by Allen Barra
Mantle did not learn quickly from his early failures, but simply gritted his teeth and swung harder. He was pushing himself to the point of emotional strain to fulfill Mutt’s dream. Stengel began to lose patience with Mickey, not because he was striking out but because he was swinging at bad pitches. Casey was right about the bad pitches, but raised in an era when making contact with the ball was the hitter’s primary job, he did not understand—as many would not understand for decades—that the new game in baseball was power and that every home run Mantle hit was well worth the two or three strikeouts that it cost. But then, in the late spring of 1951, Mantle had also stopped hitting home runs.
Allie Reynolds tried to tell him about the virtue of choosing the right pitch to hit, of getting ahead in the count and forcing the pitcher to throw him something he could drive. It wasn’t that Mantle paid no attention to Reynolds, but that he was too young to translate Reynolds’s good advice into action. As Hank Bauer put it, “In the summer of 1951 we could see that Mickey wasn’t ready for the big leagues.” But, said Bauer, “it was just as obvious that in a short time he was going to be very ready.”2
When Mickey Mantle came to New York, he was an unpolished hick. Willie Mays, who had already been to New York and played exhibition games in the Polo Grounds with the Black Barons, headed for the big city having actually seen some of America. Mickey arrived in the city in a suit that looked like it came from a road company of L’il Abner; Willie had been given grooming tips by several vets and, at least in comparison to Mantle, looked as if he had stepped out of a production of Guys and Dolls (which, starring Robert Alda, was one of Broadway’s biggest smashes in 1951). On the plane, Willie put his cap and glove (practically all he’d had a chance to grab before leaving the Millers) on the seat next to him. A stewardess asked him with a smile, “Are you Jackie Robinson?” Willie beamed and said no, but he was going to play for the New York Giants and would soon be playing baseball against Jackie. When he arrived in Manhattan on May 25, the Giants were playing under .500 ball and were so far behind the Brooklyn Dodgers that Mays couldn’t help but wonder, “What do the Giants need me for?”3
After a cab ride from LaGuardia to the Giants’ front office, an ebullient Mays shook hands with Doc Bowman, the Giants’ trainer, and Eddie Brannick, New York’s traveling secretary, who presented him with his contract. Without hesitation, Willie, his hand shaking with excitement, signed for $5,000. Brannick put his hand on his new player’s shoulder and hurried him out the door for the train ride to Philadelphia, where the Giants were playing the Phillies.
Bowman went out of his way to make Willie feel that the team was looking out for his interests—Monte Irvin, he told Willie, was going to be his roommate. Irvin, like Mays, had been born in Alabama, although he’d grown up in Orange, New Jersey, right outside Newark. He was twelve years older than Mays and knew him from barnstorming exhibitions, games Willie recalled fondly because he had made more money from them than he had playing for the Giants’ farm team in Trenton.
Mays’s first connection to his big league team involved none of the anxiety that Mantle had experienced. When he got to the team’s hotel in Philadelphia and knocked on his door, he was greeted with “Hi ya, roomie. Does Skip know you’re here?” A smiling Irvin brought him to Durocher’s room; it was the first time in Willie’s life he had seen a hotel suite. His eye took a quick inventory:
This was only a weekend series, but the closet was stuffed with his clothes and shoes. Leo definitely liked the finer things in life.
“Glad to see you, son,” he said. “Glad you’re hitting four seventy-seven.”
He might have made players nervous with his style, but he made me relaxed right away. I see now what he did. He buttered me up.4
At Shibe Park, Mays was surprised to find the Giants clubhouse quiet—but when you’re in fifth place, he reasoned, there wasn’t too much to talk about. His locker was next to Irvin’s. He looked inside and saw for the first time the shirt with the number millions of baseball fans around the world would come to associate with him, 24. “Son,” Durocher told him, “you’re batting third and playing centerfield.” Willie was dazzled. “That sounded to me like something DiMaggio might be doing.… You don’t put a man up third unless you think he’s your best all-around player. In centerfield—I guess of all the fielding positions on a team—that has always been the one filled by a player who can lead the team, take charge, make plays. I just couldn’t believe this was happening to me.”5
Willie walked out on the field and was surprised to find that Shibe Park, home of the Phillies and the A’s, the oldest steel-and-concrete ballpark in America, looked like a larger version of Rickwood Field, where he had made his professional debut. In fact, as described earlier, Shibe had been a model for Rickwood, and Philadelphia A’s owner and manager Connie Mack had visited Birmingham to help lay out the park. Now it was as if all of baseball was conspiring to help Willie hit the big leagues in style.
