Mickey and Willie

by Allen Barra

  Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays ended 1959 in bad shape, both physically and psychologically. Their teams had been disappointing, and both were booed by the hometown fans. They were hurting—Mantle from old injuries, Mays from stomach distress and dizziness. Their marriages were not happy, and they were both badly in need of money. Mays probably summed it up best ten years later in Esquire: “Mickey used to get booed a lot at Yankee Stadium. I didn’t have any problem like that until later, when the Giants moved to San Francisco. Then I got booed. It wasn’t so much what we were. It was more what we weren’t. Neither one of us was Joe DiMaggio.”1

  During 1960’s preseason, Mickey and Willie again found relief from the pressures of life by playing baseball—against each other. This time it was in an episode of Home Run Derby, the seminal TV sports reality show that presaged the annual Home Run Derby festivities that now take place before the All-Star Game. In early February, Mickey and Willie flew to Los Angeles, where the contest was held in Wrigley Field—the other Wrigley Field, which the family had built for their Pacific Coast team, the Los Angeles Angels.

  The rules were simple: anything a batter swung at and did not hit over the fences between the fair poles was an out. One significant difference between home run derbies then and now was that this one had an umpire calling balls and strikes. Another was that it was played over nine “innings.” Wrigley Field was chosen not only for its warm-weather location but for the fairness of its outfield—the distances were 340 feet to both the right- and left-field walls.

  The prize money was by no means negligible. The winner received a check for $2,000 and was invited back to compete the next week, and the runner-up got $1,000. There was a $500 bonus if a batter hit three home runs in a row, with another $500 for a fourth consecutive home run and $1,000 each for any more consecutive homers. The right-handed pitcher was a strong-armed outfielder named Tom Saffell, who had played for four seasons in the big leagues and, in 1960, was playing left field and pitching for the Hollywood All-Stars. His job was to groove batting practice fastballs down the middle.

  Charlie Einstein, who flew into Los Angeles with Willie to write a story about the home run duel, later sent me a scratchy VHS tape of the derby with a letter. “Mickey,” wrote Einstein, “took these one-on-one confrontations more seriously than Willie, and he wasn’t above using some gamesmanship to get an edge. On the tape you can hear him say to Willie and Mike Scott, the announcer, ‘I’m gonna bat right-handed.’ He sounds like he doesn’t want to put Willie at a disadvantage by batting from the left side of the plate. He was faking a little bit. He didn’t want to bat from the left side of the plate.”

  What Willie didn’t know—what a lot of people didn’t know at the time—was that Mickey was still hurting a lot from his injury in the 1958 World Series, and that it hurt every time he batted from the left side. He actually had an advantage batting from the right, even if there wasn’t a left-handed pitcher on the mound. Before the contest began, Einstein told me, “I heard Mickey mumble to Willie, ‘You wanna put a little money on the side?’ Willie’s eyes narrowed—he thought he had Mickey because Mickey had volunteered not to bat left-handed. Willie later told me they had put down a side bet of $500. Now, you have to remember that was a lot of money back then when these guys weren’t getting multimillion-dollar paychecks. Both of them could have used that money.”

  Willie was the “visiting team”—he wore a Giants gray road uniform. In the first inning, he hit four home runs. “Watch carefully,” Einstein noted. “He allows himself a little grin after the fourth one. Mickey came up and hit a terrific shot that looks as if it traveled over 450 feet. When he walked up to the press box after the inning, he passed Willie and said with a grin, ‘Can I get two for that one?’ Willie laughed at that, but it always bugged him a little that Mickey got so much attention for his tape measure home runs.” In fact, anyone viewing the tape can see that, in his half of the inning, Willie hit a shot almost as far as Mickey’s; it looks as if it sailed into the backyard of a house out past the left-field area of the ballpark. “Willie thought he could hit them as far as Mickey. He couldn’t, but he could hit them pretty far. He once said to me, ‘Maybe I don’t always hit ’em as far as Mickey, but I hit ’em far enough.’ He was right about that. It’s a silly thing, but I think it unnerved Willie just a bit to find out once and for all that he just couldn’t hit a ball as far as Mickey.”2

  Going into the fifth inning. Willie was leading 7–2. When Mickey flopped down in the press box chair, he said, “This is getting embarrassing.” He said it with a grin in that aw-shucks country boy manner. Scott responded, “Well, you just didn’t bring your home run swing with you.”

