soon moved from the apartment over the Stage Deli to the Concourse Plaza Hotel, on 161st Street in the Bronx, just a couple of blocks from Yankee Stadium. Over the years the Concourse had become a home away from home for many Yankees and their families; Babe Ruth had a famous three-bedroom suite there in the 1920s.§ Mickey’s room, though, was small. At night, he recalled, “without a roommate and almost nobody to talk to, I’d usually sit around reading the sports pages or simply stare at the walls. And there were times when the world of baseball seemed so far off, no longer the game I loved and knew as a boy.” Mickey’s memories painted a scene out of an Edward Hopper painting. In the Bronx summer nights he would hear “the el trains roaring overhead, wondering where all the people were going to and coming from. Then the diners, the cafeterias, the greasy spoon restaurants … leaning forlornly over a cup of coffee and listening to the strange New York accents, to guys in dungarees and leather jackets bunched together at the counter, arguing baseball. I’d walk back to the hotel, head down, lost in thought.”27

  One day when he had nothing else to do, Mickey stopped to watch some kids playing stickball. The kids coaxed him into the game and gave him a stick-bat. Stephen Swid, who was one of them, later recalled Mickey’s first at-bat: “Each sewer [manhole cover] was 90 feet apart. I was a two-and-a-half sewer guy, not bad at all. A really big hitter would be a three-sewer guy.” “He swung and missed, swung and missed again.… A few more swings, a few more misses. Finally he connected. Boom! It was the deepest shot any of us ever saw, more than four sewers. That was it. The news spread all over the neighborhood and throughout the Bronx. Mickey Mantle was a four-sewer man.28

  In a couple of years, some forty blocks farther downtown, another four-sewer man would thrill the street kids. Newspaper photos of Willie Mays playing stickball in the streets would charm sports fans all over the country, but Mickey’s exploits would for years be known only to the handful of kids who played with him in 1951.

  Meanwhile, at Yankee Stadium the cheers could be deafening, but he soon discovered how cruel some New York fans could be. “I’d hear their shouts coming from the right field stands, guys screaming at the top of their lungs. Boos and catcalls, curses—‘Go back to Oklahoma, you big bum!’ ”29 The draft dodger label just wouldn’t go away.

  While Mickey Mantle was making national headlines tearing up American League pitching, Willie Mays was a local hero in Minneapolis, astonishing Western Association managers by hitting everything their pitchers threw at him—even when those pitchers threw, literally, at him. In a sixteen-game home stand at Nicollet Park, Mays was knocked down at least nine times and hit four times, sending his manager and teammates into fits of rage. Willie responded to the knockdowns the way a future big leaguer was supposed to: in the sixteen games, he had 38 hits in 63 at-bats for an irrational batting average of .608.

  In a road game in September against Louisville, he made a play that stuck in the memory of everyone who saw it. A Louisville outfielder named Taft “Taffy” Wright, a nine-year major league veteran with a career batting average of .311, was playing out his professional career in the minors; he smashed a ball deep into center that looked as if it was headed for the flag pole. Jim Piersall, assigned by the Boston Red Sox to finish out the season in Louisville,‖ recalled the play this way: “Taffy hit a really good shot to the deepest part of the park. The only question was whether or not the ball would clear the fence, which was very high in that part of the park, or bounce off the top for a double or triple. No one thought it had a chance to be caught. When I replay in my memory what Willie did it still doesn’t seem real. Remember that movie where Fred Astaire walked up a wall? Well, that’s what it looked to me like Willie did. He caught his spikes on something—a board, a cement block, I don’t know—and then took another step up. I swear, it looked like he was walking up the wall. He caught the damn thing about a foot from the top, turned like a cat, and jumped back down. He made kind of a lazy throw back into the infield. Taffy, meanwhile, slid into second base, got up, and began dusting himself off. Then he took a lead off second base. The umpire tapped him on the shoulder and told him he was out. Taffy was bewildered. ‘He didn’t catch that ball!’ he was yelling. ‘He couldn’t have caught that ball!’ We started yelling from the dugout, ‘Taffy, he did catch it! He really did!’ But Taffy didn’t believe us. He thought we were kidding him. He wouldn’t leave the field. Our manager, Pinky Higgins, had to come out on the field and break the news that he was out. I still remember him trotting off the field shaking his head and looking at Willie in center field, his hands on his knees and a big grin on his face.”30

  The Minneapolis Star’s Bob Beebe, the first baseball writer to cover Willie after he left Birmingham, recounted that nearly thirty years later he bumped into Taffy Wright in Orlando, Florida, and asked him if he remembered the play. Wright did. “That little son of a bitch never did catch the ball. How could he catch that?”31

  For fans in most of the cities in the Western Association, Willie Mays was the first famous black ballplayer they had ever seen. By the time the Millers made their second road trip, the racial epithets began to fade away, replaced by cheers. Willie became a celebrity, but Jim Crow was still alive and well in many of the towns on the circuit, if not in Minneapolis itself; Willie often had to enter movie theaters from the side door and sit in the balcony.

