Mickey and Willie

by Allen Barra

  On the other hand, Willie could not know at the time just how lucky he would be to have been drafted. He would come no closer to combat than an occasional beanball while playing for Army teams, and more important, he would not be subjected to the kind of hatred and derision that tormented Mickey, who, wincing in pain from the osteomyelitis that had kept him out of the service, would hear accusations of “draft dodger” for the rest of the decade.

  In the fall of 1951, as father and son headed back home to Commerce, Mickey realized for the first time how sick Mutt was; doctors in New York had made it clear to him. Mutt probably realized he hadn’t long to live. In the words of one biographer, “Mickey returned to Oklahoma to get married. His father went home to die.”4 Mutt told Mickey he wanted him to marry Merlyn. There would be no more discussion on the subject.

  Like Willie, Mickey went home with his World Series payday, in his case the even more mind-boggling sum of $7,500, a check larger than anyone in his hometown had ever seen. Like Willie, he was a hero, and like Willie, no sooner had he dumped his bags off at home and hugged his mother than he jumped into the car with his pals and headed for the local pool hall. He stayed out past midnight buying and drinking beer, listening to Hank Williams on the jukebox, and telling his pals tales of New York and the larger-than-life characters he had met—Casey Stengel, Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra, and Ted Williams. These were probably some of the last hours of pure relaxation that Mickey Mantle would know for the rest of his life.

  On December 23, Mickey and Merlyn were married in a joyless ceremony at her parents’ home in Picher. Only the immediate families and a best friend or two of Mutt’s were in attendance. The bride and groom spent their first night together in what Mickey would later describe as “a dumpy little motel” a few miles from Picher. The honeymoon didn’t last long. Mutt’s deterioration could no longer be ignored. Mickey and Merlyn braved the treacherous winter highways of the Midwest to take Mutt to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where doctors confirmed what Mickey had been told in New York: his father’s condition was terminal.

  Unbeknownst to family, friends, the press, or anyone outside the Yankees’ front office, Mickey had another reason for going to the Mayo Clinic. After an afternoon exhibition game during his first spring training in Fort Lauderdale the year before, Mickey had gone on a drunken tear with teammates who were never named; a Yankee club official, also never named, checked him into a hospital for treatment and dispensed enough cash to ensure that the incident never made it into the papers. In return, the Yankees insisted that Mickey seek treatment during the off-season. While Mutt was dying, Mickey, scarcely five months past his twentieth birthday, was fighting a drinking problem.

  Early in April, mere weeks before Willie was due to report for military service, Leo Durocher brought the Giants from their Arizona training camp to his house in Santa Monica, California. Leo and his wife, actress Laraine Day, counted several Hollywood stars in their social circle, and at a party Leo threw a happy Willie shook hands with, among others, Ava Gardner, Frank Sinatra, Kirk Douglas, and Jack Benny. Humphrey Bogart, who was there with his wife, Lauren Bacall, kidded Mays for having overtaken his favorites, the Brooklyn Dodgers, in the previous year’s playoff and told him he was glad for the Dodgers’ sake that Willie was going to be away for a while. If you had to get ready for a stint in the Army, this was the way to do it in style.

  On May 6, the defending NL champion New York Giants were at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis, where they lost to the Cardinals, 9–1. On that same day, the defending world champion New York Yankees played the Cleveland Indians at Yankee Stadium. They lost, 1–0, that afternoon, and Mantle was not in the lineup; Irv Noren played center field. Earlier in the afternoon, as he was dressing in his rooms at the Grand Concourse Hotel, where he now lived with Merlyn, Mickey picked up the phone. It was his manager. “Hi, Skip, what’s up?” Casey took a deep breath and said, “Your mother called. She thought you were here at the Stadium.” Mickey would later remember that he looked out the window and stared out at the traffic along the Grand Concourse. Stengel began to stammer, and then told him the news that his father had died in a Denver hospital. Thirty-three years later, with unabashed emotion, Mantle recalled his reaction: “My father was dead. Why? What had happened to him in the thirty-nine years of his life, with all the scrambling and disappointments and frustrations? Where did it get him? He needed me and I wasn’t there. I couldn’t make it up to him. He died alone. I cried ‘What kind of God is there anyway, to let him die like that!’ ” He slammed his big right fist into the wall and told Merlyn that he was going home for the services. Merlyn was taken aback; she told him she wanted to be there too. Mickey told her, “No, you don’t need to,” and walked out of the room.

