by Allen Barra
The report, of course, was a waste of time. It didn’t take a special committee to determine that a man playing baseball had an easier time than a man in a foxhole or a tank. And the players themselves had nothing to do with where they were assigned and what their duties were. Of course certain officers pulled strings to get the best athletes on their company baseball teams (just as the corrupt officer in From Here to Eternity wheels and deals to get Montgomery Clift’s Robert E. Lee Pruitt on his boxing team). Mays was no more to blame for spending the Korean War playing Army baseball than Mantle was for receiving a 4-F from his draft board.
But the difference between them was this: Willie’s service time was, if anything, a boost for his public image, while Mickey’s rejection by the draft board would stain his reputation for a decade.
Mickey’s titanic home run at Griffith Stadium had put him on the cover of Time magazine and helped him become a household name. But it didn’t do much to enhance his stature with the New York press or Casey Stengel—“If he thinks he’s got it made,” Mantle’s manager told Milton Gross, “I can show him where he’s wrong”12—or for that matter, with the New York fans. The fans expected a spectacular home run every time they saw him play. Even the occasional short home run drew boos from some idiots in the stands.
As Mantle’s maturity as a ballplayer grew, his immaturity as a man became more evident. Veteran sportswriter Maury Allen, my neighbor in nearby Montclair, New Jersey, recalled an incident that for him typified Mantle’s childish attitude toward the press at the time. “It was in either May or June, I can’t remember which,” he told me, “but it wasn’t too long after he hit that long home run off Stobbs. He was standing in the batting cage at Yankee Stadium, and I got up close to watch him take his cuts. He had been the subject of some uncomplimentary stories about how that long home run had caused some people to overrate him, that he still wasn’t playing up to his potential. I wasn’t one of them.
“I had written about how he was playing great ball for a twenty-two-year-old and everyone should be happy to watch him ease into DiMaggio’s role of leadership with the team. Anyway, he stepped back from the plate, looked at me, and said, ‘Yer jus pissin’ me off standin’ there,’ and stared at me until I moved away. I was appalled, but I almost burst out laughing. With Mickey, I soon found you had to get used to that kind of behavior.”13
Just before the All-Star break, Mickey sprained his left knee while getting a quick jump on a liner nearly hit over his head by Cleveland’s Al Rosen. Fluid accumulated under the kneecap. He played like he’d played most of the time: hurting. In August, setting up to make a throw from the outfield on a runner attempting to tag from third base, he tore ligaments in his right knee, the one he had twice had surgery on. Stengel wanted him out of the lineup; Mickey exasperated his manager by putting on a leg brace and staying on the roster.
His “off” season, as most writers called it, included a .295 batting average, 24 home runs, 105 runs scored, and 92 RBIs. Hardly anyone mentioned that the injuries kept him out of twenty-four games and limited his at-bats to 461, the lowest total he would have until 1962. In the World Series that year, against a superb Dodger team, he hit just .208 and struck out 8 times in 24 at-bats, but he made his contribution with two spectacular home runs. In Game 2 in New York, with the game tied at 2–2 in the eighth with two outs and a runner on first, Mantle hit a home run into the right-field seats. It was a “short-porch” job that didn’t even rise to the second deck, but impressed everyone all the more because it was a line drive.
Then, in the third inning of Game 5 in Brooklyn, with the bases loaded and the Yanks leading 2–1, Mantle, batting against right-handed reliever Russ Meyer, stroked a long opposite-field home run into Ebbets Field’s upper deck. He was just the fourth player in baseball history at that point to hit a grand slammer in the World Series. The shot scored what proved to be the winning runs in an 11–7 final.
It’s a measure of how desperate Mantle still felt at this point in his life that he would later talk about the importance of that one swing. The grand slam meant so much to him, he later recalled, because “baseball wasn’t a game to me as a spectator understands it. It was my job and my living and all I knew. Without it, I was going to be dragging fence posts back in Commerce or carrying a pick down to the zinc mines.”14
In November 1953, Tom Greenwade, the scout who had bamboozled Mickey and his family out of thousands of dollars when he signed him, was assigned by the Yankees to take Mickey to visit Dr. Dan Yancey in Springfield, Missouri. The knee he had hurt before the All-Star break needed medical attention. Mickey swore at first that he would not have an operation under any circumstances; after looking at the X-rays, he relented. In February, Mickey was back in Springfield again; this time Yancey removed a fluid-filled cyst from the back of his right knee. Ordered to take it easy through all of spring training, Mantle complied.
