by Allen Barra
Those who bet on Mickey making it to the kickoff lost, but after a furious road trip Mickey, wearing a sport coat, slacks, and two-toned shirt, did get to the game in time to see almost all of the second half. He saw his brother Ray break ninety-six yards for a touchdown in a 13–0 whitewash of Picher.
One of the first things Mickey and Merlyn saw their first day back in Commerce was a proud notice painted on the window of Ott Chandler’s drugstore: OUR MICK, OF THE NEW YORK YANKEES, IS THE MOST SENSATIONAL ROOKIE OF ALL TIME. Mickey grinned and graciously neglected to point out that he was actually in his second year in the big leagues.
In the Sunday paper, Mickey was no doubt pleased to see a syndicated story in which Hall of Fame second baseman Charlie Gehringer told a reporter that if he were choosing one player from any major league team to start a team with, he’d choose Mickey Mantle. Also, he might pick that kid from the Giants who was in the Army.
“I have no pride in my Army career,” Willie Mays confessed in his 1966 memoir, “but I have no apologies for it, either. I did what the man said.… So everybody came through just fine, and I played in something like 180 games in the service.”15
Leo called him about every other day to see how he was faring. What Willie didn’t tell him over the phone—perhaps he was laughing too hard at a sputtering Leo sounding like Donald Duck—was that
I was working on something. They’d assigned me to the physical training department at Camp Eustis, and put me on instruction work. And there was this one boy there who taught the way to catch a fly ball was to hold his glove like he was taking out an old watch and looking at it.
I said to him, “You gotta be crazy.”
“Why?” he said.
“Because,” I said, “only way to catch a routine fly ball is to hold the glove up in front of your eyes.”
“Why?”
“Because,” I said, “that way you never lose sight of the ball.”16
The boy told Mays he would demonstrate his theory. After catching a fly ball Willie’s way, he then allowed the ball to drop into his upturned glove, positioned right in front of his stomach. Mays told this story of learning his trademark basket catch numerous times; in none of them did he remember the name of the boy who showed it to him. Nor, to be honest, do any of Willie’s explanations as to why the “basket catch” worked better than the traditional way make much sense:
If I caught it out in front of my face, like I always had before, my body could be in any one of a number of positions—my feet, too.
But if I caught it down by my belt buckle, my body automatically took up what for me was the rightest, most comfortable stance.… I could never be off balance, catching a ball that way.17
Exactly how catching a ball above your head or at your waist would affect the position of your feet—assuming, of course, that you wouldn’t use the basket catch while running hard for a ball hit either in front or in back of you—is simply not explained. Two things can be said about the basket catch: it worked for Willie and for Roberto Clemente (who later swore that he did not pick it up from Mays but developed the technique independently), and it didn’t work for at least two generations of American boys who, trying to use the basket catch, turned their Little League coaches into basket cases.
In November 1952, Mays got a chance to perfect the basket catch during some on-the-job training. The Army gave him a furlough, and he rejoined Roy Campanella’s barnstorming team. Monte Irvin, fully recovered from his broken ankle, marveled at how sharp Mays looked: “You’d never have thought Willie had ever been away. He looked as if he had been playing every day all season.”18 What Irvin didn’t know was that Mays had been playing ball every day all season, sometimes against pitchers on the same talent level that Irvin was facing in the National League, including such major league GIs as the Dodgers’ Joe Landrum and Don Newcombe and the Indians’ Johnny Antonelli (who, to the shock of Mays, Irvin, and millions of New York Giants fans, would be traded at the end of the 1953 season for Bobby Thomson, the hero of the 1951 playoffs).
After the holidays, Willie once again petitioned the Army for a discharge, citing financial hardship as he now had twelve dependents and a pregnant mother with an out-of-work husband; his request certainly seemed reasonable. The Army felt otherwise. “I always have believed,” he told Lou Sahadi thirty-five years later, “that if a lesser-known soldier had gone through that ordeal, he would have been free to leave. I don’t know whether the Army was concerned because the public thought it would be playing favorites or whether there was just some technicality. All I knew then was that I was very sad … it didn’t help my final months in the Army.”19
What may well have been the cause of PFC Willie Howard Mays’s inability to get a discharge was the public furor that surrounded Mickey Mantle’s 4-F designation. In a time of war, the Army wasn’t about to incur public wrath and face accusations of showing favoritism to two star young outfielders from New York baseball teams.