  Mantle made little mention of his reaction to his father’s death in his earlier recollections, but in his 1985 memoirs, he claims he went to the Stadium and “when I got out to the ball park, Casey called me in his office. ‘I’m really sorry, Mick, we all hate it. You can sit out the game tonight if you like, but I really think you should try to play.’ I did play. I’m sure Dad would have wanted me to.”5 No doubt that’s what Mutt would have wanted, but the box scores at Baseball-reference.com and Baseball Almanac do not list Mantle in the lineup that day.

  Leaving Merlyn in New York, Mickey went home for the funeral. Mutt was buried in a miners’ cemetery, the Grand Army of the Republic Cemetery in Ottawa County, alongside Uncle Tunney and Grandpa Charles; after the handful of mourners left, Mickey stayed alone by his father’s grave. Lovell came over and tapped him gently on the shoulder, telling him the car was waiting. Mickey told her to go on ahead, he would catch up. Three days later, he returned to Merlyn at the Concourse Plaza Hotel. His misery was easy to put a face to; Merlyn’s was not. The Concourse Plaza, as Mantle admitted, “wasn’t the Ritz.” Whenever Mickey was gone, Merlyn stayed alone. The room cost $100 a month (admittedly no small cost after Mickey peeled money from his paycheck to send back home), and it didn’t have a stove, refrigerator, or television set. The walls were bare. When he was paid, Mickey would give her a $20 bill for food and tell her that if she ran short, “order in and charge it to the room.”6 Her only diversion was visiting other players’ wives, hoping they had TVs.

  The Giants beat the Dodgers, 6–2, on Wednesday, May 28. It would be Willie’s last major league game for nearly two full seasons. Mays’s performance in the game was unremarkable—he was hitless in four at-bats. (He would leave the Giants hitting just .236 in 127 at-bats with only four home runs, though no one thought that indicated what he would have done over the entire season.) What was memorable about the afternoon was the reaction of the Brooklyn crowd: when Mays’s name was announced before the game, Dodger fans let out an earsplitting roar for the boy-man who had helped keep them out of the World Series the season before. “This was in Brooklyn, mind you,” wrote Red Smith the next day in the New York Herald-Tribune in a tone of ashen awe, “where ‘Giant’ is the dirtiest word in the language. And the giant they were talking about and cheering is a baby only one year in the major leagues, a child who is only learning to play baseball.”7

  After the game, in words that sounded scripted but that Willie spoke sincerely, he told reporters, “It’s undoubtedly for the best. I’m still young, and I might as well do my Army duties now. If everything goes well, I’ll be only twenty-three when I get out. Many a fellow hasn’t even reached the majors by then, so there will be plenty of time for me to play baseball. I’ll probably be better off, stronger, more mature in every way.”8 No matter who helped him prepare his statement—and Monte Irvin is a likely candidate—that is exactly the way things turned out.

  As Willie left Ebbets Field, Dodgers fans clamored for his autograph.

  Two nights later, the Yankees lost to the Philadelphia Athletics, 2–1. Mickey Mantle had three hits and provided the Yankees’ only run with a towering 450-plus-foot home run into the right-field upper deck. When he struck out to end the game, according
to the New York Daily News, shouts of “Draft dodger!” and “Commie rat!” greeted him as he headed for the dugout.

  On May 29, PFC Willie Howard Mays reported to Camp Kilmer, New Jersey (named for Joyce Kilmer, the soldier and poet who wrote “Trees”) for induction, and the next day he traveled by train to Fort Eustis, Newport News, Virginia. There he went through eight listless weeks of basic training; at this point it was clear to just about everyone that Mays, who had been assigned to a transportation replacement unit, probably wasn’t going to be seeing any combat. He promptly got into a near brawl with a white sergeant who thought his behavior at roll call insubordinate. (As a joke, Willie had his forage cap turned backward.) Or rather, his sergeant, who grabbed him and threw him to the ground, was brawling. Even though Willie could probably have overpowered his superior with ease, he knew enough not to fight with a white NCO.