To some sportswriters, Mickey seemed to be loafing, and several articles critical of him questioned his commitment. What made them worse was that several of these stories revived a photograph taken near the end of the 1953 season. In September, the Yankees were closing out the season against the White Sox; in the late innings of what would be a lopsided Yankees victory, Mickey began to blow a huge bubble from a wad of gum that seemed implanted in his cheek. An Associated Press photographer with a telescopic lens got the shot, and the next day Mickey’s teammates, much to Stengel’s irritation, were ribbing him about his bubble-blowing skills.
Something good did emerge from the incident: Frank Scott, who by now was handling Mickey’s endorsement offers, called the Bowman bubblegum company and made a deal for Mickey to endorse its product. Bowman leapt at the chance, and soon Mickey had an extra $1,500 to split between Merlyn, for Mickey Jr.’s baby food and other household expenses, and Lovell back in Commerce. He didn’t reveal until years later that on that afternoon against the White Sox he had actually been chewing Bazooka bubblegum.
Still, the bubblegum photo did little for Mickey’s image with the press. In fact, some were questioning whether Mickey’s bubble had indeed burst. “In the spring of 1954,” Dick Schaap would later recall, “no booming fanfare surrounded Mantle. In fact, many of the men who had predicted greatness for him only one year earlier were forced to second-guess themselves.”15
The bubblegum incident incensed Stengel, and he didn’t mind letting the press know it: the phrases “juvenile silliness” and “kid stuff” began to appear in the sports pages when Stengel talked about his prize center fielder. Mickey sulked but kept his mouth shut. Some sportswriters, though they did not say it at the time, felt that Casey’s punishment far outstripped Mantle’s crime. “More important than Mantle’s apologies,” wrote Schaap, “was the way Stengel’s voice thereafter took on an edgy tone when he referred to Mantle by his pet name of ‘Ignatz.’ ” There was something almost derisive, he thought, in linking Mantle, a player who was supposed to be the successor to Ruth, Gehrig, and DiMaggio, with the name of a comic strip mouse (from Krazy Kat). “There is a hint here,” he felt, “that in ambition Mickey falls short of his muscles.”16
In 1954, Mickey Mantle was sensational, hitting an even .300 with 27 home runs, 102 RBIs, and a league-leading 129 runs scored. In the field, he led all American League outfielders—in fact, all major league outfielders, including Willie Mays—in assists with 20. (Mays had 7.) According to Total Baseball’s Total Player Rating, Mantle was the fourth-best player in the league, just behind Ted Williams and slightly ahead of his teammate Yogi Berra. Little of this, however, mattered to the average New York baseball fan, for two reasons. First, although the Yankees won 103 games, the most ever with Casey Stengel as manager, they failed to appear in the World Series for the first time in six years. The second reason was Willie Mays. The distance of Mantle’s home run and his World Series heroics were yesterday’s news. New York was about to be engulfed in a baseball tidal wave the likes of which it had not seen since Babe Ruth was at his peak. Willie Mays
was back.
