by Allen Barra
Clete Boyer was even more adamant when I interviewed him in 2007 for my biography of Yogi: “That stuff he [Houk] said about Yogi having communication problems with the players was bullshit, and everyone knew it. Who did Yogi have trouble communicating with? Not with me. Not with Ellie Howard … not with Mickey or Whitey, who played their hearts out for him. Did Mantle and Ford stay out a few nights when Yogi was manager? Hell, yes, and they did it when Casey was manager, and you know what? They even did it when Houk was manager.…
“The truth was that Houk was jealous of Yogi. Houk had been nothing but a scrub, a backup, for years, and he resented the fact that Yogi was a much greater player and much more popular. And in my opinion, just as good a manager.”
Mickey played hard for Yogi, but he could have done a little more—as could have Yogi’s longtime battery mate, Whitey Ford. “That club,” Mantle would later recall, “would have been a test for anybody. It had such free spirits as [Phil] Linz, [Joe] Pepitone, and Jim Bouton—not to mention Whitey and me. Yogi had named Ford his pitching coach, and we were the team’s senior citizens, but what the heck, we still broke a few curfews.” Mickey actually took credit for helping Yogi in what seems, in retrospect, to have been an incident that clearly reflected a lack of maturity.
“I’m not trying to brag,” he told Mickey Herskowitz in 1994, “but in a way, unintentionally, I might have turned the team around for Yogi.” In late August, with the Yankees still trying to gain traction, the team suffered a near-disastrous four consecutive losses to the White Sox, including two in a doubleheader. On the bus ride from Comiskey Park to O’Hare Airport, Phil Linz broke a complete silence by playing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on a harmonica he had bought the day before. Berra turned and shouted toward the back of the bus for Linz to stop. Linz either didn’t hear what Yogi said or pretended not to and turned to Mantle to ask him to repeat it. Mickey, picking the wrong time to be mischievous, told him Yogi said, “If you’re gonna play that thing, play it faster.” When Linz proceeded to do exactly that, Berra sprinted to the back of the bus and knocked the harmonica out of his hands; it nicked Joe Pepitone on the knee, and Pepitone let out a mock scream of pain. Mantle related, “Soon everybody but Yogi was laughing.”
The silliest two minutes in Yankee history dominated the sports pages for days, with the dominant theme being that the players were taking advantage of Yogi. For once, the writers were probably right: the players had been taking advantage of their manager, and it was, in no small part, because Mantle and Ford, who knew as much about the Yankee tradition of silent dignity in defeat as anyone, let them do it. They should have been watching Yogi’s back instead of acting like schoolboys.
It’s true that the team did start to turn around at that point and went on to edge out the Chicago White Sox for the pennant. That they did so was due largely to Berra’s refusal to panic, and also to two additions to the pitching staff—a hard-throwing right-hander called up from Richmond in August, Mel Stottlemyre, and Pedro Ramos, a terrific relief pitcher acquired from Cleveland. Ramos was particularly glad to join the Yankees, not just because of the World Series shot the trade brought to him but because he’d been the victim of some of Mantle’s most awesome upper-deck home runs.
The 1964 World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals was a classic, featuring the two players who would probably have the most influence on the game for the rest of the century—Jim Bouton, whose 1970 memoir Ball Four forever destroyed the last vestiges of innocence that surrounded Mickey Mantle and every other major league ballplayer, and the Cardinals’ Curt Flood, who would sue baseball in 1970 for the right to become a free agent. (He would lose the case in the Supreme Court, but his suit paved the way for the binding arbitration that would win free agency for the players by 1976.) It was also a Series that pitted sibling third basemen against each other: the Yankees’ Clete Boyer and the Cardinals’ Ken, who would be named the NL’s MVP that season. It was the first World Series for St. Louis since 1946—the one Mickey had listened to on the radio while lying in a hospital bed in Oklahoma City as doctors worked frantically to save his leg from osteomyelitis.
The Series went the distance. In the seventh game, two exhausted starters, Mel Stottlemyre and Bob Gibson, both faltered. But Gibson held on for a 7–5 victory despite being tagged for three home runs. The third was hit by Mantle, a booming, opposite-field, three-tun shot in the sixth inning.