On April 15, 1953, Annie McMorris, Willie’s mother, died while giving birth to her eleventh child. He learned the news while he was stationed at Fort Eustis. He cried unabashedly and was given leave to go home for her funeral. Annie had always told people that she was her son’s biggest fan, reportedly hanging a Giants pennant on her wall and picking up their games on the radio whenever she could. But Willie never revealed whether he harbored any hurt or resentment for his mother having given him up to be raised by her sisters.
In 1954, on Mother’s Day, he spoke briefly to a black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, and praised his mother as someone who had supported him through all his boyhood ambitions to become a ballplayer. “One of the things she told me constantly was how uncertain life was and how futile it was to grieve over the loss of someone you love.… Someone once asked me if I carry a picture of her. I don’t. A picture might take me back to the past, might aggravate the hurt of knowing she is gone—physically. I’d rather carry her image in my heart, and that’s the way she’d want it.”20 But this comment did not sound much like Willie. In fact, it didn’t sound like anything else he ever said about his mother. In none of his numerous memoirs or interviews over the years did he elaborate on his feelings for the mother with whom he had spent relatively little time.
There’s no doubt Willie loved his mother, but it’s also true that the center of Willie’s life was baseball, and Willie Mays’s mother, like Mickey Mantle’s, was never at the heart of that.
* Van Hoose told me this on at least two different occasions. Alf was a longtime admirer of Mays, and the numerous columns he wrote about Willie were collected and reprinted by the University of Alabama Press in 2010. Not to take issue with his characterization of Willie as “Alabama’s greatest athlete,” but it should be noted that besides Mays, Joe Louis, Satchel Paige, and Henry Aaron—to name just three of the greatest—were all from Alabama.
10
“Right Up There with the Babe”
April 1953 was a big month for Mickey. On April 12, two days before the start of the season, the Yankees were at Ebbets Field playing the Dodgers in an exhibition. When Mickey came up, there were the usual jeers, boos, and Brooklyn variations of the Bronx cheer plus the occasional cry of “Slacker!” or “Draft dodger!” Mickey tried to ignore them and chatted amiably with Roy Campanella, one of his favorite rivals. Suddenly the public-address system blared an announcement, “Ladies and gentlemen, now batting, number seven, Mickey Mantle.” And then: “Mickey doesn’t know it yet, but he just became the father of an eight-pound twelve-ounce baby boy!” To celebrate, Carl Erskine fed Mantle a fat fastball, which Mickey slammed on a line off the right-center field wall. As he pulled into second standing up, a smiling Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese extended their hands while Mickey doffed his cap to the Dodger crowd, whose jeers had changed, suddenly, to resounding cheers.
As if to celebrate, five days later, on April 17, Mickey entered, if not baseball history, certainly the realm of folklore. Batting right-handed against the Senators
’ southpaw Chuck Stobbs—and with the wind in his face, everyone there that day swore—Mantle took a titanic swing and slammed the ball over the 55-foot left-field fence at the 391-foot mark, where it ricocheted off a 60-foot beer sign on the football scoreboard. That alone would have put the blast 460 feet from home plate. But the ball continued its flight until it landed in the yard of a house across the street.
In Griffith Stadium, Dick Schaap wrote, “4,206 spectators, 60 ballplayers, a dozen coaches and managers, a dozen sportswriters, and a few hundred assorted freeloaders went temporarily insane. They yelled, whistled, cheered, sighed, gaped, and, somewhat hollowly, laughed.” One man went crazy like a fox. He was Arthur “Red” Patterson, the shrewd publicity director of the Yankees. Patterson bolted out of his seat as though he had been struck by Mantle’s bat and disappeared in the same direction, though not quite so swiftly as the home run.