&
nbsp; One night in Sioux City, Iowa, he went to see a Western—he would later recall that the film starred Tyrone Power, so it was probably Rawhide, which was released about that Sime—when, about halfway through, the movie was stopped and the house lights went on. He was startled a second time when the manager came onstage and called out, “If Willie Mays is in the audience, would he please call his manager at the hotel?”

  Mays’s first reaction when he heard the theater manager’s announcement was a natural one: he thought Cat or someone else in his family had had an accident or was ill. He took a cab back to the team’s hotel—one of the nicer things about playing in Minneapolis was that all the players could stay in the same hotel—and knocked on Heath’s door. Heath looked at Willie with a sad smile. “I just got off the phone with New York,” he told him. “Let me be the first to congratulate you.” Willie was dumbfounded. “What for?” “The Giants,” Heath replied, “want you right away.” Willie wanted to know on whose authority. “Leo’s,” Heath informed him.

  In deciding to promote Willie, the New York Giants were going by much more than just Willie’s batting average or even Tommy Heath’s opinion. They had dispatched a scout, Hank DeBerry, to Minneapolis to monitor his progress. DeBerry’s report was an unqualified rave: “Sensational. Is the outstanding player on the Minneapolis club and probably in all the minor leagues for that matter.… Hits all pitches and hits to all fields. Hits the ball where it is pitched as good as any player seen in many days. Everything he does is sensational. He has made the most spectacular catches. Runs and throws with the best of them.… Slides hard, plays hard. He is sensational and just about as popular with local fans as he can be—a real favorite.” Leo Durocher paid close attention to one line in particular: the scout noted that the Louisville pitchers knocked Mays down several times, “but it seemed to have no effect on him at all.” If Durocher had any doubts about Willie’s toughness, the report eased his mind.

  DeBerry did concede that Willie had a few flaws: “He ran a bit with his head down. There may have been a few times when his manager needed a rope.” This remark probably meant that Willie was a bit too free on the bases, ready to steal in almost any situation or to try to take an extra base on a ball hit in the gap. But on the whole, “this player is the best prospect in America.” DeBerry, like most seasoned scouts, was not given to overstatement. When he called Willie the best prospect in America, he was fully aware of a young man named Mantle who had just begun to play for the New York Yankees.

  About four months after he scouted Willie, DeBerry died of a heart attack. Roger Kahn, who knew him, said, “I’ll bet Hank thought his evaluation of Willie Mays was the culmination of a life’s work.”32

  After hearing the news from Heath, the Giants’ prize prospect hesitated for a moment, then told his manager to call Durocher back—he didn’t want to go. It was Heath’s turn to be dumbfounded. How could any young player feel that way, he wanted to know. Willie went through a litany of reasons: he was happy in Minneapolis and wanted to help the Millers win the pennant. Most of all, he still didn’t think he was ready to hit big league pitching. And there was another reason that wasn’t known until years later. “Willie had a girlfriend there,” said Charlie Einstein. “There weren’t a lot of black girls in Minneapolis at that time, but most of them were rabid baseball fans. He met a very nice girl at the ballpark and came very close to getting serious with her. I always wondered what became of her.”33

  Back in New York, Mickey was also in the process of finding himself a girl, but definitely not one he’d be bringing home to mother.

  Heath, of course, knew that Mays’s response would be unacceptable to Durocher. What the hell, Durocher asked, did he mean that he wasn’t coming to New York? Willie hadn’t heard such forceful language from a baseball man since he was a teenager and Piper Davis had straightened him out. But he still insisted that he couldn’t handle major league pitchers. “What are you hitting now?” Durocher asked him. “.477.” “Well, do you think you could hit 2 fucking 55 for me?” Willie swallowed hard and mumbled, “I think so.” “Okay, then,” the manager told him. “Quit costing the ball club money with long-distance phone calls and join the team.”

  Heath’s young outfielder hung up the phone and quietly told his former manager he had been called up. Heath shook his hand and wished him all the best. Three days later, in the Sunday Minneapolis Tribune, there was a special ad placed by Horace Stoneham written to the Twin Cities’ desolate fandom: “We feel that Minneapolis baseball fans, who have so enthusiastically supported the Minneapolis club, are entitled to an explanation for the player deal that on Friday transferred Outfielder Willie Mays from the Millers to the New York Giants. We appreciate his worth to the Millers, but in all fairness, Mays himself must be a factor in these considerations. On the record of performance since the American Association season started, Mays is entitled to this promotion and the chance to prove that he can play major league baseball.” Stoneham added that the Giants would do their best to give the Millers’ fans a winning team, but the fans knew that no matter who the parent club sent them, they would never have another Willie Mays.