Mickey finished the Series with a .333 average, an OBP of .467, and 3 home runs. His 8 RBIs led both teams. He also had one of his most dramatic World Series moments ever in Game 3 when he hit a home run in the ninth inning to win the game, 2–1. He had had a terrible day in the field, mishandling a hit by Tim McCarver in the fifth inning that led to the Cardinals’ only run and nearly misjudging a liner by Curt Flood in the Cardinals’ half of the ninth inning, stumbling but recovering just in time to make the out. When he walked up to the plate in the ninth, he passed Elston Howard in the on-deck circle and told him, “You might as well go on in. I’m gonna hit the first pitch I see out of the park.” Sure enough, Barney Schultz floated a knuckler at him, and Mickey slammed it into the right-field third deck; a few more feet and it might have cleared Yankee Stadium. “I acted out of frustration,” Mantle said later, “not showmanship.”
The year 1964 marked the end of Mickey’s amazing record of league dominance. He hit .303 with 35 home runs and 111 RBIs and led the American League in OBP at .426, but he was no longer a threat to steal. He was a far cry from the six-season stretch in his prime in which he’d recorded 10 or more steals, 100 in all, and was caught stealing just 14 times, figures remarkable not only for the shape his legs were in but also in light of how seldom the Yankees really needed for him to steal. He had also been reduced to a merely adequate outfielder. For the first time in ten full seasons, dating back to 1954 (and not counting 1963, when he missed nearly a hundred games), Mickey did not finish in the top five in Total Baseball’s Total Player Rating. It was also the first time since 1955 (again, not counting 1963) that he failed to finish first. But he led all American League players in Bill James’s Win Shares for the ninth time since 1955 (excepting ’63). By James’s calculations, no player in baseball history—not Honus Wagner or Ty Cobb or Babe Ruth—had tallied such a record in Win Shares.
Mays, like Mantle, drove in 111 runs and led the National League with 47 home runs. He did not regard his season as a particularly good one and was not shy about saying so publicly, because he had failed for the first time in eight years to hit .300, finishing at .296, though he did lead the NL in slugging percentage (.607). He tied with the Cubs’ Ron Santo for first place in Total Player Rating, his ninth time in first in eleven years. Only Honus Wagner, who finished first ten times in eleven years, had a better record in Total Player Rating than Willie.
Two weeks after the season’s end, Willie appeared, in full Giants uniform, on the television show The Hollywood Palace with host Buddy Ebsen, star of The Beverly Hillbillies:
“You look a little glum, Willie,” Buddy said.
“Yeah,” Willie shrugged. “I didn’t hit .300 this year.”
“Well,” Ebsen said consolingly, “you hit 47 home runs. That ain’t hay” (a reference, probably, to Willie’s nickname, the Say Hey Kid).
Willie shrugged sheepishly and then proceeded to whack Wiffle balls thrown to him by comedian Jack Carter.
The show’s producers had asked Mantle to appear with Mays, but he declined the offer. “He was his league’s home run leader this year,” said Mickey. “I didn’t lead my league.” (Harmon Killebrew led the AL with 49.)
“Yeah,” Willie said when he heard of Mantle’s reply through Frank Scott, “but he’s still got more home runs than me for our careers.” Mays was correct. Mickey finished the 1964 season with 454, and Willie was one behind at 453. That Willie knew this proved how carefully he had been following Mantle’s performance. What Willie did not know, and what Mickey was only beginning to admit to himself, was that Mickey’s era was
over.
Finally, the friction in the Giants’ clubhouse reached Willie himself. In a game against the Cubs at Wrigley Field, the Giants had a six-run lead in the eighth inning. Chicago’s slugging third baseman, Ron Santo, slammed a ball into center field that, well, Mays may have given up on. “Who knows?” he would later say. “If the game had been closer I might have chased against the wall, taken a chance. Maybe in the back of my mind I thought about the big lead we had and said to myself, ‘Take it easy. Don’t get hurt on a ball that can’t hurt your team.’ And maybe I just didn’t hustle after it the way I should have.”14 And maybe Willie was being too hard on himself: underneath the ivy at Wrigley Field was a brick wall that had shortened and even ended the careers of some fine outfielders.