  No one, of course, could stay mad at Willie Mays for long, and within a short time he was practically the outfit’s mascot. If Willie didn’t understand what was expected of him when he was inducted, it didn’t take him long to get the message: the Army wanted him to play baseball. He spent most of his time on tour with other major leaguers, including Johnny Antonelli (soon to be his teammate but in 1952 a pitcher for the Boston Braves), the Pirates’ Vern Law, and the Yankees’ Lou Skizas. “Of course,” he recalled to Charles Einstein, “I enjoyed it. I was raised to say ‘Yes, sir,’ and I always respected authority, so the Army and I got along very well.”9

  In turn, authority loved Willie. Horace Stoneham used friends in the Army to keep track of Willie and see that he always felt cared for, and Leo Durocher sent him money for comic books and movies. Leo’s attitude might be described as unabashedly paternalistic: once, he heard that Willie had taken a spill during a pickup basketball game and called him at the barracks to chew him out (“No more basketball, Willie!”). He also didn’t want his prize stealing any bases in meaningless games. Mays quickly found that “Leo couldn’t stand dumb plays, even if he was a few hundred miles away. When he got excited, he would scream and talk so fast he sounded like Donald Duck.”10

  Expectations for Mantle’s 1952 season bordered on the ridiculous. Yankee pitching coach “Milkman Jim” Turner told sportswriters that he had never seen anyone who could excite other players the way Mickey could. (But then Turner had seen Willie Mays only in a couple of World Series games.) “When he gets up to hit,” said Turner, “the guys get off the bench and elbow each other out of the way to get a better look. And take a look at the other bench sometimes. I saw Ralph Kiner’s eyes pop when he first got a look at the kid. Luke Easter was studying him the other day, and so was Larry Doby.” American League umpire Charlie Berry thought that Mantle was so fast that bad calls had taken a couple of hits away from him. Mickey, said Berry, “was so fast that umpires first time they see him, don’t believe him.”11 In other words, they sometimes called him out at first, not believing anyone could get down the line that fast.

  Yet somehow the myth of Mantle’s early career began to take hold—namely, that nothing he did before 1956 lived up to his potential, despite the amazing fact that he was the first player in team history to leap from a Class-C team to the Yankees’ opening-day lineup. Milton Gross of the New York Post would write an article every season before 1956 suggesting that Mantle had actually been something of a disappointment.

  Let’s take a close look at 1952, the first year in which Mickey Mantle supposedly didn’t live up to his potential. Mickey, age twenty, hit .311 with 23 home runs and 87 RBIs in 142 games. A pretty good year for anybody. But Mantle’s year gets better and better the closer we look at it. With 75 walks and 171 hits, Mickey posted an on-base percentage of .394, and thanks largely to 37 doubles and 7 triples, his slugging percentage was .530. And so his OPS—on-base percentage plus slugging percentage—was .924, the highest mark in the league. But no one knew what OPS was at the time; most baseball writers scarcely knew enough to pay attention to on-base percentage. Most of them took note of his strikeout total of 111, shook their heads, and tsk-tsked about how much he still had to learn. Few noticed that he grounded into just five double plays all season long. According to Stats Inc., Mantle was 7.87 in its complex formula of Runs Created For 27 Outs—the highest in the league. Looking back on Mantle’s 1952 season, Total Baseball, using a method devised by analysts John Thorn and Pete Palmer, concluded that Mantle had a Total Player Rating of 4.8—second highest in the NL behind Larry Doby. All this from a player who didn’t reach his twenty-first birthday until two weeks after the World Series.

  Considering how much attention was paid to Mantle, it seems amazing in retrospect that much of his true greatness was hidden from those who watched him most carefully.

  Through most of 1952 the Yankees were locked in a furious pennant race with the Cleveland Indians; they wound up taking the pennant by two games. The big hitter down the stretch was Mantle, who hit .362 over the final three weeks—despite trouble from the knee he had injured in the previous year’s World Series.

