Mickey and Willie

by Allen Barra

  “You don’t have to sign till you see a lawyer,” the agent reassured him, and of course, he had a lawyer to refer Mickey to. It strains credulity to think that Mantle signed the contracts. Where were Mickey’s roommates to advise him on this? And why didn’t Mickey, who consulted the Yankees and/or his father on nearly everything, ask someone else for advice? The answer is probably that Mickey trusted Holly. Shortly after meeting the shyster agent, Mickey found out that the man was “somehow” acquainted with her and had “sold” her 25 percent of his interest in Mickey’s earnings.

  In his various memoirs, Mickey never identified the man, but six years later, when Holly told her story to a scandal mag, his name was revealed as Alan Savitt. By all accounts, he seemed to be a road-show version of a Damon Runyon character. He promised to get Mickey endorsements, personal appearances, even movie deals: “The sky is the limit, trust me.”

  There was no Frank Forbes to handle Mickey’s affairs or to protect him, as Willie was protected, but luckily Mantle had his own Monte Irvin in Hank Bauer. When Mantle told Bauer about his new arrangement with Savitt, the former Marine was appalled and acted quickly by introducing Mickey to Frank Scott, the Yankees’ traveling secretary, who handled endorsement deals for other Yankee players. This time, Mickey checked him out, asking Bill “Moose” Skowron what commission Scott took from their deals. “The usual 10 percent,” Moose told him. Mantle didn’t have much schooling, but he knew the difference between 10 percent and 50. Bauer then hooked Mantle up with the Yankees’ front office; it didn’t take much muscle from a legitimate law firm to scare Mickey’s “agent” away. Holly, though, would be a bit tougher to get rid of.

  Just before the World Series started, Mickey met his father out in front of Yankee Stadium. Mutt was picking up tickets for himself and a friend, Trucky Compton, who had driven up from Commerce with him. Mickey showed up with … Holly. Smile on his face, Mick introduced her. “She’s a very good friend,” he told his father. Mutt tipped his hat and smiled. A little later he took his son aside and told him that he should “do the right thing and marry your own kind.”

  “It’s not what you think, Dad,” Mickey replied—a rather silly remark considering that it was of course exactly what Mutt thought. One wonders what Mickey had expected his father’s reaction would be.

  At the time, Mutt was sick—though Mickey did not yet know it. It was the Hodgkin’s disease that ran through his family like a curse. He was about to see his life’s dream fulfilled when Mickey stepped on the field for his first World Series game; he was desperate to make yet another dream come true before he died—that of seeing his son settled down and ready to raise a family. And a quick glance at Holly convinced him that Mickey was headed in the wrong direction. Merlyn was a sweet gal, he told Mick; she loved him and she was just what Mickey needed to keep his head straight. Mickey mumbled that he knew that. Well, then, Mutt told him, after the World Series was over, he had better get on back to Oklahoma and marry her.

  Years later, in various accounts of Mickey’s life, Mutt would come under some criticism for trying to keep too tight a rein on his son. Perhaps, but at least in this situation it’s important to put everything in perspective. Mickey was nineteen, an unsophisticated hick with no one to look after him in the big city—as evidenced by the scrapes he managed to get himself into after being in New York for just a couple of months. Under the circumstances, it’s hard to imagine that Mutt Mantle would have given his son any other advice.

  Both Mantle and Mays spent the formative years of their careers under Hall of Fame managers. But while Willie could not have been luckier than to play for Leo Durocher, for Mickey, playing under Casey Stengel was a mixed blessing. Casey was a great manager, much better than Durocher, but personally he couldn’t have been more wrong for Mickey.