  But Mickey was working on Willie. In the seventh, with Willie up 8—3, Mickey passed him while going to bat and said, “Willie, man, we ought to add up the length on all these. I think my three went as far as all yours.” Willie tried to laugh it off, but he was a little indignant. “Man, what you been lookin’ at? Did you see the one I hit by that pole in center field? I got you today, man.” Mickey just grinned and made a gesture like Hey, what do you want from me? He then went out and hit three towering homers.

  Willie was now concerned not so much with winning but with matching Mickey distance for distance, and he started overswinging. When they switched places for Mickey’s half of the inning, Mickey said, “You want to double that bet?” Willie just looked at him and said, “You on, man.” But he didn’t get good wood on a pitch for the rest of the contest, and Mickey got three more in the final inning to win, 9–8. If you watch the recording, you can see Willie in the press box, the smile gone.

  So Mickey not only got his $2,000 prize money, he got Willie’s $1,000 for finishing in second place. Willie pointed a finger at him and said, “I’m gonna get you on the golf course.” Actually, he got him at the All-Star Game.

  The 1960 Home Run Derby episodes have since aired on ESPN Classic and are now available, impeccably restored, on DVD.* There’s no better visual record of Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays at bat. Mickey stands in the box with his feet close together, then spreads them as he snaps his brutally powerful shoulders and forearms, bat gripped throughout the follow-through, the barrel slamming into his back. Willie looks remarkably similar to Mickey in chest, shoulders, and forearms; his feet are spread apart wide in imitation of Joe DiMaggio as he shifts his weight forward off his front foot, lunges at the ball, and releases his right hand from the bat about two-thirds through his wide, sweeping swing. The whole contest is a magnificent display of power and hand-eye coordination.

  The Giants began their new season in Candlestick Park, which was supposed to improve Willie’s home run total. Instead, vicious gusts of wind off the ocean knocked power drives down into left field. (Baseballs weren’t the only thing affected; early in the season, Orlando Cepeda took a called strike three and turned to flip his batting helmet toward the team dugout in disgust. His teammates watched in wonder as the wind picked up the helmet and carried it ten rows deep into the stands.) Mays had not yet mastered the art of hitting with power to Candlestick’s right field, and so for the first time in five seasons his power numbers suffered: he hit just 12 home runs at home and 17 in the rest of the league’s ballparks. There was no question, though, that Willie Mays was still the best player in the National League—or at least one of the top two or three.

  But the Giants were mediocre at best, finishing fifth at 79–75, sixteen full games behind the surprising Pittsburgh Pirates, who, though they were sixth in an eight-team league in home runs, nonetheless led the league in both batting and runs scored. The NL’s best players that year were (and probably in this order) Mays, Ernie Banks, and Henry Aaron, but Pittsburgh shortstop Dick Groat was named MVP by virtue of winning the NL batting title—and for being the captain of the pennant winner.

  Mays finished third in one of several baffling MVP votes he was to endure during his prime years. Yes, Groat’s Pirates did win the pennant, but there surely was not a single play
er, coach, manager, or sportswriter, even in Pittsburgh, who truly thought that Dick Groat was a better or more valuable player than Mays. Groat out-hit Willie by six points, but that’s where the comparison ended. Mays’s OBP was 10 points higher, .381 to .371, his slugging percentage of .555 was 161 points higher, and he out-stole Groat, 25 bases to zero. He drove in 103 runs to Groat’s 50 and outscored him 107 runs to 85. Mays also edged out Groat in hits, 190 to 186. And none of this took into account the fact that Willie was hurt by his own home ballpark, where he was just .299, versus .338 on the road.

  In several seasons in Mays’s career, one cannot help looking at the MVP voting and saying, “What were they thinking?” The only explanation that makes any sense is one Charlie Einstein offered: “There was just a feeling back then that Willie was so much better than most National League players that he was going to win four or five MVPs before it was over. So every year they seemed to look for other players to give it to.”3

  One could make the same case for Mantle in that period, except that Mickey’s numbers were harder to appreciate because the importance of on-base percentage wasn’t understood and strikeouts were still regarded with too much importance.