  The Millers traveled to Sioux City, where Ray Dandridge, who had told Willie that soon he would be eating steak, walked into the clubhouse and heard the news that Mays was on his way to the big leagues. Dandridge packed the belongings Willie had left behind so they could be sent on to him in New York. The veteran had mixed emotions—he was thrilled for the young man, but full of anxiety about his own future. He was hitting over .360 at the time and would finish the season at .338. Would the Giants be calling him up as well? In his heart, he knew the truth: he’d never be getting that call. He was thirty-seven, and his time had passed. For Willie—and Mickey—it was just about to begin.a

  *In March 1987 Dandridge, at his home in Palm Bay, Florida, picked up his phone and was told he had been voted into the Hall of Fame. It took him a few seconds to realize the call was not a joke. Finally, he muttered a quiet “Thank you” and burst into tears.

  † Gifford was the most popular athlete on the Southern Cal campus, but on this day he was upstaged by Mantle. In later years, Gifford would be critical of Mickey and berate the press for making a hero out of someone with such a sordid private life—ironic considering that Gifford would eventually endure his own sex scandal. It’s possible his resentment began that day in 1951 when Mickey Mantle, not Frank Gifford, was BMOC at Southern Cal.

  ‡ Jensen had been a football star at the University of California and was a good enough baseball player to beat out Mickey for the 1958 MVP Award.

  § The exterior of the venerable old hotel still stands; it is now a home for the elderly, after an extensive renovation. It can be seen in its faded splendor in scenes from John Cassavetes’s 1980 film Gloria.

  ‖ Piersall had spent the first 121 games of the season playing for the Birmingham Barons, wowing the fans at Willie’s old ballpark, Rickwood Field. Many rated him as equal or superior to Mays as an outfielder. Alf Van Hoose, a columnist for the Birmingham News and the official scorer for the Black Barons’ games, saw both of them play and wrote a column on the debate that caused a minor uproar in the sports pages of both black and white papers. According to Van Hoose, Mays and Piersall were about equal in the ability to run down balls hit over their head and in having the range to cover ground in all parts of the outfield. Piersall was rated slightly better at getting a fast break on a ball, while Mays had a slight edge in hustle, alertness, and throwing.

  a There was an even more bitter irony connected to Mays’s ascension to the big leagues, though Willie did not realize it until he had been with the team for a few days. The Giants had to release someone from their roster to make room for the rookie. The player they let go was the great Artie Wilson, Willie’s teammate and mentor with the Black Barons, the last man to hit over .400 in organized baseball. Wilson, who was thirty, had played in just nineteen games for the Giants, mostly as a pinch-hitter and late-innings defensive replace
ment. He moved to the West Coast and played for ten more seasons in the Pacific Coast League, but never again got a shot at the majors.

  8

  “Is That Mickey and Willie?”

  Tom Hanks may have thought there was no crying in baseball, but as the summer of 1951 approached, the sport’s two most highly prized rookies were weeping.

  Major league pitchers are a community within a community, and word quickly got around that nineteen-year-old Mickey Mantle had weaknesses. From the right side it was high fastballs, slightly up out of the strike zone, which for some unexplained reason he simply couldn’t lay off. From the left side it was low outside curves or other breaking pitches. Mickey began striking out—in bunches.

  Mantle’s shyness had, up to this point, masked a ferocious temper. After striking out six times in a doubleheader in June, he began assaulting water coolers again, a serious enough offense when committed at Yankee Stadium, but downright unacceptable when it occurred in other ballparks around the league. After fanning twice against the St. Louis Browns, Mickey destroyed the cooler in the visitors’ dugout, much to the amusement of Hank Bauer and Yogi Berra, who did not truly understand how frustrated their new phenom was.

  Yogi thought he could lighten the atmosphere with a joke. “Why are you so nervous?” he asked Mickey. Mantle mumbled that he wasn’t. “Then how come you’re wearing your jock strap outside of your uniform?” Yogi said with a grin. Mantle actually glanced down to see if it was true.1

  Bill Veeck, who had just become principal owner of the Browns (after selling off his interest in the Cleveland Indians in 1950), called George Weiss in New York and suggested that the Yankees, with all their money, should pay for the water cooler Mickey had demolished. Weiss chuckled good-naturedly. Veeck wasn’t kidding.