  Their managerial philosophies evolved out of their playing careers. Casey made his bones with the Giants; Leo made his with the Yankees. Durocher played more than two hundred games as an infielder with the Ruth-Gehrig Yankees, though he was better known as a shortstop for the Gashouse Gang Cardinals of the mid-1930s. He lasted seventeen years in the big leagues, hitting just .247 with only 24 home runs—Babe Ruth famously referred to him as “The All American Out”—and 31 stolen bases. His only genuine talent was his fielding—he led NL shortstops three times in fielding average—but if bench jockeying had resulted in the scoring or prevention of runs, Durocher would have been at the top of the league. The ultraconservative Branch Rickey thought that Durocher “had an infinite capacity for immediately making a bad thing worse.” Still, when he needed a shortstop for the Cardinals in 1933, Rickey traded for Durocher. Because he learned to survive in the big leagues without being able to hit for power, Leo preferred teams that could get the ball in play.

  Stengel was the better ballplayer, hitting .284 with 60 home runs and 131 stolen bases in fourteen years with the Dodgers, Pirates, Phillies, Giants, and Braves. Casey’s greatest influence was Giants manager John McGraw, and his years under McGraw shaped him as a manager, particularly McGraw’s tactic of “platooning” players to create favorable matchups.

  Leo was a drinker, gambler, and shameless womanizer who cheated on one wife, actress Laraine Day, openly.* His approach to managing was notoriously old-school. When he began his first full season with the Giants in 1949, he immediately began striking from the roster the names who were better known for power hitting than speed and finesse. Casey, less of a tactician than Leo and more of a strategist, was more progressive and better understood the value of power in the new game. The Giants’ loss was the Yankees’ gain in August 1949 when Horace Stoneham, for $40,000 and in accordance with Durocher’s wishes, sent slugging first baseman Johnny Mize to the Bronx, where he proved to be worth his considerable weight as a pinch-hitter and part-time player.

  Sometime in the 1980s, about two decades after his managing career was over, references to Stengel as a “racist” began to pop up. This was in part the result of his famous comment when the Yankees finally signed a black player, Elston Howard: “I got one who can’t run.” For all his flaws, Durocher is seen as a pioneer in race relations, partly for a widely read statement he made to reporters in 1947 that he had seen “a million good colored players” and he would gladly have them on his team if blacks “weren’t barred by the owners.”†

  Leo also stood up to Dixie Walker and several other Dodgers in 1947 when he heard about the rumor of a proposed strike if Branch Rickey signed black players. “I’m the manager of this ball club,” he told them, “and I’m interested in one thing: Winning. I’ll play an elephant if he can do the job. And to make room for him I’ll send my own brother home. This fellow is a great ballplayer. He’s going to win pennants for us. He’s going to put money in your pockets and money in mine.”12 No doubt it took courage for any manager in the late 1940s to take such a stance. Ironically, “this fellow” proved to be Jackie Robinson, with whom Durocher did not get along. Durocher’s preference was for black players who were not sharp-tongued with aggressive personalities. He got along splendidly with Willie Mays.

  Most important, Durocher could see that all Willie needed was seasoning, while Stengel began, in the spring of 1951, a relentless campaign to mold Mickey—a campaign that would continue until Stengel was fired by the Yankees ten years later. Both managers wanted their star outfielders to cut down on strikeouts by learning to make contact with the ball. Mays, to a degree, was capable of this, while Mantle was not. But Durocher had a subtle way of getting Willie to do what he wanted him to do, such as when he suggested that Willie “just meet” the ball and hit it to right field. Casey never put it that way to Mickey; it was always “I think you should do it this way.”

  In the summer of 1951, Willie Mays resented no one, but he soon began to discover that at least a few players around the league harbored some resentment toward him. On June 26, Mays played his first game against the Dodgers and renewed his acquaintance with Roy Campanella, Brooklyn’s genial but crafty It
alian—African American catcher. Like Yogi Berra, his American League counterpart, Campanella’s pleasant demeanor masked a fierce competitive spirit, but unlike Berra, he was not above using race to get an edge. “What do you think of him, Willie?” Campy asked Mays as he stepped into the batter’s box against Preacher Roe. Mays blandly remarked that Roe was a pretty good pitcher. “You’re lucky today,” the catcher informed him. “Wait till you get Don Newcombe tomorrow. He hates colored rookies. He’ll blow you down.” Don Newcombe, a fearsome six-foot-four, 225-pound right-hander from Madison, New Jersey, was the major league’s first great black ace. He had won nineteen games in 1950 and would win twenty-one in 1951. The sentiments attributed to him by his catcher regarding black rookies were false, but Campanella’s baiting of Mays, according to his biographer, Neil Lanctot, was indicative of a feeling that “Willie hadn’t yet paid his dues. Some players like Campanella had banged around the Negro Leagues for years and had left many of their prime seasons behind. Willie, a few of the older black veterans thought, had been coddled by the Giants and, compared to them, hadn’t had a particularly rough time.”13