Anyway, what had been brewing all season finally boiled over: the Cubs went on to tie the game and win in extra innings, and Dark snapped at Willie in the clubhouse—as if his play on the fly ball was the only one that mattered—and Willie, though he thought he should have tried harder for the ball, snapped back. It was the first time in years he had had an open confrontation with his manager.
In a bleak and hopeless September, Willie, playing harder than ever, in a game at Candlestick, came to bat against the Cubs with the bases loaded. He swung viciously at the first pitch and missed, and then dropped to one knee with his head spinning. The game was stopped while Doc Bowman, the Giants’ trainer, ran out on the field with smelling salts and then walked him off the field. At the hospital, they told him he was again suffering from exhaustion.
* In the little-seen but amusing 1971 film The Steagle, directed by Paul Sylbert, Richard Benjamin plays a New York college professor unnerved by the Cuban Missile Crisis. He delivers a nonsense rant to his class in which he argues the irrationality of Maury Wills winning the 1962 MVP over Willie Mays and then gives a hilarious lecture on the subject in pig Latin. Even in pig Latin, the case for Mays made more sense than the vote for Wills.
† My heart beat fast again in 1975 when I saw One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and heard Jack Nicholson’s R. P. McMurphy doing his fake television commentary—Nurse Ratched wouldn’t let the patients watch the game—for a room full of mental patients: “Koufax’s curveball is breaking like a fucking firecracker!” he told them. I was there, and he was right.
‡ Actually, Mickey had met Yogi in September 1950 when the Yankees brought him to St. Louis before a game with the Browns to acquaint him with the organization and introduce him to some of the team’s officials and players.
From the early 1950s through the early 1970s, Sport magazine set a standard for sports journalism that hasn’t been approached before or since. The most popular cover boys were Mickey and Willie, who between them appeared on nearly 20 percent of the magazine’s covers until Mantle’s retirement in 1968. SPORT MEDIA GROUP
Despite the title of this 1962 Topps card, Mickey and Willie were not always a manager’s dream—Mickey never truly relaxed around Casey Stengel, though they won eight pennants together. Willie had at least some friction with every manager after Leo Durocher. THE TOPPS COMPANY
Mickey and Willie at the 1962 World Series in San Francisco’s Candlestick Park. Charles Einstein wrote, “As the players came in from the field, my eye fell on Mays and Mantle as they entered together, immersed in private conversation of the sort two consummate, tired professionals will have at the end of a day’s work. There was no sense that one was black, the other white.” NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME, COOPERSTOWN, N.Y.
“All you need are a family, a camera and Kodacolor Film.” Mickey got the lion’s share of the lucrative national endorsements. Top right with bat in hand is Mickey Jr. COURTESY OF KODAK CORPORATION
Mickey got the endorsements for Kodak, Timex, and other big-name companies. Most of Willie’s endorsements were for products targeted to the much smaller black audiences. COURTESY OF RECKITT BENCKISER LLC
“The Champions Choice.” In 1963 Mickey suggested to his agent, Mike Scott, that a product endorsed by both him and Willie might appeal to a wide audience. Scott, who also handled some endorsements for Mays, got them with Zipee, who made plastic balls and bats similar to those made by Wiffle. This modest little plastic ball may well have had the first interracial sports product promotion.
Mickey, Merlyn, and the boys on a vacation. To the public they were an ideal family, but later Mickey would openly lament he had been “a terrible father.” His wife and all four of his sons became alcoholics. Billy died of a heart attack in 1994 at age thirty-six, while Mickey Jr. succumbed to non-Hodgkins lymphoma in 2000, age forty-seven. Left to right: Danny, Mickey Jr., Billy, and David. PERSONAL COLLECTION OF THE MANTLE FAMILY
Willie and Marghuerite admire their adopted son, Michael. This is one of the rare photos of Willie and Michael, and little is known about their relationship. AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS
Mickey is presented with two horses from a friend in Texas at the first Mickey Mantle Day, September 9, 1965. Mantle always loved horses; as a boy he rode Tony to school. (Tony was named after the famous steed of Mickey’s cowboy movie idol Tom Mix.) CORBIS
In the mid-1960s Joe Namath supplanted Mickey as New York’s number one sports idol. The two hit it off immediately, but not even the advertising genius of George Lois could save the short-lived employment agency the two stars fronted, Mantle Men and Namath Girls. COURTESY OF GEORGE LOIS
Mickey and Willie in Esquire, August 1968. Seventeen years later in Atlantic City, when they signed the picture for me, Willie told Mickey, “I sure look better than you.” “Hell you do,” said Mantle. “I look great in that suit. Yours looks off the rack.” COURTESY OF PARS INTL.