“On 5th Street, outside the ballpark, Patterson discovered a 10-year-old boy named Donald Dunaway clutching a baseball scuffed in two places—where it hit Mantle’s bat and where it hit the scoreboard. The ball was still smoking.”1 The boy, Patterson later insisted, showed him the exact spot where he had found the ball, in the backyard of a house at 434 Oakdale Street. Patterson quickly calculated the distance from the backyard to the bleacher wall, 106 feet, and came up with 563 feet from home plate.
No one is sure exactly what happened; the amount of money Patterson is said to have paid Dunaway has changed over the years, almost every time the story has been told. Patterson himself told reporters he gave the boy $5 for the ball; in May 1961, when Dick Schaap’s paperback bio of Mantle (one of the volumes in the Sport magazine biography series) was published, the price was “$1 and the promise of three brand-new baseballs autographed by the entire Yankee team.”2
The official distance—that is, the first official distance—was recorded as 563 feet. Before the home run even made it to the papers, it had grown two extra feet to 565.
Years later, Mantle liked to say that Patterson confessed to him that the ball had never even left the park. That story is unlikely, as many claimed to have seen it clear the left-field wall, and longtime Senators fans quickly noted that it was the first home run ever to do so. Researching the home run for the Wall Street Journal fifty years later, I consulted William J. Jenkinson, a historian for the Society of American Baseball Research (SABR). “There’s no authenticity to the story,” he told me. “Absolutely zero. We know the ball was a high fly hit into a strong head wind. Following its trajectory, there is simply no way the ball could have traveled 565 feet, even allowing for the roll when it hit the ground.”
How far could it have gone? “I wouldn’t argue with anyone who said it went 500 feet,” Jenkinson said. “520 feet? Maybe. But 565 seems like something out of myth. My guess is that Patterson was trying to create a standard by which all future home runs would be measured.”3
For what it’s worth, years later Jenkinson succeeded in tracking down Patterson in the San Diego area, where he had retired after more than a decade of PR work for the Padres. “Red told me, ‘Hey, come on. It was my job to make Mickey look good.’ He didn’t actually admit that he had added the distance, but he was clearly defensive about it.” Patterson died in 1994.4
All that can be said with certainty about Mickey Mantle’s most famous home run is that it was the longest anyone in the park that day had ever seen, and that everyone was pretty much in agreement that it went over 500 feet. Mantle later told me, “I kind of went along with what Red said, but to tell you the truth, I wondered what all the fuss was about. I had hit a few home runs before that were longer than the one in Washington—the one on the Southern Cal campus, for instance. And I hit a bunch a lot longer after that.”5 However far the ball went, on April 17, 1953, Chuck Stobbs, Mickey Mantle, and Red Patterson combined to create the tape-measure home run.
What has long been forgotten about that game is how it highlighted Mantle’s extraordinary versatility. In the fifth inning, batting left-handed, he tried to drag a bunt to the right side of the field. He was moving so quickly out of the box that the ball shot off his bat and nearly reached second base while still in the air. This gave Mickey an opportunity to show off his incredible speed: he beat out the hit without a throw being made. In one game, Dick Schaap later wrote, “Mantle hit the longest home run and the longest bunt in history.”6
There was yet another irony to Mantle’s mythical 565-foot homer. Two days later in St. Louis, against the hapless Browns, Mickey hit another breathtaking shot in Sportsman’s Park, where the left-field bleachers were about 380 feet from home plate. Several of his teammates, including Gene Woodling, thought this one went farther than the one in Washington. “I was there when he hit it,” Woodling recalled, “so I know how long the one in Washington went. He hit one out of there [in St. Louis] even better, but they publicized the one in Washington so much that they had to lay quiet on that one.”7
Hank Bauer was even more emphatic: “He hit that ball [in St. Louis] even harder than the one in Washington. It may not have gone as far because it was on a little more of a line than the one off Stobbs, but I think it did go at least as far and probably further. I’ve seen some guys hit home runs almost as far as Mickey, but I’ve never seen like what he did in those two consecutive games against the Senators and Browns. It was awe inspiring.”8
On June 15, Mickey got his first national magazine cover. Time proclaimed him “Young Man on Olympus.” The story, uncredited per the magazine’s policy, called him a “corn-haired youngster out of an Oklahoma high school” and included a superb description of him at the plate as he batted against the White Sox left-hander Billy Pierce: “Bat cocked tight-handed, fingers flexing and caressing the handle, Mantle crouched at the plate and waited.… Mantle dug his spikes more firmly into the batter’s box, hunching his fullback’s body (5 ft.-11 in., 195 lbs.) into a deeper crouch.…
“Mickey Mantle set a muscular chain reaction in motion. Starting in the ankles, rippling through knees, hips, torso, broad shoulders, and 17-in. bull neck, he brought his bat around in a perfect arc to meet the ball with a sharp crack. High and deep it sailed.” The story went on to say that Mickey was “that combination of color, speed and power at the plate that makes baseball turnstiles spin. Naturally, the Yankees are delighted”—though the story did not quote Mickey’s own manager on the subject. “So, with duly diminished enthusiasm, are the other American League club owners. Mantle makes their turnstiles spin, too, and in a year when TV has all club owners worried.” Actually, it was the flight of white middle-class families to the suburbs, away from urban ballparks, that had owners worried, but no one would say that at the time.