  Early in 1960, Mantle’s biggest MVP competitor was on his own team. Early that year, the Yankees had traded with Kansas City and acquired Roger Maris, who ended up winning the AL MVP. Maris missed tying Mantle for the AL home run title by one, 39 to 40; he led the league in RBIs with 112 to Mantle’s 94. He also out-hit him .283 to .275 and led the league in slugging percentage with a .581 mark to Mantle’s .558. Yet Mickey was the better player: he stole 14 of 17 bases (to Roger’s two steals on two attempts), and his slugging percentage was higher by twenty-eight points, .399 to .371. Though Maris had 18 more RBIs, Mantle scored 21 more runs, 119 to 98. By both Total Baseball’s ratings and Bill James’s Win Shares method, Mantle had the edge.

  But no one in 1960 was ready to make that argument for Mickey. For one thing, he had been in Casey Stengel’s doghouse earlier in the season when it looked like he wasn’t hustling (though in fact Mantle was playing in terrible pain at the time). For another, most writers simply looked at his .275 batting average and 94 RBIs. Few considered that Maris had more RBIs than Mantle because he was lucky enough to hit for most of the season in the cleanup spot in back of Mickey, or that Mickey, despite his comparatively low batting average, was on base so often. He walked 111 times, 40 more than Maris.

  Thanks to the two of them—the “M&M Boys,” as they came to be called—and Bill Skowron, who hit .309 with 28 home runs, the Yankees, after trailing the Baltimore Orioles for part of the season, wound up winning the pennant by eight games. But for the Giants, the season was, in the words of Arnold Hano, “a memory of dropped pop flies, stupid base running, futile hitting, ineffective spot pitching, and incomprehensible, reprehensible managing, buried beneath jeers and laughter, all on display in a beautiful new ballpark.”4

  “I don’t want to talk about 1960,” Willie told San Francisco reporters after the last game. “A bad year. I don’t like to dig up the past. Let it rest.”5

  Willie at least had a great year on the field, and there were compensations. One came after the season when the Giants toured Japan; the fans there were fascinated by Willie and cheered wildly at everything he did, from the hotel to the ballparks. He was sick on much of the Japanese tour with swollen gums and his usual stomach distress. But he hit nearly .400 with eight home runs in nine exhibition games, and on being unanimously voted the tour’s MVP by the Japanese sportswriters, he was awarded a brand-new Datsun Bluebird.

  After a victory over the Tokyo Giants, Willie caught the final fly ball, then wheeled and fired it into the stands; the Japanese fans, new to the gesture, nearly went berserk. It was front-page news in several Japanese papers.

  There was another, even more satisfying moment for Willie that year. It came during the All-Star Game. Mickey had always been indifferent toward All-Star Games, partly because he’d played in so many World Series that All-Star Games seemed anticlimactic, and partly, perhaps, because of the pregame parties and his drinking bouts with pals from both leagues. It was no secret that on the day of the game Mantle was invariably hungover and sleep-deprived, often having come back to his hotel room just before daylight.

  Willie, of course, was Mr. All-Star, eventual holder of nearly every All-Star Game record. Mantle was proud that in 1956, at Washington’s Griffith Stadium, he and Willie had both hit home runs off the other league’s left-hander, Mickey off Warren Spahn and Willie off, of course, Whitey Ford. Outside of that, Mickey had little to show for his yearly trips to the midseason classic.

  On July 11, 1960, in Kansas City, in the first of two All-Star Games,† Mays went 3-for-4 with a triple in the first inning, a single in the second, and a double in the fourth. In the sixth inning, he missed by inches pulling off the most spectacular feat in All-Star Game history when he hit a long drive to center field that Harvey Kuenn leapt to the top of the wall to haul in.

  Two days later, back in New York at Yankee Stadium for the second All-Star Game, Willie Mays took the field to an adoring crowd: “Every time Willie came up to bat,” one writer phrased it, “the place went wild as if the 38,362 spectators were all former Giants and Dodgers fans.”6 Mantle, by his own admission, came hungover, sore-kneed, and thinking about the iced beer waiting in the locker room. Dodgers manager Walter Alston had Willie lead off; he blooped a single to center field that Mantle fielded lazily, on one hop—Mickey was not about to make a diving attempt at a ball in a game that did not count in the standings. After rounding first and faking a stop, Mays shifted into the next gear and slid into second without a play, well ahead of the throw from the embarrassed Mickey. It provided just one more reason for New York fans to cheer Mays and boo Mantle.