  Even those who didn’t appreciate him during the regular season found it impossible to ignore in the World Series. The Yankees beat the Brooklyn Dodgers in a tough seven-game Series. Mantle had 10 hits in 29 at-bats for a .345 batting average; the hits included a double, a triple, and two home runs. He had only three RBIs, but each came at just the right moment. In Game 6, with the Yankees down three games to two, Mickey hit a 430-foot home run into the Ebbets Field bleachers to give the Yankees a 3–1 lead; they hung on to win, 3–2. In the final game, batting from the left side against the Dodgers’ fireballer Joe Black, Mickey broke a sixth-inning 2–2 tie with another towering shot into Ebbets’s right-field seats. When he returned to the plate in the seventh inning, he slashed a single off Preacher Roe to give the Yankees a 4–2 lead. It proved to be the decisive run.

  Mickey had so much ability that many sportswriters were reluctant to credit him with also being a smart player, especially in the field. Free, with DiMaggio’s retirement, to grab anything in his range—on May 20 Stengel had given him the center-field job for good—he made sixteen put-outs in the Series and committed no errors—perhaps his best World Series play ever. In the eighth inning of Game 3, Jackie Robinson hit a sharp single, a low liner, to center field and made his usual daring swerve around first base. The move was obviously intended to test the nerve of the rookie center fielder. Mantle fielded the ball smoothly on one hop. Robinson jitterbugged about a third of the way down the line, trying to get Mickey to throw the ball behind him to first base, as many a National League outfielder had done. He would then break for second, which he often made standing up. In a story for Sport magazine, Milton Gross wrote that Robinson was trying to force “Mantle’s arm against Jackie’s speed, daring, and know-how on the bases. When it is you against Robinson, it is no simple decision to make.

  Mantle elected to hold his throw. Whether it was a deliberate or instinctive decision none can say, but Mantle watched Robinson, and Jackie, watching the fielder, came as much as 25 feet toward second. He slowed down, pretending to go back, and Mickey, meanwhile, came in several steps with the ball before cocking his arm as if to throw to first base. Suddenly, it seemed Jackie sensed he could not make the base. The Dodger stopped, stumbled, got to his feet again, and then scrambled back to first.

  It was a war of nerves on the bases, Robinson drawing on his years of experience and Mantle drawing from some inexplicable well of wisdom that seems to be his despite his youth, and it was a war Robinson lost.

  With that motion, Jackie went into high gear for second, yet Mantle still held his throw.12

  He fired at precisely the right moment, and Jackie was out by perhaps six feet, the only embarrassing moment he suffered in World Series play. No one had ever seen Robinson the base runner shown up like that before.

  Branch Rickey, who, according to legend, had tossed a checkbook at Yankees owner Dan Topping the year before and told him to fill in whatever he wanted for Mantle, saw the play.
“Maturity,” he told sportswriters afterward, “is something that cannot be measured in years. That young man’s arms and legs and eyes and wind are young, but his head is old. Mantle has the chance to make us forget every ballplayer we ever saw.”13 Except perhaps one.

  The following night, after the Yankees had clinched the Series, Jackie Robinson, with typical grace and style, told the press, “Mantle beat us. He was the difference between the two clubs. They didn’t miss Joe DiMaggio. It was Mickey Mantle who killed us.”14 Robinson walked over to the Yankees’ clubhouse to shake Mickey’s hand. Mickey stared at the man whom he had driven from Oklahoma to St. Louis to watch at Sportsman’s Park just a few short years earlier. He would later recall the moment as one of the proudest of his major league career.

  A few days later, all of Commerce was abuzz with the news that Mickey and Merlyn, driving in from New York in Mick’s brand-new Lincoln Mercury, would be in attendance at the high school football game between Commerce and Picher, where Mickey’s sixteen-year-old brothers, twins Roy and Ray, would both be playing halfback. By six o’clock, he had not yet appeared. Down at the Black Cat Café, men interrupted their pool game to check their watches and make bets about whether Mickey would make the nearly 1,400-mile drive in time for the opening kickoff. One of the regulars pointed out that if Mick had been alone, he’d probably have made it, but Lovell, who was with him, wouldn’t tolerate any speeding.