Willie came out of the Army bigger and stronger than when he had reported for duty. The scales showed a gain of only about three pounds, putting him up to 185—the weight Willie would carry for practically his entire major league career. But it was 185 pounds of awe-inspiring muscle. “All his baby fat was gone,” recalled Monte Irvin. “Not that there was a lot of it to begin with.”17
The Army’s daily regimen of calisthenics, running, and baseball had kept Willie in superb condition. Longtime Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully told Mays’s second biographer, Arnold Hano, “When you first see him in uniform and read his physical statistics, he does not impress you as a terribly big man. But when you see him with his shirt off, he looks like the heavyweight champion of the world.” Mays, wrote Hano, “has a magnificently muscled upper torso, upper arms, shoulders, and chest. He would undoubtedly have had such a torso even without Army exercises, but Fort Eustis hurried it along.”18
Roger Kahn recalled seeing Mays in the Giants’ locker room during 1954 spring training. “Mantle,” he said, “had the most incredible upper body I had ever seen on a ballplayer, maybe anywhere. When I saw them both in the 1951 World Series, I thought Mickey was bigger and stronger. By 1954, Mickey was still a little bigger than Willie, particularly in the chest and arms, but it was closer.”19
On a cold March 2, the Giants sent Frank Forbes to accompany Mays to spring training in Phoenix. Forbes met a grinning Willie at the Fort Eustis separation center, and the two immediately boarded a train headed to Washington, where they would be catching a second train for Phoenix. With four hours to kill between trains, Willie dragged Forbes to a theater within walking distance of Union Station to see Shane, which had premiered in September 1953 but, having proven to be hugely popular, had been re-released that spring.*
“We thought that, you know, this was Washington, so for once we didn’t have to sit in the balcony. We could just sit in the middle of the theater with everyone else.” Mays and Forbes watched the movie without incident, but upon leaving the theater they were stopped and searched by two FBI agents. Mays recalled to me many years later: “They looked to me like they were after John Dillinger.” Forbes was indignant; Mays was baffled and scared. At first he thought they had violated some sacred rule by sitting with white people in a movie theater.
It turned out that the agents had been tipped that two dark-skinned men they were looking for might be in that theater. After a few intense minutes, Forbes made it clear to them that they had nearly arrested the 1951 National League Rookie of the Year and that they would both be in hot water if the matter was pursued. It was never revealed who the agents were looking for or why they stopped two well-dressed black men coming out of the movies, but it almost certainly had something to do with an incident that had happened the previous day when four Puerto Rican nationalists who wanted separation from the United States had opened fire in the House of Representatives, wounding five congressmen. After some embarrassed apologies and handshakes, Forbes and Mays boarded their train to New Orleans, which would continue on to Phoenix.
Willie’s troubles didn’t end there. When the train stopped in the Crescent City, he jumped off to get a sandwich and soda, but by the time he got back the train had pulled off, with a frantic Forbes yelling to the conductors that he had “lost” Willie Mays. Willie quickly called Durocher in Phoenix and told him he was going to be five hours late. Leo, who had been counting the minutes until he saw Willie again, exploded. “Goddammit, didn’t they teach you about trains in the Army?” he screamed into the phone.
When Willie finally arrived in Phoenix, the scene was eerie: there was no one there to greet him. In the clubhouse, the Giants’ equipment manager, Eddie Logan, didn’t even look at him. Just as Willie’s feelings were on the verge of being hurt, the Giants’ new pitcher Johnny Antonelli, recently acquired from the Braves, jumped out of the dugout and yelled, “Hey, Leo, here comes your pennant!” The team had been giving Willie the silent treatment, but Durocher could contain himself no longer.
Willie recalled the scene to Lou Sahadi. “Leo turned around, and with a big grin he rushed at me and grabbed me in a bear hug that took the wind out of me. The last time I had seen him do that to someone was when Thomson’s homer won the pennant for us against Brooklyn.”20
Mays stepped into the batting cage as reporters marveled at his bigger biceps and the snap and power in his enormous wrists. On the first pitch, he stepped into the ball with his familiar lunge and swept the bat into it with his jackhammer swing, releasing his right hand from the bat handle about halfway through the motion. Since everyone there was quiet, watching and waiting to see what Willie would do, the crack of the bat resounded all the louder throughout the ballpark. Collective oohs and aahs and even one or two claps accompanied the ball over the left-field fences. Monte Irvin swore it was the longest shot he had ever seen, at least 430 feet. Antonelli laughed and said, “This kid hits ’em farther than Mickey Mantle.” (He didn’t, although he did hit them about as far as anyone in the National League.)
Durocher, basking in self-importance and reflected glory, told his audience of newsmen, “Willie must have been born under some kind of star. The stage always seems set for him to do something dramatic.”