  In the third inning, with nobody on, Ford tried to snap a curveball over the outside corner. Willie sent it into the left-field bleachers. In the sixth, Willie singled and stole second. When the day was over, Willie had three hits, Mickey had none, and the NL had breezed to an easy 6–0 win.

  Willie, though, had no thought of showing Mickey up; clearly his focus, revealed in his postgame comments, was on the New York fans. He always wanted to do well in New York, he told reporters, since “this is where I started to play ball, and I have friends here. The fans here understand the game, and when you’re in a slump they go along with you. This is the best place to play ball.”7 There was no other way to read what he said: he had friends in New York, not in San Francisco; the fans out west did not understand the game so well as those in New York and were too willing to get on him when he was in a slump. New York, not San Francisco, was the best place to play ball. Mays’s remarks, of course, were picked up in the Bay Area papers.

  Two days later, the season resumed at Candlestick Park against the defending champion Dodgers. When Mays came to bat in the first inning, he was roundly booed by the home crowd.

  In October 1983, Us magazine sent me to Buffalo, New York, to interview O. J. Simpson, who was then sharing the broadcast booth for Monday Night Football with another former Southern Cal running back, Frank Gifford.‡ After a Jets victory over the Bills, I got together with Simpson at a nearby hotel. He was in good spirits, getting good money and great exposure from the Monday Night gig, and he had also recently become engaged to model Nicole Brown.

  He told me about his years as a juvenile delinquent growing up in San Francisco. He was a member of a youth gang, the Persian Warriors, and when he was fourteen spent a weekend in juvenile hall for being involved in a liquor store robbery. After he got home, he told me, “I was in my room, staring at the ceiling, when I heard some people talking downstairs. I first thought my father was going to show up and whup me—that’s about the only time I saw him, when I got into trouble.”

  Simpson’s mother called for him to come downstairs, and who should he find in his living room but—Willie Mays. Willie was friendly with a man named Lefty Gordon, a youth counselor at the Booke
r T. Washington Community Service Center in western San Francisco. He was happy to give some time helping a youth whom Gordon regarded as both troubled and promising. Mays put in more than a few minutes.

  “I was expecting a lecture,” Simpson said, “but instead he asked me if I wanted to spend the day with him. So we drove around.” The two got into Willie’s car and ran some errands. Together for about two hours, they “just talked about things like baseball, football, what kind of car he owned. Stuff like that.” Simpson, a freshman, had just begun playing high school football, and he told Mays he was thinking about going to college in Utah. Willie advised him to go to Los Angeles—UCLA or Southern Cal—where he’d be closer to his mother and get more media exposure.

  “Man,” I said, “that must have been exciting. Were you thinking back then that someday you could be as famous as Willie?”

  “Naw, mostly, when we were sitting in the car, I was thinking, ‘Man, this is really Willie Mays. I bet I could take him.’ ”

  It was Willie Mays’s destiny to dominate All-Star Games, but Mickey Mantle’s to star in the World Series. The 1960 Series with the Pittsburgh Pirates was Mantle’s greatest, although it would end with Mickey weeping in the visitors’ locker room at Forbes Field only twenty minutes after Bill Mazeroski’s home run sailed over the ivy-covered left-field wall.

  Mickey’s most memorable moments of the series came in Game 2. He had gone 0-for-3 in the opener in Pittsburgh, striking out his last two at-bats as the Yankees dropped Game 1. He then struck out in his first time at the plate in Game 2—three consecutive whiffs in the World Series. It was not a good omen, but as the Pirates’ left-hander Fred Green discovered in the fifth inning, an omen was only as good as the next pitch. Green threw Mantle a sharp breaking ball—a good pitch, as both men later acknowledged—and Mickey slammed it about 420 feet to the opposite field. In the sixth, he struck out again. Then, against reliever Joe Gibbon, Mantle hit a fastball over the center-field fence, where the ball landed at a spot that had never been reached by a right-handed hitter, 440 feet from home plate. He would finish the Series hitting .400 with 10 hits, 11 RBIs, and 8 runs scored.