He felt loose. In batting practice, Willie slammed balls to all fields, including several into the seats. When he walked out of the cage, Durocher was there to hug him and tell him how happy he was to have him there. Players on both teams, Leo said, had stopped to watch him in awe as he took his swings. Unlike Mickey, Willie had not yet made headlines except in minor league parks, but among big league teams the word was out.
Thirty minutes later, he stepped into a major league batter’s box for the first time and faced Bubba Church, a right-hander who had been born in Birmingham just a few miles from Willie’s home. He got one decent pitch to hit and fouled it into the right-field stands. On the fourth pitch, looking for something to pull, he took a curveball on the outside corner for strike three. Chagrined, he dragged his bat back to the dugout, where his teammates grinned and said, “Welcome to the big leagues!” He was 0-for-4 the rest of the afternoon, without a single hard-hit ball, but the Giants won.
The next day, a Saturday, Willie was really welcomed to the big leagues when he had to face Robin Roberts, a twenty-game winner the season before and the best right-handed pitcher in the National League for at least the first half of the decade. Willie went 0-for-3, but took some consolation in having fouled off some pitches and worked Roberts for two walks. Anyway, the Giants won again. The next day, facing a career mediocrity, Russ Meyer, he went hitless in four at-bats, fanning twice, but again the Giants won and reached .500.
On May 28, Mays finally got a chance to bat as a Giant in the Polo Grounds. Many young hitters and outfielders were intimidated by the ballpark’s weird horseshoe configuration—475 feet from home plate to dead center field, 450 to right-center, and 425 to left-center—but the right-field foul pole was a mere 260 feet away, and a corner in left field had a sharp angle only 280 feet from home. The strange dimensions made the Polo Grounds a dream to both right- and left-handed pull hitters, but for most batters the fences were just too high and too far away.
The starting pitcher for the Boston Braves that day was Warren Spahn, who had led the National League in victories for the previous two years and would go on to win more games than any other pitcher in either league during the decade. Spahn, a sly left-hander, knew how to keep hitters, particularly young hitters, from reaching those shallow right- and left-field corners. In the bottom of the first, he got the first two Giant hitters on a pop-up and a dribbler back to the mound. Mays was still batting third—despite his 0-for-12 start, Durocher’s faith in him had not wavered. In later years, Willie could not recall what pitch Spahn threw to him that he drove over the left-field roof for his first major league home run. All he could remember was that it was not a fastball. Spahn couldn’t recall the pitch either. “I don’t think it was a fastball,” he quipped, “because I don’t have one. I think it was a curveball. All I can really remember is that it was a damn good pitch. It looked great heading towards the plate and it looked great flying over the roof.” For the first sixty feet, Spahn added, “it was a hell of a pitch.”6
After the game,
Willie’s enthusiasm was tempered by the fact that Spahn and the Braves won, 4–1. He was relieved, though, to think that his slump was over. It was not. The next day, against the Braves’ tough right-hander Lew Burdette, he went hitless and left four runners on base. It got worse. Over the next four games he didn’t get a single hit; his batting average for his first 25 at-bats in the major leagues was .040. The word was out: the kid had trouble with curveballs (though he had hit that probably-a-curveball from Warren Spahn well over 400 feet).
Two days after losing to the Braves, 6–3, in the second game of a doubleheader, Durocher threw a tantrum in the clubhouse, knocking over a chair, after which he stormed up the stairs to his office and slammed the door. Willie, wondering if Leo’s anger was directed at him, sat in front of his locker and cried while his teammates dressed. A few minutes later, Durocher reappeared in the clubhouse and, as he so often did, put his hand on Willie’s shoulder. “What’s the matter, son?” he asked. In a shrill voice that made him sound younger than his twenty years, the rookie told his manager between sobs that he couldn’t hit big league pitching and he feared the Giants were going to send him back down to Minneapolis. Durocher became angry, but it was a righteous anger of precisely the kind that Willie needed to hear. Listen, he told his phenom, he was the manager and as long as he was, Willie would be his center fielder. In a loud voice, he told him that he had the potential to be the best ballplayer he had ever seen. Go get some sleep, Durocher told him, and start over tomorrow.