Just a couple of country boys—Mickey and Willie share some corn and Blue Bonnet margarine in a 1983 commercial. COURTESY OF GEORGE LOIS
Willie and Mickey in a 1982 commercial for a new daily paper, USA Today. “I read it every day,” sang Mickey, “just like my friend Say Hey.” COURTESY OF GEORGE LOIS
Mickey, Duke Snider, and Willie on an unidentified TV show in 1981. Mays always seemed to be sharper dressed in public than Mantle. AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS
The Return of the Prodigal Sons. New commissioner Peter Ueberroth scored a big hit with fans by welcoming baseball’s two most beloved stars back to the game; they had been banished by previous commissioner Bowie Kuhn for taking PR jobs with Atlantic City casinos. CORBIS
The late great Bill Gallo eloquently addressed the “Who’s the best?” question in this 1964 New York Daily News cartoon. COURTESY OF BILL GALLO
New Mexico artist Thom Ross captured Willie’s 1954 World Series feat in this installation and brought it to New York on the fiftieth anniversary of “The Catch.” His efforts to make the diorama permanent have yet to produce results from the City of New York. The four figures, seen here at the former site of the Polo Grounds in Harlem, now reside with Ross’s friend Rich Tarrant Jr., who mounts them in his front yard in Burlington, Vermont, during the baseball season. COURTESY OF THOM ROSS AND GUY WATKINS
16
The Boys of Summer in Their Ruin
On April 14, 1965, in the third game of the season at Connie Mack Stadium, Willie Mays lashed into a curveball from future Hall of Famer and senator from Kentucky Jim Bunning and drove it over the center-field wall. The two-run shot, besides helping the Giants beat the Phillies, had a significance that no one appreciated at the time: it was home run number 455 for Mays’s career, and it finally put him ahead of Mickey Mantle. It was a lead he would never relinquish.
In fact, though Mays had missed nearly two full seasons in the Army, Mickey had missed so many games through injury that through 1964 he had actually played only 32 more games than Willie. But Willie had, up to that point, 499 more at-bats. Mantle had given up hundreds of plate appearances to bases on balls, leading the American League in walks five times. Mays always had a healthy proportion of walks, but never led the National League. Anyway, Willie still had some superstar left in him, but Mickey, though he had four seasons left to play, was ru
nning on empty.
Both Mickey and Willie started the 1965 season under new managers. Herman Franks, who had been a Giants coach and, for a couple of years, Durocher’s right-hand man, was given the job. Immediately, he did what all Giants managers of the era were supposed to do: he proclaimed his admiration for Willie Mays.
For Mantle, the loss of Yogi Berra as his manager was near-apocalyptic. In perhaps the most disgraceful episode in Yankees history, his longtime friend and teammate had been undermined throughout the season by GM Ralph Houk—and then, to add insult to injury, he was fired despite successfully guiding the team to Game 7 of the World Series.
The circumstances were similar to what happened to Casey Stengel after the Yankees lost the seventh game of the 1960 World Series: How could the Yankees have gotten rid of Casey if he had won another championship? What, everyone wondered, would the Yankees have done if Whitey Ford’s arm had not gone bad, if Jim Bouton had been available to pitch an extra game, if Bobby Richardson hadn’t booted a couple of routine chances in the field? With Stengel, of course, there was one other crucial factor—his age. “I made the mistake of turning seventy,” he said in his last classic remark before leaving the team. “I’ll never make that mistake again.”
Yogi, though, was just thirty-nine, and despite the Phil Linz—harmonica silliness—or perhaps, if you believed Mantle and a couple of the other veterans, because of it—he had pulled the team together, won the pennant, and, if not for an extraordinary string of unfortunate incidents, would have won the World Series. To compound the treachery, the Yankees, in a spectacular act of duplicity, offered the job to the manager Yogi had faced in the World Series, Johnny Keane, who had his own problems with the St. Louis front office. As it turned out, Yogi Berra had no idea how lucky he was to be fired by the Yankees at precisely that time.