“Willie Mays,” wrote Arnold Hano, echoing the famous promotion for the Clark Gable—Greer Garson movie, “was back, and Durocher had him.”21
The Giants won their first spring training game with Willie Mays, 7–2. In what would prove to be an omen for the season, their opponent was the Cleveland Indians. Afterward, reporters ignored nearly all the other Giants and crowded around Mays’s locker. “Willie answers all your questions breathlessly,” wrote Bill Roeder of the New York World-Telegram and Sun. “He sounds like a guy who has just been told that his house is on fire.”22 The press couldn’t get enough of him. One reporter shouted out, “How much money you going to ask for? Are you going to ask for $25,000?” Mays, who would sign for $13,000 that year, appeared to be stunned. “You crazy, man? If I ask for that kind of money, that man”—presumably Horace Stoneham—“take a gun and shoot me.”23
The Giants beat Cleveland again the next day, with Mays hitting two doubles and making a sensational backhanded stab of a line drive that appeared to be in the gap. After the game, Cleveland manager Al Lopez, who had been watching Willie at batting and fielding practice as well as on the field, was asked to give his assessment of the twenty-three-year-old Giants outfielder. His answer stands as all-time proof that the most intelligent men can sometimes make the dumbest of statements: “Mays is a .270 hitter who might hit .300 if they teach him to bunt down the third base line.”†24
He never did learn to bunt. Early in the season in a game against the Cardinals, Mays came up with runners on first and second and no outs. He attempted a bunt down the third-base line, but the pitch was up and in, and all he did was tap a dribbler to the pitcher, who fielded it and threw to third for the force-out. A visiting sportswriter cracked, “Ah-hah! They finally found Willie Mays’s weakness—he can’t bunt!”25
Sometime in 1954—Arnold Hano reckoned that it happened in the spring before the start of the 1954 spring season, while Tris Speaker’s biographer, Timothy Gay, places it in the fall, the day after Mays’s catch off Vic Wertz in the World Series—two of the greatest center fielders of all time, many said the two greatest center fielders of all time, met in person.‡ Speaker was curious about the basket catch that Mays had perfected while in the Army. “See?” Mays lectured Speaker. “When I grab the ball that way with my right hand, I never get mixed up with the fingers of my left hand. They ain’t there.” Bill Rigney, who replaced Durocher as the Giants manager in 1956, related the story to a sportswriter. “He actually taught Speaker something,” Rigney felt.
Whatever they talked about, Arnold Hano concluded, “it was apparently Mays who did the talking.”26
On April 13, 1954, against the Dodgers, Willie Mays finally played his first opening day game with the Giants. It gave hi
m a chance to face off with New York’s other great National League center fielder, Duke Snider, who, at twenty-seven, was at the peak of a Hall of Fame career, having hit .336 with 42 home runs the previous season. As if intent on wasting no time catching up to Mickey Mantle, Mays, in the sixth inning of a 3–3 tie, lashed out at a Carl Erskine fastball and hit a line drive over the 414-foot marker of the Polo Grounds’ left-field upper deck. Arnold Hano wrote at the time that the ball would have gone 600 feet had it not been stopped by the seats. (Hano confessed to me fifty-six years later that he was exaggerating, but insisted, “I think it might have gone at least 500.”27) As if to toss his hat into the ring of the ongoing debate on who hit the ball harder, Branch Rickey began telling any sportswriter who would listen that Willie Mays swung with more power than any other player in the game—a statement that took in, of course, both Snider and Mantle.§ For his part, Willie found the home run tremendously satisfying; the spotlight was back on him. “Now,” he said in 1988 as he recalled that frame of mind, “it was my turn to show Mickey.”28
The Giants’ 4–3 victory ignited a Willie Mays frenzy that would not cool for the entire season. It might well have been that no baseball player, no athlete ever, fired up New York as Willie Mays did that season. The day after Willie’s home run, the New York Post’s Jimmy Cannon, one of the most widely read and certainly the most hyperbolic sports columnist of his time, wrote a piece titled “You’re Willie Mays—A Young Legend.” “You’re Willie Mays of Fairfield, Ala., who is part of the small talk of New York. This shall be your city as long as your talent lasts.” Mays, with only one rookie season and just 156 games of major league baseball under his belt, was already taking on the status of an icon: “Strangers, aching with loneliness, spoke to those who sat alongside of them [at the Polo Grounds] and they mentioned your name … you brought people together in the bantering arguments of sports. You made time pass for the bored with a bright brush. It is a fine accomplishment in a terrible age.… Your frantic image dashed across the screens of television sets.… You’ve become a metropolitan fable told in saloons and pool rooms and related on street corners, in home and playground.”29