  Willie soon learned that Newcombe was not averse to brushing hitters of any color back off the plate. After facing him a couple of times, Mays learned that he was no more to be feared than Robin Roberts or Warren Spahn, but was to be no less respected. He also learned to not let himself be distracted by Roy Campanella. “Campy,” he told him the next time the Giants played the Dodgers, “Mr. Leo says I’m not supposed to listen to you.”

  Mickey’s struggles at the plate continued into July. Patience of the kind Durocher had shown with Willie might have paid big dividends for Stengel and the Yankees. But patience was not a cardinal virtue for the organization.

  On the fifteenth, the Yankees were in Detroit for a series with the Tigers. Stengel had just checked into his hotel when he got a call from George Weiss. He then called Mickey into his room to give him the news: the front office had decided to send him down to Kansas City, where, Casey assured him, he would get his swing back. It would just be for a couple of weeks and he’d be back up in no time.

  It wasn’t just the strikeouts. Though they annoyed Casey no end, he didn’t yet understand that the increase in power in big league ball meant an automatic increase in swings and misses. He had been spoiled by the performances of two extraordinary hitters, Joe DiMaggio, who struck out just 369 times in 1,736 games, and Yogi Berra, who ended his career with just 414 strikeouts in 2,120 games. Both these numbers were amazingly low for power hitters. Increasingly throughout the decade, sluggers would fan more and more often while reaching for the fences.

  Mickey couldn’t deny that his overall game was suffering; in a game against the White Sox, he had let a shallow pop fly to right drop at his feet. Ed Lopat, who did not suffer fools on days when he pitched, waited until they were in the dugout before grabbing the muscular teenager by the sleeve. “If you don’t want to play,” Lopat told him, just loud enough for others to hear, though they did not indicate that they did, “don’t screw around with our money.” Mantle later said that after that incident he could see the end coming; what he didn’t know was that it was not the end, just an interlude. When he struck out five consecutive times in a doubleheader with the Red Sox, Stengel told reserve outfielder Cliff Mapes, “Get in there for Mantle. We need somebody who can hit the ball.”14 In a short time, Mickey would have both the position and Mapes’s number 7. But right then it seemed like the end of the world.

  Mickey would later recall that when Stengel told him of his demotion, the old manager had tears in his eyes and told him, on the way out of the hotel, “I’m counting on you.” Had Mickey been able to put his situation in perspective, he would have seen there was nothing unusual about a nineteen-year-old being dropped to Triple-A to get his concentration back, but nothing could assuage the numbing sense of failure and the terrible knowledge that soon he would have to call Mutt and tell him what had happened.

  The train that brought Mickey to join the Kansas City Blues took him to Minneapolis, where they were playing a series with the Millers. Once again, Mickey had missed playing against Willie, this time by less than three months.

  In his first game, Mantle thought that bunting for a hit would be a smart way to show off his speed and let the team know he was hustling. After dragging the ball between the pitcher’s mound and first base for a hit, he thought he’d be congratulated. Instead, manager George Selkirk (a former Yankee himself who just a few years before had managed Yogi Berra at Newark) rudely informed him that he had not been sent there to bunt. Get some hits, he told Mantle, and get your confidence back.