While the Time cover story was mostly laudatory, it did, at times, make Mickey seem like a bumpkin with a temper: “ ‘Standing around the outfield,’ he was quoted as saying, ‘I used to hope that they wouldn’t hit to me. I was afraid I’d drop it. But now I just catch it and throw it in.’ This kind of casual, frank statement given in an offhand manner, has raised some doubt among professional worriers about Mantle’s competitive spark. Ordinarily phlegmatic, like DiMaggio … Mickey had been known to kick the water cooler or bruise his knuckles on the concrete walls in moments of angry frustration after striking out. Nowadays, reflecting the restrained professional pride of the Yankees, Mantle has learned to bottle up his anger over a strike-out or a miscue. ‘I try not to let it bother me,’ he says placidly.’ ”9
The story pointed out that Mantle was being paid $18,000 a year—a rather eye-opening salary for a twenty-one-year-old in the second year of the Eisenhower era—and also that he was making perhaps twice that again in endorsements. Indeed, Mickey’s celebrity was well in place in the summer of 1953. After playing about two full seasons of major league baseball, he was the most sought-after endorser in American sports, with deals from Wheaties, Camel cigarettes, Gem razor blades, Esquire socks, Van Heusen shirts, Haggar slacks, and Louisville Slugger bats. He also would soon be endors
ing, though not without some reservation, Beech-Nut chewing gum.
Just before his incredible home run in Washington, his first biography, The Mickey Mantle Story, by New York sportswriter Ben Epstein, was published. “One of the very few biographies,” one writer commented, “ever written of someone barely old enough to vote.”10
In May, the Duke of Windsor, on a goodwill trip to America, saw his first baseball game. He was, he told reporters at the game’s end, “delighted.” But he “particularly wanted to meet that switcher [switch-hitter] fellow.” Red Patterson, a busy man that year, happily shuffled the Duke into the Yankees’ locker room, where flash bulbs immediately began popping. “I’ve heard about you,” said the smiling Duke, extending his hand. An embarrassed but grinning Mickey, in a line that could have come from Yogi Berra, replied, “I’ve heard about you too.”11
Mays received the first and only injury of his Army stint on July 25: sliding into third base during a game at Fort Eustis, he chipped a bone in his left foot. Durocher, with Monte Irvin’s injury fresh in his mind, nearly went into cardiac arrest. Willie recovered quickly. He would not be discharged until March 1 of the following year, but as the summer of 1953 came to a close, for all intents and purposes his uneventful military career was over.
While Mickey was being cursed and booed as a draft dodger by bleacher bums, Willie Mays, along with other major league ballplayers who had put in service time during the Korean War—including Billy Martin and Whitey Ford—were being investigated to see if they had been shown favoritism while in the military; “coddled” was the term that most often appeared in the papers. On July 22, a congressional report was released. Surprise! Several major league ballplayers in the armed forces had been coddled. (And for that matter, so was middleweight champion Sugar Ray Robinson, who was also investigated.)