As he walked back up the stairs to his office, Durocher stopped, turned, and offered Willie some practical advice. Just stop trying to pull the ball so damn much, he said. Just meet it and hit it to right until you get your timing. Then, Leo promised, things would start to go his way. Oh—and hike your pants up a bit. Leo had long believed that umpires gave players with lower pants legs a larger strike zone. Or at least that was what he told Willie, to give him the illusion that he was getting an edge on the pitcher.
The next day Durocher implemented another shrewd tactic. Rather than simply drop Willie down in the batting order, he asked him if he would help the team by batting eighth. The tail end of the batting order, Leo told him, needed some punch. Willie, flattered that his manager would ask him to help out in any way, gushed, “Of course.” That day against the Pittsburgh Pirates, Mays got two hits, including a triple to right-center field—where Durocher had told him to try to hit the ball—that would have cleared the fences in most big league parks by twenty or thirty feet, and he gunned down a Pirate runner at third base who dared to test his arm on a single to center field. He had also quickly learned not to be intimidated by the Polo Grounds’ cavernous outfield, having discovered that balls hit at even a slight angle between the outfielders might go for singles in some parks but were easy doubles for him at home.
After he hit two two-baggers the next day, Willie and the Giants started on a roll. His teammates liked him, the fans adored him, and to the veteran New York sportswriters he was the black son they never had. But if Willie thought he was going to cruise through his rookie season, he soon discovered there were obstacles he hadn’t yet considered. One of them was a pal from the Negro Leagues he had barnstormed with.
Frank Forbes was a successful black boxing promoter who had worked for and with most of the prominent black fighters of his era, including heavyweight champions Ezzard Charles and Jersey Joe Walcott, as well as the most popular and the greatest pound-for-pound fighter of his and perhaps any other time, Sugar Ray Robinson. Having staged bouts at the Polo Grounds, Forbes had built a good working relationship with Horace Stoneham and the New York Giants. It was no surprise, then, that the Giants turned over the care of their most valuable young property to Forbes. Forbes was offered a business relationship by the Giants: if he would find a safe place for Willie to live and keep a close eye on him, he would be allowed to share in promotions Mays did with the organization.
Through Forbes, Willie met the leading black celebrities of his day such as Robinson and Joe Louis, who had been heavyweight champion for all of Willie’s formative years; he also met entertainers like Billy Eckstine and Dizzy Gillespie, who were as thrilled to be around the Giants’ budding young superstar as he was to be in their presence. Monte Irvin recalled a breathless Willie phoning Cat Mays back in Alabama, saying, “Pop, you’re not going to believe this, but I just met Duke Ellington. He came to the game last night.”7 In fact, Cat had met Duke Ellington when he played with a small combo at Bob’s Little Savoy in Birmingham sometime in the mid-1930s.
Forbes told Time magazine in 1954, “When I first met Willie, I thought he was the most open, decent, down-to-earth guy I’d ever seen—completely unspoiled and completely natural. I was worried to death about the kind of people he might get mixed up with.” It was assumed, of course, that Mays would be living in Harlem, a place Forbes found to be “full of people just wanting to part an innocent youngster from his money. Somebody had to see to it that Willie wasn’t exploited, sift the chaff from the flour, figure out who was in a racket and who was in a legitimate organization.”8
A cousin of Cat’s who lived in Harlem offered Willie a room with his family, but it was crowded and noisy, with Willie’s distant cousins going in and out at all hours. Willie, thought the Giants and Forbes, needed a “good home environment”—meaning not surrounded by family. Through his own contacts, Forbes found David and Ann Goosby on 155th Street and St. Nicholas Place—or about three good Willie Mays pegs from the Polo Grounds. Mrs. Goosby cooked regularly for Willie, did his laundry, and, with Forbes’s help, looked after his every need as no one had done since Willie left Fairfield and Aunt Sarah.