  The Blues, like most minor league teams, were composed largely of players either trying to claw their way into the major leagues or fighting to keep from falling out of professional baseball altogether. Nerves were raw; drinking and fighting were common. Mickey, who was not drinking at the time, later said, “Pitchers carried pints of whiskey in their back pockets, right in the bullpen. It was like a comedy of errors.”15

  In such an atmosphere, Mantle could not get his game back. He wrote home to Merlyn to tell her how much he missed her, but did not dare write to his father. Among the Blues, he alone got fan letters, which caused resentment among the veterans. It irritated them even more when Mickey carelessly left the letters unopened. His teammates who took the time to look at them found out that nearly all were from angry fans accusing him of being a traitor and draft dodger—a few even contained death threats. One day a friend came to visit him from Oklahoma, and he and Mickey went out to dinner. As Mantle walked him back to the car, “a dried-up little old man tottered over, cigarette butt in mouth, looking like some kind of lunatic as he fumbled in his pants pocket for God knows what. Mantle froze; his nerves were almost on edge enough to believe that the old fellow was going to pull a gun on him. But it was just a scorecard. The man wanted it signed.” Mickey snapped at him to get lost, but his friend grabbed him by the arm and reminded him that such fans paid his salary. Mickey apologized, signed the card, “then watched the old guy shuffle away, staring at him curiously, almost laughing because the whole thing was so pathetic.”16

  A few days later, Mickey worked up the courage to call Mutt at the Eagle Picher Mines. Mickey told him he was in Kansas City; Mutt quietly told him that he already knew, that he had been following him in the papers. With a catch in his voice, he told his father that he didn’t think he could play anymore. Mutt asked where he was, and Mickey told him he was staying at the Aladdin Hotel.

  Mickey told the story of what happened next many times. In his recountings, Mutt arrived just a few hours later—the drive took at least five—and sternly, though without anger, told Mickey that he hadn’t raised any cowards. If he couldn’t stick it out in Kansas City, he could come back and work in the mines with his dad. Mickey, stifling tears, told him that he would try again. Mutt, who was throwing clothes in his son’s bag, stopped, smiled, and said, “What the hell, why not?” A little later, in the hotel coffee shop, Mutt reminded his son that “everybody has slumps—even DiMaggio. Take my word, it’ll come together. You’ll see.”17

  And of course it did. Two days later, against Toledo, he hit two home runs over a light tower in right field to go with a double and a triple. One of his teammates jokingly informed him that he should try for only a single in his last time up so he could “hit for the cycle.” So, leading off the ninth, Mickey dragged a bunt down the first-base line and beat it out. Back in the dugout, a satisfied George Selkirk just smiled at him.

  Mantle played in forty games for the Blues, batting .351 and driving in an amazing 50 runs. Near the end of August, he went to see a Western at a Kansas City movie house. He did not, like Willie a few months before, get a call from the ball club that interrupted the picture. It wasn’t until he got back to the team motel that he found out that the Yankees wanted him back in New York.

  Mickey first told the story of his minor league comeback to Sport magazine in 1956 and then
repeated it over and over again through the years with little change. In each version, though, the only person he mentioned was Mutt. “Every time I heard someone in my family tell that story,” Mantle’s son Danny told me in 2010, “I’d hear someone say, ‘Well, damn, Daddy wasn’t the only one who went to see him. We all got in the car and drove over to Kansas City.’ ”

  When Mickey returned to New York, he exchanged his first uniform number, 6, for the one he would always be remembered by—7. It would become the most recognizable—and marketable—number of any baseball player ever. (Mickey was able to take the number because Cliff Mapes, who had worn number 7 since 1949, had been traded to the St. Louis Browns while Mantle was gone.)

  On August 29, Mickey got his first look at the great Satchel Paige, who was by this time at least forty-five years old and was winding down his brief major league career with the Browns, for whom he would pitch his last two seasons in the major leagues.‡ Mantle’s account of their meeting is an illustration of how self-deprecating Mickey could be. He recalled in The Mick:

  We had a runner in scoring position, bottom of the ninth, and I took two straight cuts, missing them both by a wide margin.

  Paige’s next pitch was a fastball. I bunted and ran to first as fast as I could go. It was a foul ball, the last out of the game. Paige doffed his hat and flashed a big toothy smile. I was still running out the play, halfway up the foul line, as the Browns started back to their dugout.