“Willie’s a good boy,” Mrs. Goosby told a reporter from Time, “and all I have to lecture him on besides eating properly is his habit of reading comic books. That boy spends hours, I swear, with those comics.”9 If only Willie had been playing for the Yankees, he and Yogi Berra could have shared their stacks of comics.
Forbes, in turn, enlisted Monte Irvin’s assistance when it came to outfitting Willie and showing him the best restaurants and places to go. Irvin not only was older than Willie but had grown up in a much more sophisticated environment. “He was such a countrified boy,” Irvin told me, “that he had to be shown just about everything, but he learned very, very quickly.”10 Irvin was joking just a bit; Willie was not a country boy. He never rode a horse to school, as Mickey Mantle had. But nearly all young black ballplayers from the South received some ribbing from the older players, particularly those who had grown up north of the Mason-Dixon Line.
Forbes and Irvin felt they had to protect Willie from women. After each Giants home game, the players would find dozens of females waiting at the exit gate, supposedly looking for autographs but, according to Irvin, “really waiting to give Willie their autograph as well as their phone number.” Sometimes, after a day game, Irvin would take Willie out to dinner, and Willie would empty his pockets of all the notes he had collected when leaving the ballpark. “I assumed that none of these girls was up to any good,” said Irvin, “and in the course of our conversation, when Willie wasn’t paying any attention, I’d crumple them up and throw them away.” Sometimes Irvin would find notes from hustlers who wanted to act as Willie’s agent “for commercial deals.” Irvin tossed those messages away as well. Any legitimate businessman, he felt, would approach Willie through the ball club. Mickey could have used similar guidance from the New York Yankees.
Like all New Yorkers, Mickey had to learn to use the subway. On his first underground trip, he asked someone how to get to the ballpark. The fellow, who did not recognize Mantle, told him, No problem, just take the Lexington Avenue Express and get off at 161st Street. Mickey managed to end up on the wrong train and wound up instead at the Polo Grounds, where he heard clusters of happy Giants fans. He asked them what they were celebrating; they told him that the Giants had just beaten the Cincinnati Reds on a home run by their great new rookie, Willie Mays. Once he figured out what had happened, in a
panic, he jogged over the Macombs Dam Bridge until he reached Yankee Stadium. After that, he mostly got around by cab.
Some nights were lonely. Mickey went to the movies as often as he could, catching noon shows when the Yankees had a night game or late shows after day games. “I usually sat in a last row balcony seat, alone, checking my watch because the rules were that you had to be suited up and ready for batting practice three hours ahead of time.” His favorites, of course, were Westerns. Since they were also the favorites of Willie Mays, and since Willie’s favorite spot was the balcony, and since many uptown New York movie theaters were integrated by the early 1950s, Mickey might well have been sitting close to Willie in the dark without knowing it. Or he may have passed Willie on the way in or out, as the Giants occasionally scheduled a day game in New York on days the Yankees were playing at night—and vice versa.
Some nights he was not alone. “Around that time,” he would later say in a memoir, “a very pretty showgirl named Holly came into my life.” Perhaps he met her in the balcony of a movie theater, or at the Stage Deli, eating a reuben sandwich. “Once in a while when the team was in New York and I had the evening free after a day game, we’d go out for dinner or Holly would hang out with me at the apartment on Seventh Avenue. I guess I developed my first taste for the high life then—meeting Holly’s friends, getting stuck with the check at too many fancy restaurants, discovering Scotch at too many dull cocktail parties. It was a lot of fun—while it lasted.”11
It didn’t last too long, but it was long enough to get him into quite a bit of trouble. He would later claim to have met his first “agent” through a phone call—somehow the man got his phone number and woke him up early one morning to tell him of a “golden opportunity” he had for him. Before Mantle had finished brushing his teeth, a “short, chubby guy with a razor-thin mustache” was at his apartment with two contracts. One was for personal services, for which Mickey signed away 10 percent of all his earnings outside baseball for ten years; the second, for two years, gave the “agent” 50 percent of Mickey’s endorsements, testimonials, and appearances.